A friend in college told me he was impressed with my self-control because I bought a shitty car and saved up all my money, instead of blowing it on a series of hot cars like he does. My car didn't have a driver's side door, I had to find a matching door in a junkyard to make it legal to drive. He drove a different sports car every year. I replied "Saved up what money? I spent everything I had on this junker" but I don't think he really got it.
People that grew up with fuck you money tend to be clueless that way. Poor and rich are words, not concepts they understand. A $5 burger and a $500 dinner are the same thing, and require the same amount of thought.
In middleschool I had an old nokia phone, while many of the other kids had the cool flip phones.
A kid asked me why I wouldn't buy a new phone and when I said I had no money, they were confused and said "just ask your parents." They couldn't comprehend I didn't have an allowance and me not having money meant my family not having money...
This person I dated had all these nice new clothes and shoes like closet stuffed, take vacations, had one of those cool sliding touch phones, always had some money and if not her mom had it to give, and also going to do all the fun stuff like amusement parks and such.
They think they grew up poor. The dad worked all day all week, the mom all night all week. They talk shit about both parents and say how their grandparents paid for everything. Even if the grandparents did pay for everything that means ALL the money their parents made was free for use and is the reason they were able to go and do all this stuff they did. This same person still doesn't know how it feels to be so much as middle class. Who the fuck goes to an ivy league school, leaves with no debt, and doesn't realize they had a better setup than every single friend they had. Oh, they recently went off on some friends because they still have a better setup but are extremely unhappy with their marriage lol we might have been kids when we dated but that relationship was twice as long as the person she married.
I have found people who grew up upper middle class think that they are the same as working class. Like once you get to college most realize they have fuck you money if they got it. But like you said those that have nice clothing and vacation money think they are the same as Joe Shmoe the coal miner
I'll be dead honest. I grew up in a trailer park. Asked my parents why we didn't own a real house. They said "we could afford to 'live' in a house **OR** we could take vacations, go fun places, afford to actually live and make memories together."
They ended up moving out of there and bought a house when they started their DINK lifestyle after my older sister and I both moved out..
The payment was $600 (when I was 18 and about to move out, lot rent increased annually), vs houses that would have been easily double or higher for the mortgage
Pretty accurate. My wife grew up in upper middle class, and I grew up on pots of beans to hopefully make it through the week. We moved in together and she starts throwing expensive cuts of meat in the basket while grocery shopping. We were at $40 with 3 things. I told her the price of each and that we couldn't afford that. The look of disappointment on her face of going from chicken and steak to ham sandwiches really hurt to see. It was something she had never really experienced but felt like a feast to me just to have food.
I knew a kid in highschool who got a brand new Camero from their rich parents. He told them he didn't want it and wanted a truck instead so they bought him a brand new F350. The disgust was real coming from guys like me who bought their own '99 Saturn with 200k miles.
I dunno about that.
My parents convinced me that we ate rice and beans for dinner like three or four nights a week because, "It's healthy and meat and processed foods are terrible for you."
I mean, they weren't really wrong, but I also realized much later that it was because you could feed a family of four with a couple of big bags of rice and beans for like $10 a week back in the 90s.
Yeah, I recently bought an instapot and thus began having more meals without meat and with chickpeas and different kinds of beans for protein. It made me lose a few kilos without even trying and it's certainly great for my gut health to get all that extra fibre. Cheap as hell too.
its funny how different bodies are. I did that for a couple of weeks when I was single (lentils and kidney/black beans) with peas and quinoa and I was never hungrier and snacked more. I assume it was all the carbs, cause I've never lost weight until I went low carb.
Jumping in about that, the whole having farts when eating beans is the result of our western diets including few legumes. Basically what happens if you grow up eating all kinds of beans, you have a greater of amount of the kinds of bacteria in your gut that help you digest those beans without causing gas and bloating. As an adult you can 100% also adjust to this, it's literally a matter of eating them regularly (first in small amounts, then upping the amount) and you'll also have those kinds of bacteria in your gut.
Eventually you literally digest beans the same way you'd digest pasta or white rice, except they're infinitely more nutritious and filling
Same with rice, I feel like asians eat 3x the amount of rice a white person would regularly have with their meal/meat. Or maybe we were just broke growing up
I'd say that doing it for just a few weeks is too small a timespan, but also I should clarify that I still eat meat a few times a week (especially chicken breast) because it's highly filling and since I lift weights I do try to keep my protein up, something that's difficult with just legumes. I have tried going more than a week without meat and I didn't gain weight but I did feel oddly hungry and low-energy.
A good side effect is that rare ribeye or grilled beef ribs taste three times as delicious now
As a former rich kid, Im in my late twenties and I still have moments where I have to stop and it just hits me what poverty actually is. I was in La la land in my highschool years, buying my friends Starbucks for lunch just so they would go with me because I liked the sandwiches.
I just beat homelessness.
Or sexuality.
Or college choice.
Or not wanting to live your life exactly as they dictate.
Or really any number of things.
Having money means you can buy shit. That's it. Doesn't mean you're a good person or a good parent. Or even good with money.
Also, "rich" is a very broad term. Especially in Reddit comments.
That's like my wife asking me what we did for our summer vacation every year growing up. I'm like "summer vacation?" We sat home and tried not to do anything stupid while my mom worked. Basically did the same as during the school year just without School.
She wasn't oblivious to the world but was blown away that a lot of people can't afford to have family vacations.
My wife grew up wealthy, I did not. She asked me how old I was when I first went to Disney and I just laughed and asked her how old she was when she first went to Colonial Williamsburg?
The first time I went to Disney was when my wife took me at 30
I was 10 the first time I went. The only reason I even went was because we were playing in the peewee football national championships. Otherwise I wouldn't have gone until I was early twenties when I was in college in Orlando.
Until I was 13-14 the best we could hope for was my mom would find some crazy cheap deal for amusement park tickets. We'd get up before dawn, pack a cooler, drive the 2+ hours, spend all day without spending a dime in the park, then drive home after the park closed bc we couldn't afford a hotel. I never realized that people would actually spend multiple days at amusement parks and stay overnight until I was older.
We were lower middle class with a large family, so regular vacations were our of the question. However, we also had a large extended family, so our vacations consisted of visiting more distant relatives. Ah, the 10 hour drives in a crowded van.
Fortunately, we lived 20 minutes from the beach so it was convenient and inexpensive to just grab a cooler and some towels and drive out to the beach. We didn't really have vacations but while poor we did do that kind of stuff around town that was free. I also did have access to some pretty good free public parks. I think that helped me to appreciate nature and outdoorsy stuff.
I remember having one vacation growing up. My mother drove my sister and I from Florida to Pennsylvania to visit our godparents before they died. I think it was more a trip for her to get some things in order than it was an actual vacation. It was still fun though.
Wym. Got an apartment and help. Not homeless anymore
Edit oh shit I did not see all the shit this post caused lmfao
Edit 2 it is a very long story.
I wasn’t always homeless. I had been good with money, and actually a year before I made roughly 45k on GameStop in 3 months in the stock market.
I lost my gf at the time (covid) and had to isolate.
I lost mental balance due to those things and many other things.
I started drinking.
I found out very quickly I was an alcoholic.
I moved out of town with the money and bought a car, and stupidly lived off the money.
Alcoholism increased.
Room mate kicked me out when I basically had no more money left.
I couldn’t go back with my parents so I door dashed while living in a Walmart parking lot. I was -500 in my account at that time. Got clean for a 4-5 months out of sheer will and worked my ass off for a new apartment.
Though, I did have a family member let me live in a no running water no insolation shed for a second after they heard I was living in my car - so there’s that.
I can’t imagine what it would be like to be homeless and have no family. Or to have a family that is not well off.
I’m not saying I had it worse than others - but my other rich kid friends have basically deemed me a failure while I think I see the world very differently now as it is not something that I’ve walked away from unscathed.
I actually got hired at a restaurant as a waiter the first day of my shed life.
I now have an apartment. But I almost fucked up again due to alcoholism. The fear that would all happen again made me pull the trigger and get into rehab.
I’m 2 months and one week clean and in intensive outpatient.
Things are looking good and I make videos on my phone in my spare time. I’m saving up for a computer. But my life is not the same.
It is very hard to go from la la land to poor. It fucks with you a little.
Poor kid from the 80s and 90s here. Agreed that parents can sometimes make being poor FEEL better than it is. Even back then there were obvious signs. The neighborhood kid with dirt bikes or the new gaming system. But also, that was before the internet. It’s much more obvious when you’re poor now. Sure, some kids are too poor to have internet, but when they go to school with other kids… those kids are more informed by the internet as well and the knowledge is shared.
Hell, I’m a 46 year old man who makes a decent living now. I own a home, married, etc. But sometimes the internet makes ME feel poor. I can’t imagine being 13 year old me seeing Instagram or TikTok on a library or school computer.
This is my theory as to why American society is so really, really messed up now. Too many comparing themselves to the best parts of others lives. It makes men lack self esteem and women to become over anxious. Everyone is either giving up or trying to keep up with the joneses
>This is my theory as to why American society is so really, really messed up now. Too many comparing themselves to the best parts of others lives. It makes men lack self esteem and women to become over anxious. Everyone is either giving up or trying to keep up with the joneses
My ex would spend up to 8 hours a day glued to tik tok following all of the influencers and it really fucked with her mentally. I remember her telling me one time about an influencer who couldn't decide which vacation destination to choose from so her and her boyfriend just ended up going to both. She then proceeded to get herself into a rage over it and directed it at me since we weren't out there living these spectacular lives like all of those people were.
This 29 year old woman couldn't understand that most people don't actually live that way. She also became incredibly bitter and jealous that these kids were making so much money by living these fanciful lives while she was stuck behind a desk. She also got into antivax shit and other conspiracies. Tik tok definitely altered her perception of reality and normal expectations of life.
I had a school project back in middle school where we had to budget 3 healthy meals a day. I did rice and beans for 3 meals a day for 5 days, and was told that this wasn’t good enough. That’s when I knew something was up.
Rajma masala as well if you want to branch out of Tex-Mex. Another Indian recipe that works well with kidney beans is olan, a south indian dish that can be made with pumpkins and beans in a coconut milk-based sauce
I hate kidney beans. They don't taste good in anything.
Except chili.
Chili just isn't chili without kidney beans. Kidney beans in chili is fucking delicious.
Old school Texas chili takes it's roots from Mexican Chile rojo/Verde, which is literally just meat in chili sauce, no other veggies are added other than the chiles and spices. Once chili began to spread in popularity other states began to add their own twists and flair to the recipe, but Texas remains the closest to the original Mexican style chili. If you want a good read up on the history look up "the chili queens of San Antonio"
Oof - we called it old faithful in our house.. Been 20+ years for me too, but just thinking about that pot of spaghetti and tomato sauce we would eat for days in a row makes me a little queasy still. Love my parents and appreciate how hard they worked to make our lives better - but gottdamn we ate so much of that, lol.
