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

I think our impressions are colored about by our different observations of those around us, and this conversation is probably colored by our definitions of success.

This thread kicked off with someone who escaped poverty and made it to the middle class. I am not talking about the fetishization of the hyper-rich.

I do think that with persistence, hard work, and an average allocation of luck most people are capable of achieving a comfortable job and a happy middle class life.

In my observations, a lack of personal responsibility for improving your situation is much more harmful than idealizing the successful. For every person I know held back by some sense of inferiority, blaming themselves, I know 10 stuck in a shitty situation by complacency. I see skilled people in miserable jobs who could be interviewing, people lonely or shitty marriages they should change. I see people who are unhappy with their heath but make no change. Many of these people think, "I am just unlucky" and resign themselves to their situation.

While you don't think people will ever stop struggling, I'm not convinced. People can become disillusion and hopeless if you tell them their effort has no correlation with their success in life.

Some say that the "American Dream" of getting ahead with hard work is a lie, but I think the idea that your efforts have no impact on outcomes is an even bigger lie, and a more dangerous one.

Being poor means living with poor people that do not seem capable of understanding how harmful interruptions are to focus and concentration, thinking they are only taking one minute of your time each time they interrupt, but it is actually one minute plus 10-15 minutes to get back to where I was.

Being poor means having friends and family from lower classes the never talk about credit scores, and the impact they have on job and housing searches. I didn't realize until years later that my job search out of college was probably so difficult because of my low credit score (partly due to my often being a few days late, which I didn't realize is a VERY BIG DEAL for credit scores).

Being poor means living with people that always have the TV blasting near 100%, making it difficult to read or focus on anything. Not being able to afford headphones that can drown out the noise doesn't help.

Being poor means living in an area with more crime, so after you save for a year to buy a decent computer, it gets stolen. So you have to go to a thrift store and get a 10-15 year old computer, which is so slow that you have to spend 80% of your time looking at spinners/hourglasses.

Being poor and living in a poor neighborhood you spend more time waiting in lines. For example, it takes longer to use an ATM because there is only one outside the bank, so there is a line. In the wealthier towns 20 minutes away they have 3 or 4 ATMs all lined up in a row, so I've never seen anyone wait in line there.

Being poor in a poor area means things are more expensive. For example, the car wash charges $3.00, but the wealthy town 20 minutes has a car wash that charges on $2.00; the laundromat charges more in the poor neighborhood too. In the poor area, it costs $1.00 to inflate my tire at a gas staiton, while in the rich neighborhood it's often free. In poor places, sometimes business charge 50 cents to use a restroom, and there is often no mirror, and sometimes no TP. While the wealthier town the bathrooms are often free, with a mirror and plenty of TP. And some chain stores often have bathrooms open to the public in wealthy towns, but not in poor towns. If they exist in poor towns, you usually have to ask for a key, which looks like you can get 50K kinds of bacteria just by touching.

Being poor means no matter how hard you try to be a good driver, you can end up with a $500 ticket by a simple mistake, which you have to pay on-time or the penalties are aggressively insane and will bankrupt you. So you have to skip a bill and credit card payment, which further messes up your credit, making it more difficult to get a better job, housing, etc.

Being poor means your neighborhood is louder. Louder cars, motorcycles, music, etc. People doing their loud stuff very early in the morning and very late at night. People revving up their extremely loud cars and motorcycles in their driveways for 10-20 minutes at a time. There are more parties that blast extremely loud music outside until 2am. When I go to wealthier areas I'm always struck at how nice and quiet they are.

Being poor in California means that the yearly $250 car registration fee on my cheap car means that I'm going to have to not pay a bill or else start saving a few months ahead of time. Or worse, not pay for awhile and deal with the insane penalties, hoping the cops don't notice and pull me over.

Being poor means not knowing anything about negotiation, not knowing anyone that has every negotiated for a higher salary, and not even knowing early in your career that it is a possebility. So you get stuck in a $40K job in expensive coastal California. You start off your career with your morale low and depressed, thinking you should be wealthy by now, but realizing all your blue-collar friends are making more money than you. And you can't even start paying the full monthly amount on your student loans, so you'll be in debt for awhile. Things get better after 5 years of experience, but the first few years can be tough. And being somewhat poor as a developer, where everyone seems to eat out for lunch everyday, and not being able to afford it, and thus being seen as anti-social and out of the loop.

Being poor means lots of your family and friends are poor. If you live in the same area, they will need lots of free technical support with their computers and phones. You will also need to spend a lot of time helping your nephews and nieces with their school work because their poor parents cannot figure out to help them and cannot afford to hire a tutor. You will be out of energy and time that you could have used to advance your career. Your social connections tend to bring your down, putting breaks on your ambitions. You feel like your are caught in a spider web, that is dragging you back, only allowing you to move only so far.

Being poor means your brother or sister is poor and the financial stresses cause a divorce, and they move back in with your parents. And you also live with your parents because you are trying to save money by commuting to college. But now you can only get 3-4 hours of sleep because there is a newborn in the equation that screams so loud that everyone is sleep-deprived. You walk around campus like a zombie, try hard to process the lecture and notes, which you have to read over and over again. Your GPA goes from 3.7 to 2.3, and you have to retake a couple classes, and you can kiss your hopes of grad-school good-bye. You often think what's the point? No matter how hard I try my redneck friends and family will always pull me down.

Being poor means people see you as lazy because you grew up in a social class where you do what you're told and taking initiative is seen as bad. You are seen as taking control from others and full of yourself, so you do the minimum of what you are told. Then you get around upper middle-class people and your virtue is now a vice. People at work or college talk about what needs to be done and you are waiting for them to tell you what to do. But others are volunteering and being proactive and soon all the tasks are gone. You wonder why they left you out, thinking they don't like you or are not good enough. Several years later you realize you are supposed to volunteer without being told exactly what to do. You were seen as lazy and unhelpful, even though you were willing to work twice as hard as everyone else on a project. But no matter how much you volunteer after you learn the new rules, your reputation as lazy and not-a-team-player will never change until you change jobs.

Sure, but there's another part of it where applying statistical averages to individuals promotes helplessness. Expecting people to suck it up and achieve despite adversity is not realistic at a population level and you should not promote that as a solution there, but individuals can and do achieve despite adversity. Telling people that they are real humans that can make decisions and do things is healthy and you don't want to take that away. It's a line you need to walk but only going with the population level approach has a lot of downsides.

Right, except that book also tells you not to spend/use any of that interest, and continue working as much as possible, so that it accumulates exponentially.

And if you're already clear that reaching a given number is your priority above your current lifestyle, do you really need a book to tell you that spending the least possible will make you reach that goal faster?