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On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

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Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#301

Post by AlwaysRock »

I grew up poorish. Father made less than 100 dollars a week for a good chunk of my childhood. However we lived in a low cost of living area and it was relatively safe. My parents were, and still are, cheap despite making much more money now.

They did an incredible job not letting us realize we were poor. I thought we were upper middle class until I was in high school. Raising a family while poor is hard. I can't even imagine the life I would have had if I grew up in a higher cost of living or more dangerous place.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#302

Post by atty »

YinglingLight wrote: post #232
syops wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much enjoyed reading your post. You made a statement that, taken literally, I disagree with and wonder if you care to elaborate more on it. I made it and you can too. It seems to me that luck plays a huge role in each success story like yours. My wife had a similar trajectory and makes quite a bit of money. However, along the way, there were hundreds of decisions made that could have gone the wrong way. She's…

It seems to me that luck plays a huge role The concept of Talent Stacking: https://personalexcellence.co/blog/talent-stack/ Those who accrue and leverage a variety of skills tend to get 'lucky'. This is why you could strip most entrepreneurs of all their money and assets, and not be surprised to see them enjoying success in 5 years. You put into place a system that makes making the right decisions inevitable, and lea…

Your idea isn’t backed up by statistics. The vast majority of successful entrepreneurs come from upper-middle class or richer families. If it was just about “building a talent stack”, then the distribution would be relatively flat across all family income distributions. You also missed the part in the article that described how hard it is as a poor person to just find the time and resources necessary to learn those skills.

Of course you need to put the work in, but the deck is stacked in your favor if your family is very well off (and frankly you need to do far less work, due to nepotism and everything else), and massively stacked against you if you come from a poor family.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#303

Post by dalbasal »

His point on housing is so important, and its adjacent to a lot of other poverty-related issues.

It's one of the reasons advocates for the poor often seem to speak a different language to their opposition.

If you live in median-and-above-land, you think of all costs existing on a spectrum. Fancy dinners for $100 on one end. Rice and beans for pennies at the other. This is true for clothes, smartphones, furniture... lots of things. There's a spectrum with options all along it.

It is not true for housing, transport and a lot of other, unavoidable expenses. Housing is the extreme example. Say an average smartphone is $350. $700 buys a luxury phone. $175 gets you an decent phone. Say median rent is $1500. Going above $3k will get you a palace and $750 probably doesn't get you anything. Quality, below median prices is on an extremely steep curve.

Household economics are just completely different below and above a certain threshold... and this has gotten more pronounced over the last generation or two.

Ireland has/had a whole literary genre of stories about miserable poverty-stricken childhoods. They paint a very vivid picture. If you compare it to poverty today, besides being less harsh, it's quite different. They had housing. It was basic, often insecure, but they did have housing.

Food was scarce. That's no longer the case. Stuff though... they had no stuff. No bed, no mugs, no shoes, no pencils. Getting these things was an epic mission and served as a landmark. That is all changed now. Stuff is extremely abundant. Basics like housing and transport are almost as scarce as they were in the bad old days.

The upshot of all this is that we underestimate how poor poor is.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#304

Post by simonh »

throwaway-0987 wrote: post #174

Throwaway because I don't want my co-workers to know. I was poor. My father left home when I was a kid in middle school. My mom worked part time cleaning houses and left us when she found a new husband. I dropped out of high-school in the 9th grade and went to work. Low paying jobs. I lived with my aunt on the bad side of town. Fast-forward 35 years. Today, I make about 200K per year. I got a GED, went to trade schoo…

Ive never been truly impoverished. The nearest I ever got was living off the minimum student allowance back in the 80s.

On the edge of solvency it takes so little for things to go badly wrong, even if your scrupulously careful. On the other hand, it's the ability to make effective use of financing options and to leverage even modest wealth or income through mortgages and such that enables a lot of middle class families to prosper as much as they do.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#305

Post by PragmaticPulp »

syops wrote: post #214
throwaway-0987 wrote: post #174

Throwaway because I don't want my co-workers to know. I was poor. My father left home when I was a kid in middle school. My mom worked part time cleaning houses and left us when she found a new husband. I dropped out of high-school in the 9th grade and went to work. Low paying jobs. I lived with my aunt on the bad side of town. Fast-forward 35 years. Today, I make about 200K per year. I got a GED, went to trade schoo…

I very much enjoyed reading your post. You made a statement that, taken literally, I disagree with and wonder if you care to elaborate more on it. I made it and you can too. It seems to me that luck plays a huge role in each success story like yours. My wife had a similar trajectory and makes quite a bit of money. However, along the way, there were hundreds of decisions made that could have gone the wrong way. She's…

The important part is to focus on the things you can control. Luck always plays a role, but your own actions decide how prepared you are to capitalize on lucky breaks when they arrive.