> just thinking about that pot of spaghetti and tomato sauce we would eat for days in a row makes me a little queasy still.
i mean... probably not a good idea to just leave it around, spaghetti isn't hard to cook, even for kids. Making a big batch of sauce on the weekends(and freeze it in a ziploc to thaw one per day) and then whatever kind of pasta you want each day would definitely have kept it a bit less gross.
....but then you went to school where you were viciously made fun of for your raggedy clothes & shoes, never owning a brand name, etc ....right? This made you realize you were in poverty as other kids didn't get made fun of for wearing raggedy old clothes, could afford new ones whenever needed and always had nice shoes.
I was poor as fuck but I also grew up in the hood so everyone was pretty poor. I didn’t realize how poor I was until I grew up, got a good paying job , and started my own family . My kids get anything they want when I couldn’t even get a new pair of shoes more than once a year
I never experienced this. I think name brands and cool clothes weren't as big in my culture. I'm from a culture where we brag about how cheap something is, so no one is going to make fun of the kid without name brand stuff.
I was poor and didn't realise until I was early twenties.
There was this kid when I was 6 or 7, he knew he was rich!
I didn't know he was rich or what rich was at the time but he knew and made sure I knew what he was.
I had a friend like that in junior high.
His dad was a postman and his mom was a stay-at-home mom.
He loved to lord his $75 Fossil watch over the rest of us poors and tell us it was worth more than our *houses* like it was a real Rolex.
I understood later he was a poor kid who thought he was rich.
according to a random list of expensive rolexes there was one sold in 2011 (the pearlmaster something something) worth ~$277,850 then, or ~$375,000 today (USD) if we're only factoring in inflation on retail price
[here are 582 3+ bed houses you can buy](https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/find.html?locationIdentifier=REGION%5E61352&minBedrooms=3&maxPrice=290000&sortType=6&propertyTypes=detached%2Csemi-detached%2Cterraced&mustHave=&dontShow=&furnishTypes=&keywords=) for the equivalent price or less in GBP, in only a relatively small area in scotland
To be fair they probably lived on the grandfather's property, he knew his family was balling but he/they weren't the kind of people like shitty rich people. I'd say sane people rich, not trying to throw it in everyone's face and looking like they think everyone in the world is below them... Elon, Kardashians, those kind of folks.
If his family wasn't like him... He definitely learned from watching them and decided he didn't want to be like them which makes him even better and makes me hope you two kept in touch. A friend that doesn't give a shit about his family money was probably great to have.
I remember the first time I went to a schoolmate's house in junior high, and embarrassed myself by being in awe that they had figurines on display in a CURIO CABINET.
Can totally relate to this. Went to a classmates house and they had a beautiful TV bookcase that ran the length of the wall. I was just in awe of its beauty.
I was impressed by my ex gfs family's salad spinner. We had always just shaken the lettuce to get the water off or used paper towel so I thought it was a magical device.
I knew from a young age we didn’t have as much as my peers, but It really sank in how poor we were when I was hired to clean a friend’s McMansion when I was 13/14. She had an adorable room filled with tons of cozy furniture and fun teenage girl stuff. I had a cot in a corner of a room I shared with a sibling with barely any furnishings at home constantly afraid of eviction. She’d show me songs she was learning from her piano tutor on her grand piano in their den. They paid me well for very little work, but the fomo made me so depressed I quit after a short while.
We had a poor side of town and a rich side of town. My family hopped from place to place usually in the rougher areas. I took advanced classes in school and it seemed like all of my peers came from the wealthier families.
Rich kids and advanced classes go hand in hand. I was always in advanced classes and about 99% of the kids in there with me had rich parents. Kind of sad and disgusting when you consider all the poor kids that could have gotten a better education if they had better support. Even though I got through advanced classes in high school, I didn’t make it though college because the mental health effects of growing up finally caught up with me.
In some places, like canada, we may all go to the same school, because public schools are decent and many have mixed income demographics due to how the city layout is. I had friends with actual mansions with walk-in refrigerators, and also friends who had to move in the middle of the night to skip rent. I am very glad to have had exposure to both.
I have read that mixed income schooling is a major way that poor kids can become more socially mobile and have an actual shot at climbing into another bracket.
Exactly. There were people at my high school living in 5 million dollar lake front homes and others like me living in basic shacks. The wealthiest did tend to head to the private schools, but upper middle class definitely. Metro Detroit Michigan.
I’d say my friend’s parents probably made ~150,000 combined in 2007/2008.
My dad and mom never really got above $15/hr each.
There were a lot of those neighborhoods that have 3-4,000 sq houses that all look the same mini mansion and the kids in my social group lived in neighborhoods like this. I hadn’t had stable housing at most points in my childhood, so those things seemed incredible to me.
I had a rough going with relating to my friends. I didn’t know anyone else with similar experiences to me so I felt like an alien. My home life was stressful and traumatizing, so I was very insecure and depressed. I was also an overachiever in school and comparing myself with other kids with less trauma, more free time, and a good support system was exhausting. I was very envious and jealous, so I worked harder to be on their level but always burnt out.
I’d often have maladaptive daydreams about living a different life with a safe, cozy home and less stress.
I’m grateful I was given a shot but it’s pretty damn exhausting trying to climb that socioeconomic ladder. I did to an extent I’m proud of, but I still feel like I’m always one pay check away from my life crumbling apart again.
Interesting, cause i was on the other side. My friends found it bonkers that my family had a housekeeper and all sat down to a meal served one by one by dad. And i did well at school but was internally crumbling from lack of emotional support or attention from my parents, who provided all the advantages of wealth and privilege except emotional connection. I would compare myself to a friend who had to get her fist job when we were 9, so she could put food on her table, and worked multiple jobs through highschool and still did well even though her mom was mentally ill and entirely unreliable. A real blossoming from the cracks in the sidewalk kind of story. And self-centred me just lamented like, how is it that I, with all this privilege, still feel like i can't make it, like i will topple at any minute and can't even handle just doing school?
Even as an adult, i aspire to that friend's inner confidence and self-sufficiency.
I'm glad to see someone else talking about this. Being given a shot to climb the socioeconomic ladder is a lot different than a lot of people think it is. I got a shot by leaving my hometown the second I could, joining the military, going to school with GI Bill money and then a grad school fellowship, and having an engineering career. I'm in my early 40's now, and honestly, the burnout has really started to hit.
People seem to think it's just a one and done fix. "OK, she has a high income now. All's well that ends well!" And then I'm just supposed to sit there and live a life that nothing prepared me to live, which starts to feel more and more like jump-scare horror every year. Every time I turn around, there's some other expectation I can't reach because I wasn't born here, or didn't know existed until I was slapped in the face with the ramifications of not knowing it.
> I still feel like I’m always one pay check away from my life crumbling apart again.
This is the part nobody thinks of. This is the part that burns me out more than anything else. I make as much as my peers, my partner, all the other generationally wealthy (or at least generationally middle class) fucks I live among these days, but will always have more in common with everyone where I came from than I ever will with them for this reason. Just knowing that there is nothing behind me, that I am the only thing standing between my kids and every dark thing about where I came from, is daunting. If I lose my job, get sick, die before the last of my kids reaches adulthood, all this was for nothing because we are right back where I began. The knowledge that there's no room for error is so heavy, and it doesn't go away.
That might be true for some, but not for me and my siblings. My father was a junior officer in the military and my mother was a stay at home mom raising the kids. This was late 1960's, early-to-mid 1970's. Back then a junior officer didn't make a lot of money.
I never felt like we were not well off. We did all sorts of cool things when we were young. Our dad would take us fishing and camping, my mom would cook most meals, and McDonalds or Del Taco was a once every 1-2 weeks treat.
My parents hit their stride later in life and both ended up doing very well and became wealthy. That was when I was already an adult.
The thing that really hit home for me thinking about the past was a time when my father took us to see a shuttle launch. This was 2003 and he was doing very well by that time. We were in his RV which was a Prevost Bus like rock stars have.
We were around a bunch of his friends talking about RVs and I said something to the effect at how much my father liked camping. He blurted out, "Bullshit! I hate camping, I did enough of 'camping' in the mud in Vietnam." I asked, "What about all those times we went camping at the lake, fishing, Bryce Canyon, and all those other places?" He says, "I took you, your brother, and your sister camping because I couldn't afford the hotel rooms."
As kids, we never knew, we thought our parents did all the cool stuff they did for us to have fun.
Sorry to ask this but how about your grandparents?
There's generational poorness (the real deal) and then there's being "poor" but having loaded grandparents - where, essentially, your parents are willing to take risks with money and are not that worried about it because _their_ folks are rich: it's like there's a safety net, a privilege they may not even realize.
One of my friends is like this - him and his wife work dead-end jobs and aren't worried about money despite having none - they live in a small shack with their first kid and just rack up a ton of credit card debt buying necessities.
Her parents are millionaires.
This, in my experience, is quite common.
Basically 80% of people are generationally poor globally. But in places like the US, 40s to 90s was an incredibly, once in a forever kind of asset explosion for most of the people living at that time. Especially if you were a white male (most of the working population) no matter what you did, you end up with a couple of million dollars in the 2000s. This is due to house assets appreciating, and a mix of good stock market returns and pensions still existing.
This will likely never happen again at the scale it did. It was due to many factors including 2 world wars, rapid advances in technology accessible to most, and had some fascinating effects of things like racism and misogyny which limited the good working conditions artificially.
So yeah, in my experience, there are MILLIONS of people who simply have been/are waiting for their parents to die in order to end up with really solid amounts of money.
That's the whole "generational" part of it.
I think he has enough for vacation... Just spent it on two really ridiculous things. I bet his idea of a vacation is a lot more expensive than my idea of a vacation.
The annoying part is when they keep suggesting expensive activities to do while being oblivious to financial struggles. Like bitch I cant travel with you for vacation on a monthly basis
That didn't used to be the case in previous generations. A number of my relatives in coal country Pennsylvania have said that they didn't know they were poor growing up even though some of what they described, like walking along train tracks to pick up coal that fell from coal cars or seeing snow come into the house between the boards that made up the walls, would make you think it should be obvious. But the human spirit is more adaptable than you might imagine. Hardship is relative in that light, especially when it's a shared experience among many and there's some degree of mutual support among family and community. I do agree with your sentiment for the most part for today's kids who have a greater awareness of the world around them and sometimes a reminder where privilege highlights the divide between the haves and have nots.
I think feeling poor is more a result of upward social comparison than of actual live circumstances. You can feel just fine if everyone you know is doing similarly well to you, even if you have to pick up coal. In comparison, even a millionaire can feel poor if everyone he knows is a billionaire.
My parents grew up poor and to this day my now-comfortably-retired mom can’t quite accept that characterization, despite ample evidence from her own childhood stories. When I was growing up, we didn’t have a lot (I remember being constantly jealous of better-off friends with their summer camps and cool toys and clothes not bought at Wal-Mart) but we had a lot more than she’d had. But everyone around her was poor too and she didn’t really think about it.
My dad knew he was poor because his parents’ fortunes changed dramatically for the better when he was a teenager. The contrast made it clear.
