Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

residentcontrarian.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 920 posts

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

#331

Post by LocalH »

throwaway846 wrote: post #251
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…

Similar story I'm now late 30s; father left when i was 2 died of aids when I was 6 Mother washed dishes then was unemployed from age 12-now and we bounced around her boyfriends houses My metric (edit: for myself) "have you been poor" is gathering extra condiments from a gas station and having mustard on bread for a meal. We had food stamps, and a small social security check. I always had a bed, and food, but barely a…

Equity should operate just as much, if not more so, by boosting people up than by cutting people down. It should also favor the individual and small business over large megacorporations.

I fear that the concept of equity presents a real possibility of a race to the bottom if we're not careful to prevent a Harrison Bergeron situation. That doesn't mean I think we should avoid equity, just that we should be cognizant of the potential pitfalls along the way to determining the exact implementation.

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

#332

Post by ed25519FUUU »

rvn1045 wrote: post #317

Low income people in the U.S still have a chance of improving their station in life, although it is very hard. It’s nearly impossible in other countries where poor takes on a whole new meaning.

We just need to make sure we don’t get “used to it” in the USA, lest we become a place where class becomes ossified in daily life, or descend into the aristocracy class hierarchy that plagued much of early European history.

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

#333

Post by kungito »

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…

I think this issue is very important and when I think about it I cannot help but think the answer lies all the way down in the question whether we have free will. Some people say "you have to be perseverant like me and you will make it and often time we think about people who have simply cannot be perseverant enough but they are good people. Can they be better "if they wanted it more" or "if someone helped them" and who would that person be? People especially here have stories with "I was in a bad situation but I worked hard learning coding" while many people were in a similar situation but didn't pick up coding as these people did. Are they to blame and did the other people pick coding because they knew it would launch them to great heights?

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

#334

Post by [deleted] »

airhead969 wrote: post #82
austincheney wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to know how people truly are, become actually poor, filthy, and seem depressed, then you will know their nature. You don’t need to be homeless to discover that some people lack sympathy. I lack sympathy. It doesn’t mean I’m an asshole. Sympathy isn’t empathy (huge distinction). Some people can’t tell the difference and everyone is just bad (cue the big tears). This is especially true if you’re a freeloa…

You may have missed the point, so I'll state it explicitly: almost all people lack empathy, it's just more than some have the self-control not to stab homeless people to death. Sympathy, gratuity, and freeloading are somewhere off in the distance. I hope you're not trying to slip in some duplicitous language to accuse me of being freeloader. What does it have to do with anything?

[deleted]

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

#335

Post by nitrogen »

grumple wrote: post #315
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…

I have a similar story and luck played no part of it. I spent lots of time in public libraries and on public computers as a kid. As a result, I got an academic scholarship. A few years after graduating amidst the 2008 economic crisis, I heard about a company that used a particular programming language. I learned that language and convinced someone I knew at the company to get me an interview. I aced the interview and…

someone I knew at the company

Sounds fortunate. This is one aspect where I too have been "lucky" in the past, but you have to be both lucky and good.

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

#336

Post by david-gpu »

sandoze wrote: post #298
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…

Very similar situation. I had a single mother and spent time with family and non-family members most of my life. I never had much and essentially grew up in a trailer park throughout my teenage years with an elderly couple that I called my grandparents but weren’t even related. They were kind enough to take me in. Fast forward to my 40s and I make a quarter million a year. Have a net worth of over a million, a quarte…

I can relate. You may find that passive value investing resonates with you once you learn more about it.

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

#337

Post by MontyCarloHall »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #160
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #104

> a pretty bottom-barrel ford leases for 300-400 a month Ford leases seem to be expensive for some reason, and not indicative of the overall market. For instance, a base model Toyota Corolla or Honda Civic can be leased for $160/month, with $0 down. With $1000 down, these figures are close to $100/month. > A company is looking to pay a person as little as they can and keep them, so a person’s pay is determined by how…

Ever notice how those ads say something like "qualifying customers". If your credit score is in the toilet you're not getting any of those prices. The domestics, koreans, nissan and mistu will lease to anyone with a pulse but if your credit is bad the monthly rate or requireed uprfront payment is gonna climb quickly. You might as well need the president of the local yacht club write you a recommendation to get a sub-…

Yeah, fair enough, I hadn’t thought about that. Underscores exactly why articles like this are good reading.

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

#338

Post by technofiend »

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…

Go read The Millionaire Next Door. You'll see that there are plenty of people like yourself who remain frugal after managing to pull themselves out of poverty. I'm suggesting the book to both validate your behavior but also give you some examples so you can perhaps moderate it if you still feel that's needed. I can give a single example from my life: my uncle managed to snag a liquor distributorship after WW II. It was a license to print money. He never moved out of the first postwar house he purchased when he started his business because he just didn't see the need and he felt showing off his newfound wealth in poor taste.

In short, you're not alone and as long as you're not making yourself or people in your life miserable well maybe you're not too far off from where you need to be.

https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Stanley-Thomas/...

I will say the folks who come from richer backgrounds do have some advantages over us who grew up poor. For instance I had no idea how much scholarships subsidized learning and went to the state school I could afford to fund on my own.

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

#339

Post by Terretta »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #306
Terretta wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s the gist of my second to last paragraph. For this time value to be real, could you and would you be able to redeploy the time? This scenario was premised on having the skills to do your own repair work.

To be clear, I’m acknowledging your position, but hold that it is, by and large, a trap to believe that time cannot be leveraged. For instance, can you fix someone else’s porch for more than you’d save by fixing your own? Probably.

What works to low end income advantage here is that if you’re at the left end of the income bell curve, there are many more people to the right of you who can compensate you for your time to free up theirs, while those still lower than you can be leveraged to free up yours. Not saying it’s easy to find one’s ratchet, but odds are high a ratchet is there.

Post reply on HN