Luck is important, but it’s a mistake to try to attribute the success of others purely to luck. Someone winning the lottery is lucky. Someone who gets hired because a company noticed their quality GitHub commits to a project relevant to their needs is also lucky, but their success isn’t the result of luck alone.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#306

Post by AlwaysRock »

Terretta wrote: post #295
sethammons wrote: post #129

> You are also more or less forced to learn to do mechanic work. You are forced to do all your own work, unless the landlord will help. I am no longer poor and broke, but I spent roughly my first three decades there. I recall a colleague saying they were redoing their walk way; it blew my mind they paid someone to do it — the concept of paying someone to do something for you is not something I experienced growing up.…

The article touches on this with “don’t by a spatula from Craigslist”. No matter your income, what you’re really doing is trading time for goods and services, the money is just a token. When “doing your own work”, be mindful of the opportunity cost of your time. What’s your rate versus the handyman’s rate? If you fix the porch, are you less able to pick up that overtime shift? This needs to be genuine trade off, not…

At some point though time doesnt really equal money. For many we can find a way to make money with that time. But if you are working a low income job that does not allow for overtime pay and you don't have skills you can use to generate income on the side... money is money and time is time.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#307

Post by nerdponx »

skohan wrote: post #180
burlesona wrote: post #167

This is a great write-up, and as someone who spent time being poor-ish, it really resonated. What I realized from my own life experience: the US sawed the bottom rungs off the ladder in the 1950s when it suburbanized. There is no affordable housing or transportation in 95% of the North American land area, and virtually every societal problem we deal with either stems from this or is made worse by it. Then the healthc…

I sometimes wonder if that event horizon is encroaching higher and higher up the economic ladder over time. Most of the people in my personal cohort - with university degrees and good careers - have no problem living a good life in the US. But with the rapid inflation of the cost of healthcare, higher education and housing, I wonder how that lifestyle can possibly become accessible to people who weren't essentially b…

This is very much the trend I saw over the 2000s-2010s.

Most of the people in my personal cohort - with university degrees and good careers - have no problem living a good life in the US. But with the rapid inflation of the cost of healthcare, higher education and housing, I wonder how that lifestyle can possibly become accessible to people who weren't essentially born into it.

I know many people who were born into a middle-class or upper-middle-class lifestyle, pursued career paths that didn't involve the tech industry (because they were specifically encouraged to "do whatever you want"), and are now living below their parents' standards of living and will probably always be poorer than their parents.

They aren't bum artists either; they work in offices 8-6, and have 5+ years of experience and sophisticated professional skills. But they are being paid 2011 wages in a 2021 housing market, and it all strikes me as tremendously unfair.

Median house prices in the USA are now above their pre-crash peak, and have been increasing much much faster than the CPI[0]. Something fucky is going on, and I doubt it's all because of the "free" market.

[0]: chart https://files.catbox.moe/kvppyj.png and data https://files.catbox.moe/tqj9vb.csv

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#308

Post by pnutjam »

pbronez wrote: post #262
scsilver wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remove them from their network and see what happens.

Sure, but social capital is an asset you build like anything else. Remove a big chunk of anyone’s wealth - liquid, paper, social, health - and it’s gonna be painful and disruptive. The point isn’t that they’d be poor if you took away what they built... it’s that they succeed in building it in the first place! That process of building wealth in all its forms is the key. It’s not easy. It’s definitely not fair. Some pe…

I think a big part of it is also the moral choices people are willing to make. Most people climb to success because they are incredibly talented (rare), incredibly lucky (nobody likes to admit it), or because it's always bowb your buddy week to them.

Sometimes they are able to do a minor hurt to a vast number of people (marketing, some sales, etc...) and they don't feel like they are doing anything wrong. Sometimes they are just conforming to the standards our society has set, (everybody is doing it).

I myself try to do the best, but I've discovered the only way to advance is to job hop my way to a decent salary. I'm sure this has caused problems for others, but it's accepted in this industry. I've seen others who won't job hop languish with much lower salaries.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#309

Post by meepmorp »

newswasboring wrote: post #299
throwaway846 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Metric for myself; not others. I can't pretend to know what "line" people have in their mind that gives them anxiety around money. (I'll edit for clarity) It ends up being a discussion point with my wife for lots of topics where I'm not picky about the quality of food because it's not mustard on bread.

Oh in that case I understand your trauma. But you need to understand that it is trauma and not facts of life. I am, for the past few years, learning how to be happy. I realized that most of my life training has been around learning how to survive because that's how it is where I was born. And because that's all I knew, I thought that was somehow superior. Our media also tries very hard to glamorize "struggling", ther…

>Oh in that case I understand your trauma. But you need to understand that it is trauma and not facts of life.

Thank god you now understand their trauma well enough to explain how they don't comprehend reality the right way.

Re: On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

#310

Post by sandworm101 »

gibspaulding wrote: post #300
offtop5 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wear and tear on the car would be an issue, even if you presume Tesla's can effectively drive themselves for free, Tesla still break down. I don't think I'd be okay with anything over an hour each way

I'm really curious to see what the longevity of future electric cars ends up looking like. In theory electric motors should be able to last way longer than an ICE, and most other wear parts (suspension, breaks, etc) should be straight forward to replace. The big question would be batteries, and in the case of Tesla at least right to repair issues.

>> In theory electric motors should be able to last way longer than an ICE

Except that it is very rare for a car to be scrapped because of its engine. IC engines are mature tech. They last forever, longer than the body of the car. Extending the life of the engine further won't extend the life of the vehicle. And for such calculations one must include the battery packs. I think it safe to say that while electric motors might marginally outlast IC engines, I don't think that batteries will every have a functional lifespan longer than a gas tank (many decades, maybe even a century.)

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