At my school, a charity is currently doing a project with the 10-year-olds to raise awareness about the massive rate of child poverty in our city, and to create a community project to help families who are struggling. It's a great way of helping the children to develop both empathy and a sense of social responsibility... but there are a whole lot of children in my class now realising for the first time how lucky and well off their families actually are.
Actual suggestions by children discussing how 35% of families in our city struggle to buy food:
They could sell one of their cars.
Maybe they skip Disney land this year.
Why don't they just drink water and not eat for a while? I've heard you can do that, and not eating *has* to be easier than eating.
What if they just buy cheaper stuff? Like going to Costa instead of Starbucks, and just having a medium cappuccino, not a big fancy drink?
I don't blame them at all for not knowing, but it's really good that they're finding out, because kids who grow up being allowed to think like this turn into adults who refuse to accept anything else.
It wasn't until I started living on my own that I started questioning my parents financial decisions
We lived in one of the cheaper parts of town, had a car that would've been fitting for a middle class family if it was 15 years newer, and half of my wardrobe came from thrift shops
We didn't go to coffee shops. We made coffee at home, with beans my dad brought back from his trips to Italy. A feijoada, on Brazil, can be made very cheaply. Due to the required meats not being sold where we lived, we got them from a diplomat friend who brought mlthe meat over from Brazil. All the butter and chocolate in our house was the same
We had lobster for dinner at least once a week, while our house only had finctioning water pressure 70% of the time
Well, don't leave us hanging! I'm confused. Is this a rich story or a poor story? You say you questioned their decisions, were they good ones? What country were you actually living in?
We were living in Panama at the time and I'm still not sure if this is a rich or poor story. I guess min-maxed middle class?
As for their decisions regarding spending, they seem bad, but now I find myself doing basically the same. If my diet was less luxurious I could probably afford a much better place to live, but I'd rather eat like a king than live in a house bigger than I really need
I think I get it. I do the same in parts of my life. At times I've lived in a van at home and never ate out, because this was the cheapest way to afford flying lessons and traveling abroad frequently. I think people sometimes get stuck in living at a certain level and can't imagine making major adjustments to reach what they want. You got a good life perspective.
We were poor for awhile, but I had no idea. Because that’s your parents job-kids shouldn’t know about money struggles. We had food and a home, but we didn’t get everything we wanted. We had to save for new bikes, or work for something because things are better when you earn them. My mom was the queen of coupons and lay away!
I had like the opposite experience. My family had a pretty good financial situation, but whenever they would talk about it around me they would always say stuff that made me think we were on the brink. They wondered why I never asked for anything.
Yeah, I was in a similar boat. Not that I ever thought we were poor, but compared to my peers and neighbours (I grew up in quite a well-off area) we were always more humble with money.
I realised later how lucky we really were when I came into contact with a wider range of people.
I’m planning to raise my kid (close to) that way because as an ex-poor kid, who is now well off, I have a fear of raising spoiled douchebags. I had no idea my husbands family was well off, given how modestly he lived because they raised him similarly.
Some are more poor than others. I didn’t really think about us being poor growing up until the power got shut off a few times. Then the portion sizes and everything else made more sense.
But then there’s my kid’s friend who lives in a one bedroom apartment with their mom, grandpa, and brother, and they don’t have any illusion that their situation is not what average or above average income may look like. No queen of coupons is fixing that unfortunate situation.
As a poor kid, I had larger portion sizes that I do now because it was all cheap carbs. Pasta bakes, rice dishes, potatoes - stuff where you could triple the quantity for less than adding a bit of protein and veg.
I'm in my 30s now, and I'm still becoming aware just how poor my family was when I was growing up. I knew we weren't rich, but looking back we had very little cash and mum put a lot of life on multiple credit cards. It was also partially her fault, she would live a very frugal life in some ways but also incredibly frivolous in others - like leaving the heating on when we went out so the house would be warm when we got back. Her parents were pretty comfortable when she was growing up so she got accustomed to a certain lifestyle.
I never knew because they always made things fun growing up. Love my parents to death, but that part always makes me a little more appreciative looking back.
My two nephews are the most spoiled little bastards I've ever seen. I don't know if they'll ever understand how good they have it. One of them was pissed that he didn't get some 7k gaming chair for Christmas. My sister in law was telling me how upset she was over christmas dinner that she couldn't justify that purchase, even though he really expected it. Meanwhile, I'm driving a 2006 Nissan Sentra that I paid 5k for 6 years ago that I absolutely cannot afford to replace.
Is that gaming chair plated in gold? I can't imagine being willing to spend that much on any chair. Like even if I could afford it without thinking about the cost, you can get absolutely amazing chairs for $500, with many decent options for much less.
Can semi confirm. Definitely knew we were poor before I hit 2nd grade. I thought my friends were rich cause they were…I guess middle class? I had no idea at the time what rich really was. But when you’re handed a coffee tin full of change at school in third grade, you feel some really complicated things a child should not feel.
I legit thought that canned vienna sausages were the height of luxury.
My mom used to cook them in a pan with some sugar and soy sauce and serve it with rice.
Fuckin shit is out of control. It wasn’t till I got older that I ate it cuz it was like a 50 cent meal lol.
Rich kids know they are rich?
My experience is that they truly believe their life chances were choices open to all, even until adulthood. The reality is someone who was caring for their addict parents would have difficulty attending many of the opportunities, and didn't have access to many of the things that would have provided the life opportunities that rich kids took for granted.
I grew up middle class in a poor area. I only realised later on how shit it was for many of my peers. We didn't attend many of the opportunities not because we didn't want to but because our school didn't even tell us about them. I nearly missed university applications for my chosen subject because I couldn't get the one single signature I needed from a teacher... Meanwhile rich kids got coaching for the interviews and were encouraged to submit applications early, because their schools had 15-20% going to study these subjects.
There are little differences too like I had a friend who’s parents signed her up for private school for certain courses. Because it was private and she had more time with the teacher her grades where amazing which meant when it came time for college she had full scholarships- even though the parents were rich. Lower class children did not have that opportunity and ended up working during highschool and grades not as high, therefore needing to take on debt to go to school.
My parents had enough money to easily pay for college for me-they paid for me to get two degrees, and even paid for my ex husband to do a university degree and then a college degree.
I never ever even applied for scholarships specifically because i felt like i should leave those for my classmates working multiple jobs. I had university teachers give me a hard time for not pushing myself more, like, cause i was always great at school, but to me, it just felt deeply unfair for a "have" student to take away opportunity from a "have not."
Yeesh, proof reading this after writing, i may be trauma dumping but whatever.
I remember the day I realized we were poor. I think I was maybe 6 or 7. My dad worked as a truck driver so he was barely home and my mom was disabled in a accident so she couldn't work. My dad was home for a weekend and I remember us going to a KB Toys (wow I'm old) and I really wanted to get Sonic 3 for the genesis that i used to play when I went to church as a kid. I remember my dad saying that it was too expensive and got me some other toy. Obviously, as a kid, I wasn't very happy about that. When we got back into his truck to go home, he told me straight up. He said, "Son, we aren't very well off financially right now. I'm sorry I couldn't get you that game." Now, I felt so bad, not that I couldn't get the game anymore but that my dad had spent money on me on a toy that he probably couldn't afford. I remember full blown sobbing because of the guilt lol. That conversation changed me.
Spent entire childhood thinking i live in a mid income family, then high school hits, and i had to interact with the mostly richer classmates. Just finished high school and shit hits harder now
It's tough man. I was a kid in the 80s so we didn't have Internet. I thought the people in the nearby shitty town of 9,000 people were straight up wealthy. They absolutely weren't, turns out. Mostly lower-mid income although that was better off back then that now.
I get it about after high school. The only way I had to get out of that shit situation was the military, which I can't in good conscience recommend. Sure, I ended up making solidly middle class money but I got blown up a few times too many times and have medical issues that I'll have my entire life. I get a pension but I'd rather have be able to not feel like I've been up for 18 hours. I've been just exhausted like that for 3 years and barring significant medical advances I'll feel like that the rest of my life. What a great society we live in.
> I never once complained about not having money
Where do people get the idea this is "rich"?
The gulf between financially secure and rich is bigger than the gulf between financially secure and completely destitute.
In dollars (or whatever currency), sure. Not necessarily in mindset.
At a certain point, money stops occupying as much mental bandwidth. Yes, you buy a Camry instead of a Porsche. You try for that promotion because it's points in the game. But there isn't much fear.
I was poor when I was a kid, and it's my mission to make sure that my 4 months old daughter will grow up in a middleclass household. The house is bought, we have a car, we have a trailer and a garden, we have 3 cats and we live in the suburbs, I feel like I've managed to turn things around.
Looking back, do you have any tips on how to prevent this kind of behavior?
We're well-off now, but my wife and I grew up poor. While we want to do our best to give everything to our child, we also want to keep our child humble and have her know the value of money.
I think having jobs and internships as teens is key. Some rich kids never learn to work and never build the confidence and resiliency needed to get and keep a job. A job can also be humbling and keep kids out of trouble which are both good things. Add in volunteering to help with elderly, homeless, etc. to help with perspective.
In some ways, it is impossible to lower expectations and entitlement though. It would be like if someone told you you should be grateful for oxygen and water. If you always have what others consider luxuries, they aren't luxuries for you..
It's exposure, explaining where money comes from and that you sell your time for money etc... (maybe not in those words) and showing them that the value in life is not in stuff, and that they're very fortunate to be able to do cool things. I grew up 'poor' (we had enough money to rarely go broke, but one of 11 kids and mom prioritised stuff instead of experiences, I count myself lucky every day that I have money in the bank and have experienced things people dream of.
Relative wealth plays a part in this. I grew up with way more than my friends at school but we were all poor. I didnt realize I grew up poor until I was in college and reported my parents income. I got a full ride (BA with 0 debt) for being so poor.
I don't think I've ever met poor kids who didn't know their families were poor.
I have definitely met people who had no idea they were rich.
I used to play WoW with a guy who lived in Texas. One day he starts complaining about how the midday maid is late. A different person we were playing with asked this texas guy if he was rich.
Texas tries to say no, he's not rich, maids are normal.
I tried to explain that having a maid is not normal. (normal as in a common occurrence, I'm not dissing anyone who cleans as a job)
Then texas goes on to explain that it's only a problem at this ranch, not any of the other ones his family owns. He ended up offended that people were saying he was rich.
I was happier when we weren't doing well financially growing up. There are other ways to be "rich", if you are surrounded with good people, in good health, having a good time overall, able to enjoy what little you have then you are rich.
I only learnt recently it’s not normal to worry about what your parents were spending money on or to worry about how much work they were/weren’t getting
I feel this, I wish I wasn't given the fine details of our money problems. From like 8yo I'd be Googling variations of "how to make money" because it stressed me out pretty bad. I also only realised a few years ago that it wasn't really normal and may have affected me.
Yeah my friend and I were just chatting and she tells me her history and how stressed she has always been about money, and I’m thinking in my head oh that’s normal why is she so stressed and I questioned it and she’s like girl no. Big wake up call for me. How fucking weird it is saying it out loud too.
