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

Many people are just doomed to failure from the start. All that motivational talk and grooming goes to nothing if you came form impoverished background.

There is a distinction between a yacht (generally > 35 feet, needs a full crew) and just a boat:

https://www.tessllc.us/whats-the-difference-between-a-yacht-...

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 aspirational. For example, one lots of folks don’t consider: what’s the cost of your commute time, and if you could live significantly closer for a little more rent or mortgage, could you and would you put that time to a use with payback/upside? In a recent datascience article, the author analyzed rents and locations to save a few pounds, tolerating a 50 minute commute. What could they generate with an extra 40 hours of productive time a month, and would they do that or watch the telly?

Reframe as: what can you do with your tradeoffs on time that adds pay-it-forward energy to your financial flywheel?

I share this sentiment from the author.

I speak "normally", as in to say I don't have a regional accent, and have "white collar" jobs working in IT. Many people assume I am a good middle class person.

I often get told I am naive, or stupid for saying things like "rent prices are too expensive" and that when the median income people cannot afford the median priced house we're just growing another bubble.

I had a playstation 1 and the original xbox as a child/teenager. That sounds like I must have been lucky/middle class and not poor? Surely!

All of my adult friends didn't know me as a child. My mother left when I wasn an infant and since then until his death my father never worked another day in his life. We lived off approximately £100 ($150?) a week for a family of three while my sister was sent to live with a relative.

There was also summers where I ate only bread and jam, cooked on a portable gas heater, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner 7 days a week. Our gas had mostly been shut off and so we couldn't use a cooker, or the central heating, and didn't have any money other than a few £ for bread & jam. When I was at school I had free school lunches. Sometimes there wouldn't be any food for dinner when I got home.

I lived below the poverty line until I was 19 and went to University. After which I moved to a city and got a job in IT. I am the wealthiest I have ever been, but my actual expenses are close to nothing: after rent and utility bills my only monthly expenses are my phone contract (£8) and audiable (£8). I don't buy clothes or shoes or any anything really unless there is a direct need to (i.e. my shoes have a large hole in them).

Because of my upbringing (the lack of food etc.) I probably have an eating disorder, and most of my monthly outgoings is probably on takeaway foods. That is still probably a maximum of £200 a month. I probably spend £100-£200 a month on normal food shopping (milk, bread, cereal, cheese, meat, ready meals, chocolate, etc.)

Everything else is shared with my partner out of a joint savings account (Netflix, Disney+, Car insurance paid yearly). My partner didn't grow up in the level of poverty I did - but now I earn twice as much as her she feels poor and "unworthy" compared to the amount of money I contribute to our savings.

My father ended up with MS and killed himself a year ago. He was living on disability allowance so his income was probably the highest he had ever lived on, but is equivalent to minimum wage. He killed himself when the current conservative government (UK) were following through with their disability reassements which meant his income would have dropped by hundreds of pounds a month.

I don't want to derail the conversation, but I do get frustrated when people call out my "white male IT privledgedness". I think I have more in common with any marginalised group than I do with the "normal white middle class" everyone assumes I am.

I currently have saved about £30,000 to go towards my first flat. This money has been saved by myself and my partner only. This will be the first property ever owned in my immediate family. (I was the second to go to university, after my sister a few years ahead of me.) I will not/have not inhereited anything from any of my family.

My brother, who had the exact same upbringing as me and is approximately one year younger than me currently rents a room from a family for £400 a month and works full time at McDonalds "flipping burgers". His future prospects aren't high. Breaking the cycle of poverty is a hard thing.

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", there are no stories about how to be happy because it will be laughed out of room. It will be counted as either "privileged people being privileged" or they will tie it to family/love as the only posed answer.

Seriously man, I want to be happy and nobody out there wants to tell me how. I am slowly discovering it for myself, but I feel like this is a deficiency in our media.