Interestingly - many rich people wouldn't call themselves rich.
I know folks clearing 350k/year in household income who wouldn't call themselves rich. They imagine rich to mean "so much money I never have to work again" not "so much money I never have to really think about an expense."
This seems kind of out of nowhere? If anything, I'd say you realize you're poor/rich if you are an outlier where you live. Poor kids in the ghetto where everyone else is poor can take a long time to realize similar to a rich kid who only interacts with rich kids. You learn quick when you are around the opposite and see the difference.
Having been something of the "poor kid" who grew up around a lot of rich kids, I think it depends on a variety of factors. Generally, whoever is more out of step with the people around them will notice it first, and that can go either way.
As a kid, I thought we were middle class. In college I realized we have our house and 2 cars and thought we were rich. Now I feel more solidarity with the homeless than the billionaires, because we're closer to homeless than we are to billionaire even though we're "comfortable".
It's hard to "notice" something that just makes your life more frictionless and easy. It's hard to notice getting things you want and need. some people seem to go through their entire life never realising they had it easy.
I had a friend in college with rich parents who described her family as “not rich, just upper middle class.” Her father was chief of surgery at a major hospital driving a Porsche. They had a multi million dollar house in Ohio, a vacation house in Mexico, a lake house in Michigan, and when she wrecked her car they drove out with a new one next day. Her and her 5 siblings went to fancy private schools.
Maybe a private jet was out of the budget for them but she was very oblivious that yes, they’re rich.
I knew we were poor when the parent used buying me school clothes as yet another stick to beat me with (as well as actual sticks). Having money has always been such a weird concept to me. Just the idea of knowing I'll be able to eat every day, and that noone could kick me out of a place I'm living is so out there.
It work both ways.
Rich kids notice the clothes, school bag and even the pens that their friends own, that are cheap or passed down from an older brother/sister. They notice they have more than their classmates, that they go on holidays and their friends don't, that their parents have a nice car and the others go home in bad looking cars. When they see their buddies cry because they made a hole in their shoes and are scared that their parents won't get them another pair. This all happens in kindergarten.
Just as poor kids recognize wealth when they see it, rich kids recognize poverty. What they see is the difference, which amounts to the same whether you go up or down
My family and I wouldn't be classed as poor or rich growing up in the UK, fairly average, however, after mortgage payments and bills etc, there was never much surplus, in fact dad worked extra hours and mum part-time while bringing us up to afford what we had (a detached fairly sized house in a nice area).
Siblings and i would do chores, as you would, and that would amount to £5 at the end of the month, which was awesome, a bit of spending money.
Reality hit hard during secondary school, around the time i was 14 or 15 years old. In a geography class, we were asked by the teacher about pocket money us students would get from our parents. We didnt have to answer of course, but i volunteered, £5 a month i said to a round of laughter from the others. The known richer kids, piped up, saying they got £20 a week for doing literally nothing.
Adding salt to the wounds, in the same class, we did an experiment, each table represening a different economic country. Paper was resources, scissors as tools, fake coins as cash etc. The idea was to produce different paper shapes, sell what we could and try to make as much money as possible with each table starting with different amounts of the stuff or none at all. A couple of tables played the scenario fairly. The richer kids, take a guess, took extra paper, sciscors whatever else they could get their hands on when no one was looking. Ruined the entire point of the excercise and in the end got away with it.
Im not saying this applies to all rich vs poor debates at all, rather one moment that I remember particulary well in which I realised my family struggled vs those who at the same school didn't.
You might know you’re rich or poor in a vague generalized sense, but you don’t really internalize (it doesn’t become *real*) it until you get a chance to see how the other half lives. Even then, sometimes it doesn’t ‘click’ until you grow older.
For example, I grew up in a huge house with incredibly supportive parents and went to a fairly exclusive school. I thought that was normal. Sure, I knew “some kids don’t have it as good”, but that was more of a theoretical concept than something I had actual feelings about. After all, I didn’t really know anybody that was poor. That just wasn’t something that I interacted with.
I’m 40 now and travel extensively. Last NYE, I was visiting the family of a friend in SE Asia. The family lives in a house with one main room, one small room (for the babies), and a tiny little kitchen (and a door with a pit and hose for a toilet). The adults and older kids sleep in the main room by rolling out mats, use it for karaoke (seriously, the room has a couch, a karaoke machine, and a fold up table, that’s it). I spent the night there reflecting on just how impoverished they were.
I guess that’s still in my mind now, because I housesitting for my parents just a few weeks ago at my old house. It was just me and their dogs in this sprawling 2 story 6 bedroom/3 bathroom house. I guess that was the first time ever really *fully* sunk in just how lucky I was.
Poor kids raised right might not realize they were poor until they look back on it as an adult.*
*And no, I'm not saying that kids who do realize it younger were raised "wrong," so simmer down before you even get started.
I went to an after party for a play I worked on in high school. It was at my friend’s house in the most expensive neighborhood in the state. All of the theater kids gushed about how nice her house was and how rich her family must be. She was kinda surprised, and said she’d never really thought about it
I remember asking my mom for a playstation 3 for Christmas when I was a kid. It was around the time it came out so it was between 500 to 600 dollars. Told me Santa would get me one. Christmas comes around and no PS3. I was super excited, it was the only thing I wanted and I was super disappointed. My mom told me next year, maybe he forgot. So I waited another year, nothing again. At that point I knew Santa wasn't real thanks to my friends telling me, so I just decided I'd get it myself and started saving every bit of money I got. It took 2.5 years to get 300 dollars since I wasn't old enough to work yet. Then my dog died in the middle of summer. So my dad asked me if I wanted to go get the PlayStation 3 I had been saving for. I didn't have enough for any games just the console nothing else. Said he didn't care he'd get me one or two. We get back with it and we're setting it up and my Mom notices my Dad spent money. So she comes into my room screaming at him about how we couldn't afford to do that and how she wanted to smash the console (She thought dad paid for it all). Made me feel so awful for just wanting something. Growing up poor is hell.
Absolutely this is true. Occasionally I run into people that were very well off talk about how they were poor growing up. Bitch tell me about the government cheese - I can tell you about it. Nothing like carbs and processed oil as a dinner.
Agreed. I was realy self concious about beeing poor since the 1st grade, being a poor kid with a scholarship. A friend of mine insisted she was poor, she didn't have as much money as it looked. She had the iPhone 7 in 5th grade, that she bought in an overseas trip. She went traveling at least twice a year, and went to the beach every minor holiday. She still says the same bs, and yes, they may not be rich, but they live a very confortable upper midle class life. Meanwhile, we still live check by check and can't afford to travel anywhere.
I was 6 years old when I realized we were poor. My mom would play a game with us. She had a box of cans with no labels, and each evening a different kid would pick a can for "dinner surprise." When it was my turn, we opened the can and it smelled weird. Mom said "Oh, that's dog food! Silly me! Pick again!" That was when I realized.
We had a family of 6, and mom was the only one with a job. She had been buying discard cans at the grocery store for cheap, just to keep us fed. My useless alcoholic step-dad was spending money on booze and cigarettes while my mom was working herself to the bone to keep us afloat. Even now, I'm amazed by her. She worked AND went to school to get a better job, and she still found time to spend with the kids.
My best friend grew up incredibly rich but she was surrounded by people who were just as, if not more, rich which meant she never gained perspective until a lot later in life. I have a feeling the same is true for a lot of other rich kids
I mannied for an family in Aspen. Their dad told them they were "middle class" I assume to convince them they had to work. I remember having to explain to them (11, and twin 13 yo's) after being asked what kind of private jet my parents had that I had been raised middle class in that while I had everything that I needed as a kid, I didn't have anything that I wanted and went on to tell them that before I worked for them, I had never been on a private plane of any kind or knew anyone that had. It was way over their heads and they told me that their dad got a great deal on the jet and if my parents knew how to negotiate, I would have been jetting off to Cabo on weekends...Then again looking at their friends' lifestyles, I can understand how they thought they were middle class.
Seeing other kids' fancy school supplies made me think so. Still, I appreciate my parents for doing what they can to provide my needs. I'm in college now but still haven't gotten out of my poor phase. I still can't help but feel envious for those who don't have financial problems and have money for everything they need and want.
One of the videos I hate the most on YouTube was from this cooking channel.
It was a short of a girl who was basically talking about how she, as an Asian, couldn't comprehend how her rich friends didn't understand their privileges and wealth.
This girl was born to a rich family, went to an Ivy league school for a degree she doesn't even use, traveled across the world, has her own businesses, moved to and lived in the UK for a dude she met, always uses expensive ingredient and cuts of meat for her recipes, and is now in the process of buying a condo/property in a fairly expensive area of Korea. Oh, and the living-room/kitchen where she films her videos are (each) larger than my *entire* apartment.
The whole video came off as incredibly tone-deaf and almost as a self-aware joke, but she was dead serious... and she got slammed hard for it on the comment section/like bar. To her credit, her comment/reply was essentially "Oh... I guess I'm *also* rich/privileged myself!... Huh..."
Like yes... Yes you are.
Even if your other friends were more rich/privileged, that doesn't mean that you weren't also rich/privileged.
A friend in college told me he was impressed with my self-control because I bought a shitty car and saved up all my money, instead of blowing it on a series of hot cars like he does. My car didn't have a driver's side door, I had to find a matching door in a junkyard to make it legal to drive. He drove a different sports car every year. I replied "Saved up what money? I spent everything I had on this junker" but I don't think he really got it.
People that grew up with fuck you money tend to be clueless that way. Poor and rich are words, not concepts they understand. A $5 burger and a $500 dinner are the same thing, and require the same amount of thought.
In middleschool I had an old nokia phone, while many of the other kids had the cool flip phones. A kid asked me why I wouldn't buy a new phone and when I said I had no money, they were confused and said "just ask your parents." They couldn't comprehend I didn't have an allowance and me not having money meant my family not having money...
This person I dated had all these nice new clothes and shoes like closet stuffed, take vacations, had one of those cool sliding touch phones, always had some money and if not her mom had it to give, and also going to do all the fun stuff like amusement parks and such. They think they grew up poor. The dad worked all day all week, the mom all night all week. They talk shit about both parents and say how their grandparents paid for everything. Even if the grandparents did pay for everything that means ALL the money their parents made was free for use and is the reason they were able to go and do all this stuff they did. This same person still doesn't know how it feels to be so much as middle class. Who the fuck goes to an ivy league school, leaves with no debt, and doesn't realize they had a better setup than every single friend they had. Oh, they recently went off on some friends because they still have a better setup but are extremely unhappy with their marriage lol we might have been kids when we dated but that relationship was twice as long as the person she married.
I have found people who grew up upper middle class think that they are the same as working class. Like once you get to college most realize they have fuck you money if they got it. But like you said those that have nice clothing and vacation money think they are the same as Joe Shmoe the coal miner
I'll be dead honest. I grew up in a trailer park. Asked my parents why we didn't own a real house. They said "we could afford to 'live' in a house **OR** we could take vacations, go fun places, afford to actually live and make memories together." They ended up moving out of there and bought a house when they started their DINK lifestyle after my older sister and I both moved out.. The payment was $600 (when I was 18 and about to move out, lot rent increased annually), vs houses that would have been easily double or higher for the mortgage
Pretty accurate. My wife grew up in upper middle class, and I grew up on pots of beans to hopefully make it through the week. We moved in together and she starts throwing expensive cuts of meat in the basket while grocery shopping. We were at $40 with 3 things. I told her the price of each and that we couldn't afford that. The look of disappointment on her face of going from chicken and steak to ham sandwiches really hurt to see. It was something she had never really experienced but felt like a feast to me just to have food.
I knew a kid in highschool who got a brand new Camero from their rich parents. He told them he didn't want it and wanted a truck instead so they bought him a brand new F350. The disgust was real coming from guys like me who bought their own '99 Saturn with 200k miles.
I dunno about that. My parents convinced me that we ate rice and beans for dinner like three or four nights a week because, "It's healthy and meat and processed foods are terrible for you." I mean, they weren't really wrong, but I also realized much later that it was because you could feed a family of four with a couple of big bags of rice and beans for like $10 a week back in the 90s.
Honestly big props to your parents for feeding you like this instead of like hot dogs and walmart chips.
Yeah, I recently bought an instapot and thus began having more meals without meat and with chickpeas and different kinds of beans for protein. It made me lose a few kilos without even trying and it's certainly great for my gut health to get all that extra fibre. Cheap as hell too.
CHICKPEAS ARE THE FOOD OF THE GODS.SARDINES AS WELL. ALSO THEY ARE CHEAP AND YES I NEEDED TO SCREAM ALL THIS. sorry.
Can you find sardines that aren’t salted to hell?
Yeah, they are in the sea
Yup. They only get salty when you trap 'em in a net.
Oceans, well known for their lack of salt.
Can confirm. Went to a beach, grabbed some water. Didn't see any salt.
The salt is camouflaged. It's in the navy.
Somehow my brain autocorrected "sea" to area. And then wanted me to comment "Hot sardines in the area" Soo here we are.
I think you meant “hot sardine moms in your area.”
Sardines aren't a type of fish, just a catchall name for the size, so sure, you can probably go get some freshwater sardines, try smelt.
TIL, thanks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sardine#Species
its funny how different bodies are. I did that for a couple of weeks when I was single (lentils and kidney/black beans) with peas and quinoa and I was never hungrier and snacked more. I assume it was all the carbs, cause I've never lost weight until I went low carb.
I bet you were super farty too💨
Jumping in about that, the whole having farts when eating beans is the result of our western diets including few legumes. Basically what happens if you grow up eating all kinds of beans, you have a greater of amount of the kinds of bacteria in your gut that help you digest those beans without causing gas and bloating. As an adult you can 100% also adjust to this, it's literally a matter of eating them regularly (first in small amounts, then upping the amount) and you'll also have those kinds of bacteria in your gut. Eventually you literally digest beans the same way you'd digest pasta or white rice, except they're infinitely more nutritious and filling
Same with rice, I feel like asians eat 3x the amount of rice a white person would regularly have with their meal/meat. Or maybe we were just broke growing up
I'd say that doing it for just a few weeks is too small a timespan, but also I should clarify that I still eat meat a few times a week (especially chicken breast) because it's highly filling and since I lift weights I do try to keep my protein up, something that's difficult with just legumes. I have tried going more than a week without meat and I didn't gain weight but I did feel oddly hungry and low-energy. A good side effect is that rare ribeye or grilled beef ribs taste three times as delicious now
Lol I read “lose a few kidos” at first 🤣
"Instapot leads to three new deaths"
Good old rez diet
As a former rich kid, Im in my late twenties and I still have moments where I have to stop and it just hits me what poverty actually is. I was in La la land in my highschool years, buying my friends Starbucks for lunch just so they would go with me because I liked the sandwiches. I just beat homelessness.
Congratulations, I hope things continue to improve for you.
Wait, how did you go from a former rich kid to homeless? If you don't mind me asking? I'm curious about your story if you'd like to share.
Yeah to be honest that sounds like a story full of twists kinda curious here too
I’d bet one of those twists is drugs
Or sexuality. Or college choice. Or not wanting to live your life exactly as they dictate. Or really any number of things. Having money means you can buy shit. That's it. Doesn't mean you're a good person or a good parent. Or even good with money. Also, "rich" is a very broad term. Especially in Reddit comments.
Honest, Mr. White, I’m clean as a whistle.
That's like my wife asking me what we did for our summer vacation every year growing up. I'm like "summer vacation?" We sat home and tried not to do anything stupid while my mom worked. Basically did the same as during the school year just without School. She wasn't oblivious to the world but was blown away that a lot of people can't afford to have family vacations.
My wife grew up wealthy, I did not. She asked me how old I was when I first went to Disney and I just laughed and asked her how old she was when she first went to Colonial Williamsburg? The first time I went to Disney was when my wife took me at 30
I was 10 the first time I went. The only reason I even went was because we were playing in the peewee football national championships. Otherwise I wouldn't have gone until I was early twenties when I was in college in Orlando.
Until I was 13-14 the best we could hope for was my mom would find some crazy cheap deal for amusement park tickets. We'd get up before dawn, pack a cooler, drive the 2+ hours, spend all day without spending a dime in the park, then drive home after the park closed bc we couldn't afford a hotel. I never realized that people would actually spend multiple days at amusement parks and stay overnight until I was older.
We were lower middle class with a large family, so regular vacations were our of the question. However, we also had a large extended family, so our vacations consisted of visiting more distant relatives. Ah, the 10 hour drives in a crowded van.
Fortunately, we lived 20 minutes from the beach so it was convenient and inexpensive to just grab a cooler and some towels and drive out to the beach. We didn't really have vacations but while poor we did do that kind of stuff around town that was free. I also did have access to some pretty good free public parks. I think that helped me to appreciate nature and outdoorsy stuff. I remember having one vacation growing up. My mother drove my sister and I from Florida to Pennsylvania to visit our godparents before they died. I think it was more a trip for her to get some things in order than it was an actual vacation. It was still fun though.
She was oblivious to the world.
Are you just gonna leave us hanging?
Wym. Got an apartment and help. Not homeless anymore Edit oh shit I did not see all the shit this post caused lmfao Edit 2 it is a very long story. I wasn’t always homeless. I had been good with money, and actually a year before I made roughly 45k on GameStop in 3 months in the stock market. I lost my gf at the time (covid) and had to isolate. I lost mental balance due to those things and many other things. I started drinking. I found out very quickly I was an alcoholic. I moved out of town with the money and bought a car, and stupidly lived off the money. Alcoholism increased. Room mate kicked me out when I basically had no more money left. I couldn’t go back with my parents so I door dashed while living in a Walmart parking lot. I was -500 in my account at that time. Got clean for a 4-5 months out of sheer will and worked my ass off for a new apartment. Though, I did have a family member let me live in a no running water no insolation shed for a second after they heard I was living in my car - so there’s that. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be homeless and have no family. Or to have a family that is not well off. I’m not saying I had it worse than others - but my other rich kid friends have basically deemed me a failure while I think I see the world very differently now as it is not something that I’ve walked away from unscathed. I actually got hired at a restaurant as a waiter the first day of my shed life. I now have an apartment. But I almost fucked up again due to alcoholism. The fear that would all happen again made me pull the trigger and get into rehab. I’m 2 months and one week clean and in intensive outpatient. Things are looking good and I make videos on my phone in my spare time. I’m saving up for a computer. But my life is not the same. It is very hard to go from la la land to poor. It fucks with you a little.
Poor kid from the 80s and 90s here. Agreed that parents can sometimes make being poor FEEL better than it is. Even back then there were obvious signs. The neighborhood kid with dirt bikes or the new gaming system. But also, that was before the internet. It’s much more obvious when you’re poor now. Sure, some kids are too poor to have internet, but when they go to school with other kids… those kids are more informed by the internet as well and the knowledge is shared. Hell, I’m a 46 year old man who makes a decent living now. I own a home, married, etc. But sometimes the internet makes ME feel poor. I can’t imagine being 13 year old me seeing Instagram or TikTok on a library or school computer.
This is my theory as to why American society is so really, really messed up now. Too many comparing themselves to the best parts of others lives. It makes men lack self esteem and women to become over anxious. Everyone is either giving up or trying to keep up with the joneses
Comparison is the thief of joy
>This is my theory as to why American society is so really, really messed up now. Too many comparing themselves to the best parts of others lives. It makes men lack self esteem and women to become over anxious. Everyone is either giving up or trying to keep up with the joneses My ex would spend up to 8 hours a day glued to tik tok following all of the influencers and it really fucked with her mentally. I remember her telling me one time about an influencer who couldn't decide which vacation destination to choose from so her and her boyfriend just ended up going to both. She then proceeded to get herself into a rage over it and directed it at me since we weren't out there living these spectacular lives like all of those people were. This 29 year old woman couldn't understand that most people don't actually live that way. She also became incredibly bitter and jealous that these kids were making so much money by living these fanciful lives while she was stuck behind a desk. She also got into antivax shit and other conspiracies. Tik tok definitely altered her perception of reality and normal expectations of life.
As a child of former poor parents.. eggs, pinto beans, rice, tortillas and cotija cheese were food of champion meals
Are you sure you aren't just Mexican.
It was bologna and sleep for me.
I had a school project back in middle school where we had to budget 3 healthy meals a day. I did rice and beans for 3 meals a day for 5 days, and was told that this wasn’t good enough. That’s when I knew something was up.
Hey, those are some of the best meals
Soft disagree. I have not willingly eaten a kidney bean since I was about 16.
You’re missing out on some great chili recipes.
Rajma masala as well if you want to branch out of Tex-Mex. Another Indian recipe that works well with kidney beans is olan, a south indian dish that can be made with pumpkins and beans in a coconut milk-based sauce
I hate kidney beans. They don't taste good in anything. Except chili. Chili just isn't chili without kidney beans. Kidney beans in chili is fucking delicious.
Don't say that in Texas
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Old school Texas chili takes it's roots from Mexican Chile rojo/Verde, which is literally just meat in chili sauce, no other veggies are added other than the chiles and spices. Once chili began to spread in popularity other states began to add their own twists and flair to the recipe, but Texas remains the closest to the original Mexican style chili. If you want a good read up on the history look up "the chili queens of San Antonio"
Yeah well those guys didn’t even have burritos, so…
Burritos are just chubby tacos, wrapped in a flour tortilla instead of a corn tortilla, and sealed up for maximum portability.
I don't ever plan to visit Texas so that's not a issue lol. I tend to try and avoid the US as much as possible.
For us, it was spaghetti. We ate it a few times a week for years. That was 25 years ago, and I still hate spaghetti
Oof - we called it old faithful in our house.. Been 20+ years for me too, but just thinking about that pot of spaghetti and tomato sauce we would eat for days in a row makes me a little queasy still. Love my parents and appreciate how hard they worked to make our lives better - but gottdamn we ate so much of that, lol.
> just thinking about that pot of spaghetti and tomato sauce we would eat for days in a row makes me a little queasy still. i mean... probably not a good idea to just leave it around, spaghetti isn't hard to cook, even for kids. Making a big batch of sauce on the weekends(and freeze it in a ziploc to thaw one per day) and then whatever kind of pasta you want each day would definitely have kept it a bit less gross.
I would imagine they refrigerated it...
Yeah but also many rich kids (and some adults) never realise how good they have it
Sounds like rich in this thread means a middle class grocery cart.
....but then you went to school where you were viciously made fun of for your raggedy clothes & shoes, never owning a brand name, etc ....right? This made you realize you were in poverty as other kids didn't get made fun of for wearing raggedy old clothes, could afford new ones whenever needed and always had nice shoes.
I was poor as fuck but I also grew up in the hood so everyone was pretty poor. I didn’t realize how poor I was until I grew up, got a good paying job , and started my own family . My kids get anything they want when I couldn’t even get a new pair of shoes more than once a year
I never experienced this. I think name brands and cool clothes weren't as big in my culture. I'm from a culture where we brag about how cheap something is, so no one is going to make fun of the kid without name brand stuff. I was poor and didn't realise until I was early twenties.
There was this kid when I was 6 or 7, he knew he was rich! I didn't know he was rich or what rich was at the time but he knew and made sure I knew what he was.
I had a friend like that in junior high. His dad was a postman and his mom was a stay-at-home mom. He loved to lord his $75 Fossil watch over the rest of us poors and tell us it was worth more than our *houses* like it was a real Rolex. I understood later he was a poor kid who thought he was rich.
Oh god I wish I could buy a house for the price of Rolex
Depends on the rolex
And depends on the house. 😂😂😂
according to a random list of expensive rolexes there was one sold in 2011 (the pearlmaster something something) worth ~$277,850 then, or ~$375,000 today (USD) if we're only factoring in inflation on retail price [here are 582 3+ bed houses you can buy](https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/find.html?locationIdentifier=REGION%5E61352&minBedrooms=3&maxPrice=290000&sortType=6&propertyTypes=detached%2Csemi-detached%2Cterraced&mustHave=&dontShow=&furnishTypes=&keywords=) for the equivalent price or less in GBP, in only a relatively small area in scotland
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Its the low-key, rich that 'don't flaunt it through clothes/materials' that know whats up
To be fair they probably lived on the grandfather's property, he knew his family was balling but he/they weren't the kind of people like shitty rich people. I'd say sane people rich, not trying to throw it in everyone's face and looking like they think everyone in the world is below them... Elon, Kardashians, those kind of folks. If his family wasn't like him... He definitely learned from watching them and decided he didn't want to be like them which makes him even better and makes me hope you two kept in touch. A friend that doesn't give a shit about his family money was probably great to have.
I remember the first time I went to a schoolmate's house in junior high, and embarrassed myself by being in awe that they had figurines on display in a CURIO CABINET.
Can totally relate to this. Went to a classmates house and they had a beautiful TV bookcase that ran the length of the wall. I was just in awe of its beauty.
I was impressed by my ex gfs family's salad spinner. We had always just shaken the lettuce to get the water off or used paper towel so I thought it was a magical device.
You can also make a sling with a dishtowel and spin it around outside. The water flies off. That's my method.
I’m envisioning someone letting go by accident and hammer throwing a lettuce which lands on someone’s head like the cabbage pults in plants vs zombies
I knew from a young age we didn’t have as much as my peers, but It really sank in how poor we were when I was hired to clean a friend’s McMansion when I was 13/14. She had an adorable room filled with tons of cozy furniture and fun teenage girl stuff. I had a cot in a corner of a room I shared with a sibling with barely any furnishings at home constantly afraid of eviction. She’d show me songs she was learning from her piano tutor on her grand piano in their den. They paid me well for very little work, but the fomo made me so depressed I quit after a short while.
How were you so poor but also had rich friends?
We had a poor side of town and a rich side of town. My family hopped from place to place usually in the rougher areas. I took advanced classes in school and it seemed like all of my peers came from the wealthier families.
Rich kids and advanced classes go hand in hand. I was always in advanced classes and about 99% of the kids in there with me had rich parents. Kind of sad and disgusting when you consider all the poor kids that could have gotten a better education if they had better support. Even though I got through advanced classes in high school, I didn’t make it though college because the mental health effects of growing up finally caught up with me.
In some places, like canada, we may all go to the same school, because public schools are decent and many have mixed income demographics due to how the city layout is. I had friends with actual mansions with walk-in refrigerators, and also friends who had to move in the middle of the night to skip rent. I am very glad to have had exposure to both. I have read that mixed income schooling is a major way that poor kids can become more socially mobile and have an actual shot at climbing into another bracket.
Exactly. There were people at my high school living in 5 million dollar lake front homes and others like me living in basic shacks. The wealthiest did tend to head to the private schools, but upper middle class definitely. Metro Detroit Michigan. I’d say my friend’s parents probably made ~150,000 combined in 2007/2008. My dad and mom never really got above $15/hr each. There were a lot of those neighborhoods that have 3-4,000 sq houses that all look the same mini mansion and the kids in my social group lived in neighborhoods like this. I hadn’t had stable housing at most points in my childhood, so those things seemed incredible to me. I had a rough going with relating to my friends. I didn’t know anyone else with similar experiences to me so I felt like an alien. My home life was stressful and traumatizing, so I was very insecure and depressed. I was also an overachiever in school and comparing myself with other kids with less trauma, more free time, and a good support system was exhausting. I was very envious and jealous, so I worked harder to be on their level but always burnt out. I’d often have maladaptive daydreams about living a different life with a safe, cozy home and less stress. I’m grateful I was given a shot but it’s pretty damn exhausting trying to climb that socioeconomic ladder. I did to an extent I’m proud of, but I still feel like I’m always one pay check away from my life crumbling apart again.
Interesting, cause i was on the other side. My friends found it bonkers that my family had a housekeeper and all sat down to a meal served one by one by dad. And i did well at school but was internally crumbling from lack of emotional support or attention from my parents, who provided all the advantages of wealth and privilege except emotional connection. I would compare myself to a friend who had to get her fist job when we were 9, so she could put food on her table, and worked multiple jobs through highschool and still did well even though her mom was mentally ill and entirely unreliable. A real blossoming from the cracks in the sidewalk kind of story. And self-centred me just lamented like, how is it that I, with all this privilege, still feel like i can't make it, like i will topple at any minute and can't even handle just doing school? Even as an adult, i aspire to that friend's inner confidence and self-sufficiency.
Oh, and you should feel proud as fuck for scraping your way into a better situation. Respect.
I'm glad to see someone else talking about this. Being given a shot to climb the socioeconomic ladder is a lot different than a lot of people think it is. I got a shot by leaving my hometown the second I could, joining the military, going to school with GI Bill money and then a grad school fellowship, and having an engineering career. I'm in my early 40's now, and honestly, the burnout has really started to hit. People seem to think it's just a one and done fix. "OK, she has a high income now. All's well that ends well!" And then I'm just supposed to sit there and live a life that nothing prepared me to live, which starts to feel more and more like jump-scare horror every year. Every time I turn around, there's some other expectation I can't reach because I wasn't born here, or didn't know existed until I was slapped in the face with the ramifications of not knowing it. > I still feel like I’m always one pay check away from my life crumbling apart again. This is the part nobody thinks of. This is the part that burns me out more than anything else. I make as much as my peers, my partner, all the other generationally wealthy (or at least generationally middle class) fucks I live among these days, but will always have more in common with everyone where I came from than I ever will with them for this reason. Just knowing that there is nothing behind me, that I am the only thing standing between my kids and every dark thing about where I came from, is daunting. If I lose my job, get sick, die before the last of my kids reaches adulthood, all this was for nothing because we are right back where I began. The knowledge that there's no room for error is so heavy, and it doesn't go away.
That might be true for some, but not for me and my siblings. My father was a junior officer in the military and my mother was a stay at home mom raising the kids. This was late 1960's, early-to-mid 1970's. Back then a junior officer didn't make a lot of money. I never felt like we were not well off. We did all sorts of cool things when we were young. Our dad would take us fishing and camping, my mom would cook most meals, and McDonalds or Del Taco was a once every 1-2 weeks treat. My parents hit their stride later in life and both ended up doing very well and became wealthy. That was when I was already an adult. The thing that really hit home for me thinking about the past was a time when my father took us to see a shuttle launch. This was 2003 and he was doing very well by that time. We were in his RV which was a Prevost Bus like rock stars have. We were around a bunch of his friends talking about RVs and I said something to the effect at how much my father liked camping. He blurted out, "Bullshit! I hate camping, I did enough of 'camping' in the mud in Vietnam." I asked, "What about all those times we went camping at the lake, fishing, Bryce Canyon, and all those other places?" He says, "I took you, your brother, and your sister camping because I couldn't afford the hotel rooms." As kids, we never knew, we thought our parents did all the cool stuff they did for us to have fun.
Sorry to ask this but how about your grandparents? There's generational poorness (the real deal) and then there's being "poor" but having loaded grandparents - where, essentially, your parents are willing to take risks with money and are not that worried about it because _their_ folks are rich: it's like there's a safety net, a privilege they may not even realize. One of my friends is like this - him and his wife work dead-end jobs and aren't worried about money despite having none - they live in a small shack with their first kid and just rack up a ton of credit card debt buying necessities. Her parents are millionaires.
This, in my experience, is quite common. Basically 80% of people are generationally poor globally. But in places like the US, 40s to 90s was an incredibly, once in a forever kind of asset explosion for most of the people living at that time. Especially if you were a white male (most of the working population) no matter what you did, you end up with a couple of million dollars in the 2000s. This is due to house assets appreciating, and a mix of good stock market returns and pensions still existing. This will likely never happen again at the scale it did. It was due to many factors including 2 world wars, rapid advances in technology accessible to most, and had some fascinating effects of things like racism and misogyny which limited the good working conditions artificially. So yeah, in my experience, there are MILLIONS of people who simply have been/are waiting for their parents to die in order to end up with really solid amounts of money. That's the whole "generational" part of it.
Most rich adults don't realize they are rich.
My old boss complains about not having enough for vacations ...he has a pterodactyl wing on his wall (yes, the dinosaur) and a ferrari in the driveway
Hey man, a month at the four seasons bungalo in bora bora is expensive - how are you gonna afford that plus a trip to Europe this year?
If you can't afford the whole skeleton, you're struggling.
I think he has enough for vacation... Just spent it on two really ridiculous things. I bet his idea of a vacation is a lot more expensive than my idea of a vacation.
"I only have *two* yachts and a vacation home. Not like Bob, who's rich and has **five**"
The annoying part is when they keep suggesting expensive activities to do while being oblivious to financial struggles. Like bitch I cant travel with you for vacation on a monthly basis
That didn't used to be the case in previous generations. A number of my relatives in coal country Pennsylvania have said that they didn't know they were poor growing up even though some of what they described, like walking along train tracks to pick up coal that fell from coal cars or seeing snow come into the house between the boards that made up the walls, would make you think it should be obvious. But the human spirit is more adaptable than you might imagine. Hardship is relative in that light, especially when it's a shared experience among many and there's some degree of mutual support among family and community. I do agree with your sentiment for the most part for today's kids who have a greater awareness of the world around them and sometimes a reminder where privilege highlights the divide between the haves and have nots.
I think feeling poor is more a result of upward social comparison than of actual live circumstances. You can feel just fine if everyone you know is doing similarly well to you, even if you have to pick up coal. In comparison, even a millionaire can feel poor if everyone he knows is a billionaire.
Well said
My parents grew up poor and to this day my now-comfortably-retired mom can’t quite accept that characterization, despite ample evidence from her own childhood stories. When I was growing up, we didn’t have a lot (I remember being constantly jealous of better-off friends with their summer camps and cool toys and clothes not bought at Wal-Mart) but we had a lot more than she’d had. But everyone around her was poor too and she didn’t really think about it. My dad knew he was poor because his parents’ fortunes changed dramatically for the better when he was a teenager. The contrast made it clear.
Yeah we realize rich kids are rich before they do too.
At my school, a charity is currently doing a project with the 10-year-olds to raise awareness about the massive rate of child poverty in our city, and to create a community project to help families who are struggling. It's a great way of helping the children to develop both empathy and a sense of social responsibility... but there are a whole lot of children in my class now realising for the first time how lucky and well off their families actually are. Actual suggestions by children discussing how 35% of families in our city struggle to buy food: They could sell one of their cars. Maybe they skip Disney land this year. Why don't they just drink water and not eat for a while? I've heard you can do that, and not eating *has* to be easier than eating. What if they just buy cheaper stuff? Like going to Costa instead of Starbucks, and just having a medium cappuccino, not a big fancy drink? I don't blame them at all for not knowing, but it's really good that they're finding out, because kids who grow up being allowed to think like this turn into adults who refuse to accept anything else.
So kids and boomers see the world the same way.
Dumb old vs dumb young, who will win? It doesn't really matter, cause now we all lose either way.
It wasn't until I started living on my own that I started questioning my parents financial decisions We lived in one of the cheaper parts of town, had a car that would've been fitting for a middle class family if it was 15 years newer, and half of my wardrobe came from thrift shops We didn't go to coffee shops. We made coffee at home, with beans my dad brought back from his trips to Italy. A feijoada, on Brazil, can be made very cheaply. Due to the required meats not being sold where we lived, we got them from a diplomat friend who brought mlthe meat over from Brazil. All the butter and chocolate in our house was the same We had lobster for dinner at least once a week, while our house only had finctioning water pressure 70% of the time
Well, don't leave us hanging! I'm confused. Is this a rich story or a poor story? You say you questioned their decisions, were they good ones? What country were you actually living in?
We were living in Panama at the time and I'm still not sure if this is a rich or poor story. I guess min-maxed middle class? As for their decisions regarding spending, they seem bad, but now I find myself doing basically the same. If my diet was less luxurious I could probably afford a much better place to live, but I'd rather eat like a king than live in a house bigger than I really need
I think I get it. I do the same in parts of my life. At times I've lived in a van at home and never ate out, because this was the cheapest way to afford flying lessons and traveling abroad frequently. I think people sometimes get stuck in living at a certain level and can't imagine making major adjustments to reach what they want. You got a good life perspective.
We were poor for awhile, but I had no idea. Because that’s your parents job-kids shouldn’t know about money struggles. We had food and a home, but we didn’t get everything we wanted. We had to save for new bikes, or work for something because things are better when you earn them. My mom was the queen of coupons and lay away!
I had like the opposite experience. My family had a pretty good financial situation, but whenever they would talk about it around me they would always say stuff that made me think we were on the brink. They wondered why I never asked for anything.
Yeah, I was in a similar boat. Not that I ever thought we were poor, but compared to my peers and neighbours (I grew up in quite a well-off area) we were always more humble with money. I realised later how lucky we really were when I came into contact with a wider range of people.
I’m planning to raise my kid (close to) that way because as an ex-poor kid, who is now well off, I have a fear of raising spoiled douchebags. I had no idea my husbands family was well off, given how modestly he lived because they raised him similarly.
Some are more poor than others. I didn’t really think about us being poor growing up until the power got shut off a few times. Then the portion sizes and everything else made more sense. But then there’s my kid’s friend who lives in a one bedroom apartment with their mom, grandpa, and brother, and they don’t have any illusion that their situation is not what average or above average income may look like. No queen of coupons is fixing that unfortunate situation.
As a poor kid, I had larger portion sizes that I do now because it was all cheap carbs. Pasta bakes, rice dishes, potatoes - stuff where you could triple the quantity for less than adding a bit of protein and veg.
I'm in my 30s now, and I'm still becoming aware just how poor my family was when I was growing up. I knew we weren't rich, but looking back we had very little cash and mum put a lot of life on multiple credit cards. It was also partially her fault, she would live a very frugal life in some ways but also incredibly frivolous in others - like leaving the heating on when we went out so the house would be warm when we got back. Her parents were pretty comfortable when she was growing up so she got accustomed to a certain lifestyle.
I never knew because they always made things fun growing up. Love my parents to death, but that part always makes me a little more appreciative looking back.
My two nephews are the most spoiled little bastards I've ever seen. I don't know if they'll ever understand how good they have it. One of them was pissed that he didn't get some 7k gaming chair for Christmas. My sister in law was telling me how upset she was over christmas dinner that she couldn't justify that purchase, even though he really expected it. Meanwhile, I'm driving a 2006 Nissan Sentra that I paid 5k for 6 years ago that I absolutely cannot afford to replace.
Is that gaming chair plated in gold? I can't imagine being willing to spend that much on any chair. Like even if I could afford it without thinking about the cost, you can get absolutely amazing chairs for $500, with many decent options for much less.
Seriously though, you can get most herman Miller chairs for like a quarter that, wtf is in that chair?
Can semi confirm. Definitely knew we were poor before I hit 2nd grade. I thought my friends were rich cause they were…I guess middle class? I had no idea at the time what rich really was. But when you’re handed a coffee tin full of change at school in third grade, you feel some really complicated things a child should not feel.
I legit thought that canned vienna sausages were the height of luxury. My mom used to cook them in a pan with some sugar and soy sauce and serve it with rice. Fuckin shit is out of control. It wasn’t till I got older that I ate it cuz it was like a 50 cent meal lol.
Rich kids know they are rich? My experience is that they truly believe their life chances were choices open to all, even until adulthood. The reality is someone who was caring for their addict parents would have difficulty attending many of the opportunities, and didn't have access to many of the things that would have provided the life opportunities that rich kids took for granted. I grew up middle class in a poor area. I only realised later on how shit it was for many of my peers. We didn't attend many of the opportunities not because we didn't want to but because our school didn't even tell us about them. I nearly missed university applications for my chosen subject because I couldn't get the one single signature I needed from a teacher... Meanwhile rich kids got coaching for the interviews and were encouraged to submit applications early, because their schools had 15-20% going to study these subjects.
There are little differences too like I had a friend who’s parents signed her up for private school for certain courses. Because it was private and she had more time with the teacher her grades where amazing which meant when it came time for college she had full scholarships- even though the parents were rich. Lower class children did not have that opportunity and ended up working during highschool and grades not as high, therefore needing to take on debt to go to school.
My parents had enough money to easily pay for college for me-they paid for me to get two degrees, and even paid for my ex husband to do a university degree and then a college degree. I never ever even applied for scholarships specifically because i felt like i should leave those for my classmates working multiple jobs. I had university teachers give me a hard time for not pushing myself more, like, cause i was always great at school, but to me, it just felt deeply unfair for a "have" student to take away opportunity from a "have not."
Yeesh, proof reading this after writing, i may be trauma dumping but whatever. I remember the day I realized we were poor. I think I was maybe 6 or 7. My dad worked as a truck driver so he was barely home and my mom was disabled in a accident so she couldn't work. My dad was home for a weekend and I remember us going to a KB Toys (wow I'm old) and I really wanted to get Sonic 3 for the genesis that i used to play when I went to church as a kid. I remember my dad saying that it was too expensive and got me some other toy. Obviously, as a kid, I wasn't very happy about that. When we got back into his truck to go home, he told me straight up. He said, "Son, we aren't very well off financially right now. I'm sorry I couldn't get you that game." Now, I felt so bad, not that I couldn't get the game anymore but that my dad had spent money on me on a toy that he probably couldn't afford. I remember full blown sobbing because of the guilt lol. That conversation changed me.
If your dad is still around go talk to him bro
That's because poor people can see rich people.
We were poor as hell when I was a kid and just going into town made me very aware how poor we were at a very, very young age.
Spent entire childhood thinking i live in a mid income family, then high school hits, and i had to interact with the mostly richer classmates. Just finished high school and shit hits harder now
It's tough man. I was a kid in the 80s so we didn't have Internet. I thought the people in the nearby shitty town of 9,000 people were straight up wealthy. They absolutely weren't, turns out. Mostly lower-mid income although that was better off back then that now. I get it about after high school. The only way I had to get out of that shit situation was the military, which I can't in good conscience recommend. Sure, I ended up making solidly middle class money but I got blown up a few times too many times and have medical issues that I'll have my entire life. I get a pension but I'd rather have be able to not feel like I've been up for 18 hours. I've been just exhausted like that for 3 years and barring significant medical advances I'll feel like that the rest of my life. What a great society we live in.
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> I never once complained about not having money Where do people get the idea this is "rich"? The gulf between financially secure and rich is bigger than the gulf between financially secure and completely destitute.
In dollars (or whatever currency), sure. Not necessarily in mindset. At a certain point, money stops occupying as much mental bandwidth. Yes, you buy a Camry instead of a Porsche. You try for that promotion because it's points in the game. But there isn't much fear.
I'd contend the mindset of "I can afford this" is closer to "I can't afford this" than "what does 'afford' mean"?
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I realized I had to make a wall when my friend called me "the help", my friend was the kids my mom was nannying.
I was poor when I was a kid, and it's my mission to make sure that my 4 months old daughter will grow up in a middleclass household. The house is bought, we have a car, we have a trailer and a garden, we have 3 cats and we live in the suburbs, I feel like I've managed to turn things around.
You grow up quick when you grow up poor
whole boat nutty snails spark water nippy forgetful steer ink *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Looking back, do you have any tips on how to prevent this kind of behavior? We're well-off now, but my wife and I grew up poor. While we want to do our best to give everything to our child, we also want to keep our child humble and have her know the value of money.
I think having jobs and internships as teens is key. Some rich kids never learn to work and never build the confidence and resiliency needed to get and keep a job. A job can also be humbling and keep kids out of trouble which are both good things. Add in volunteering to help with elderly, homeless, etc. to help with perspective. In some ways, it is impossible to lower expectations and entitlement though. It would be like if someone told you you should be grateful for oxygen and water. If you always have what others consider luxuries, they aren't luxuries for you..
It's exposure, explaining where money comes from and that you sell your time for money etc... (maybe not in those words) and showing them that the value in life is not in stuff, and that they're very fortunate to be able to do cool things. I grew up 'poor' (we had enough money to rarely go broke, but one of 11 kids and mom prioritised stuff instead of experiences, I count myself lucky every day that I have money in the bank and have experienced things people dream of.
Relative wealth plays a part in this. I grew up with way more than my friends at school but we were all poor. I didnt realize I grew up poor until I was in college and reported my parents income. I got a full ride (BA with 0 debt) for being so poor.
I don't think I've ever met poor kids who didn't know their families were poor. I have definitely met people who had no idea they were rich. I used to play WoW with a guy who lived in Texas. One day he starts complaining about how the midday maid is late. A different person we were playing with asked this texas guy if he was rich. Texas tries to say no, he's not rich, maids are normal. I tried to explain that having a maid is not normal. (normal as in a common occurrence, I'm not dissing anyone who cleans as a job) Then texas goes on to explain that it's only a problem at this ranch, not any of the other ones his family owns. He ended up offended that people were saying he was rich.
I knew when we couldn’t afford the jersey for the school basketball team I made it on
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I am in the *exact same scenario*
I was happier when we weren't doing well financially growing up. There are other ways to be "rich", if you are surrounded with good people, in good health, having a good time overall, able to enjoy what little you have then you are rich.
I only learnt recently it’s not normal to worry about what your parents were spending money on or to worry about how much work they were/weren’t getting
I feel this, I wish I wasn't given the fine details of our money problems. From like 8yo I'd be Googling variations of "how to make money" because it stressed me out pretty bad. I also only realised a few years ago that it wasn't really normal and may have affected me.
Yeah my friend and I were just chatting and she tells me her history and how stressed she has always been about money, and I’m thinking in my head oh that’s normal why is she so stressed and I questioned it and she’s like girl no. Big wake up call for me. How fucking weird it is saying it out loud too.
Interestingly - many rich people wouldn't call themselves rich. I know folks clearing 350k/year in household income who wouldn't call themselves rich. They imagine rich to mean "so much money I never have to work again" not "so much money I never have to really think about an expense."
This seems kind of out of nowhere? If anything, I'd say you realize you're poor/rich if you are an outlier where you live. Poor kids in the ghetto where everyone else is poor can take a long time to realize similar to a rich kid who only interacts with rich kids. You learn quick when you are around the opposite and see the difference.
Having been something of the "poor kid" who grew up around a lot of rich kids, I think it depends on a variety of factors. Generally, whoever is more out of step with the people around them will notice it first, and that can go either way.
As a kid, I thought we were middle class. In college I realized we have our house and 2 cars and thought we were rich. Now I feel more solidarity with the homeless than the billionaires, because we're closer to homeless than we are to billionaire even though we're "comfortable".
My moment was in high school, going to a party and seeing that there were people with bowling lanes in their basement...
It's hard to "notice" something that just makes your life more frictionless and easy. It's hard to notice getting things you want and need. some people seem to go through their entire life never realising they had it easy.
I had a friend in college with rich parents who described her family as “not rich, just upper middle class.” Her father was chief of surgery at a major hospital driving a Porsche. They had a multi million dollar house in Ohio, a vacation house in Mexico, a lake house in Michigan, and when she wrecked her car they drove out with a new one next day. Her and her 5 siblings went to fancy private schools. Maybe a private jet was out of the budget for them but she was very oblivious that yes, they’re rich.
I knew we were poor when the parent used buying me school clothes as yet another stick to beat me with (as well as actual sticks). Having money has always been such a weird concept to me. Just the idea of knowing I'll be able to eat every day, and that noone could kick me out of a place I'm living is so out there.
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I guess reality hits harder when it’s regarding something you need instead of just something you want.
It work both ways. Rich kids notice the clothes, school bag and even the pens that their friends own, that are cheap or passed down from an older brother/sister. They notice they have more than their classmates, that they go on holidays and their friends don't, that their parents have a nice car and the others go home in bad looking cars. When they see their buddies cry because they made a hole in their shoes and are scared that their parents won't get them another pair. This all happens in kindergarten. Just as poor kids recognize wealth when they see it, rich kids recognize poverty. What they see is the difference, which amounts to the same whether you go up or down
My family and I wouldn't be classed as poor or rich growing up in the UK, fairly average, however, after mortgage payments and bills etc, there was never much surplus, in fact dad worked extra hours and mum part-time while bringing us up to afford what we had (a detached fairly sized house in a nice area). Siblings and i would do chores, as you would, and that would amount to £5 at the end of the month, which was awesome, a bit of spending money. Reality hit hard during secondary school, around the time i was 14 or 15 years old. In a geography class, we were asked by the teacher about pocket money us students would get from our parents. We didnt have to answer of course, but i volunteered, £5 a month i said to a round of laughter from the others. The known richer kids, piped up, saying they got £20 a week for doing literally nothing. Adding salt to the wounds, in the same class, we did an experiment, each table represening a different economic country. Paper was resources, scissors as tools, fake coins as cash etc. The idea was to produce different paper shapes, sell what we could and try to make as much money as possible with each table starting with different amounts of the stuff or none at all. A couple of tables played the scenario fairly. The richer kids, take a guess, took extra paper, sciscors whatever else they could get their hands on when no one was looking. Ruined the entire point of the excercise and in the end got away with it. Im not saying this applies to all rich vs poor debates at all, rather one moment that I remember particulary well in which I realised my family struggled vs those who at the same school didn't.
You might know you’re rich or poor in a vague generalized sense, but you don’t really internalize (it doesn’t become *real*) it until you get a chance to see how the other half lives. Even then, sometimes it doesn’t ‘click’ until you grow older. For example, I grew up in a huge house with incredibly supportive parents and went to a fairly exclusive school. I thought that was normal. Sure, I knew “some kids don’t have it as good”, but that was more of a theoretical concept than something I had actual feelings about. After all, I didn’t really know anybody that was poor. That just wasn’t something that I interacted with. I’m 40 now and travel extensively. Last NYE, I was visiting the family of a friend in SE Asia. The family lives in a house with one main room, one small room (for the babies), and a tiny little kitchen (and a door with a pit and hose for a toilet). The adults and older kids sleep in the main room by rolling out mats, use it for karaoke (seriously, the room has a couch, a karaoke machine, and a fold up table, that’s it). I spent the night there reflecting on just how impoverished they were. I guess that’s still in my mind now, because I housesitting for my parents just a few weeks ago at my old house. It was just me and their dogs in this sprawling 2 story 6 bedroom/3 bathroom house. I guess that was the first time ever really *fully* sunk in just how lucky I was.
As a rich kid, I remember doing the food pyramid lesson. A friend said the last time they had meat was at my house.
Poor kids raised right might not realize they were poor until they look back on it as an adult.* *And no, I'm not saying that kids who do realize it younger were raised "wrong," so simmer down before you even get started.
Girls know about sexism before boys. Kids of color know about racism before white kids. Disabled kids know about ableism before abled kids.
I think it's the exact opposite
I know someone who teach their kids to always make sure everyone knows they’re rich. Luckily, the other parent believes otherwise…
Very poor kids don't have shower thoughts
Half the time rich people think they have it hard
I didn't know I was poor until my friends told me i was poor.
I went to an after party for a play I worked on in high school. It was at my friend’s house in the most expensive neighborhood in the state. All of the theater kids gushed about how nice her house was and how rich her family must be. She was kinda surprised, and said she’d never really thought about it
Shit took me too damn long see how poor I was lol
I remember asking my mom for a playstation 3 for Christmas when I was a kid. It was around the time it came out so it was between 500 to 600 dollars. Told me Santa would get me one. Christmas comes around and no PS3. I was super excited, it was the only thing I wanted and I was super disappointed. My mom told me next year, maybe he forgot. So I waited another year, nothing again. At that point I knew Santa wasn't real thanks to my friends telling me, so I just decided I'd get it myself and started saving every bit of money I got. It took 2.5 years to get 300 dollars since I wasn't old enough to work yet. Then my dog died in the middle of summer. So my dad asked me if I wanted to go get the PlayStation 3 I had been saving for. I didn't have enough for any games just the console nothing else. Said he didn't care he'd get me one or two. We get back with it and we're setting it up and my Mom notices my Dad spent money. So she comes into my room screaming at him about how we couldn't afford to do that and how she wanted to smash the console (She thought dad paid for it all). Made me feel so awful for just wanting something. Growing up poor is hell.
Absolutely this is true. Occasionally I run into people that were very well off talk about how they were poor growing up. Bitch tell me about the government cheese - I can tell you about it. Nothing like carbs and processed oil as a dinner.
Agreed. I was realy self concious about beeing poor since the 1st grade, being a poor kid with a scholarship. A friend of mine insisted she was poor, she didn't have as much money as it looked. She had the iPhone 7 in 5th grade, that she bought in an overseas trip. She went traveling at least twice a year, and went to the beach every minor holiday. She still says the same bs, and yes, they may not be rich, but they live a very confortable upper midle class life. Meanwhile, we still live check by check and can't afford to travel anywhere.
I was 6 years old when I realized we were poor. My mom would play a game with us. She had a box of cans with no labels, and each evening a different kid would pick a can for "dinner surprise." When it was my turn, we opened the can and it smelled weird. Mom said "Oh, that's dog food! Silly me! Pick again!" That was when I realized. We had a family of 6, and mom was the only one with a job. She had been buying discard cans at the grocery store for cheap, just to keep us fed. My useless alcoholic step-dad was spending money on booze and cigarettes while my mom was working herself to the bone to keep us afloat. Even now, I'm amazed by her. She worked AND went to school to get a better job, and she still found time to spend with the kids.
My best friend grew up incredibly rich but she was surrounded by people who were just as, if not more, rich which meant she never gained perspective until a lot later in life. I have a feeling the same is true for a lot of other rich kids
I mannied for an family in Aspen. Their dad told them they were "middle class" I assume to convince them they had to work. I remember having to explain to them (11, and twin 13 yo's) after being asked what kind of private jet my parents had that I had been raised middle class in that while I had everything that I needed as a kid, I didn't have anything that I wanted and went on to tell them that before I worked for them, I had never been on a private plane of any kind or knew anyone that had. It was way over their heads and they told me that their dad got a great deal on the jet and if my parents knew how to negotiate, I would have been jetting off to Cabo on weekends...Then again looking at their friends' lifestyles, I can understand how they thought they were middle class.
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Seeing other kids' fancy school supplies made me think so. Still, I appreciate my parents for doing what they can to provide my needs. I'm in college now but still haven't gotten out of my poor phase. I still can't help but feel envious for those who don't have financial problems and have money for everything they need and want.
One of the videos I hate the most on YouTube was from this cooking channel. It was a short of a girl who was basically talking about how she, as an Asian, couldn't comprehend how her rich friends didn't understand their privileges and wealth. This girl was born to a rich family, went to an Ivy league school for a degree she doesn't even use, traveled across the world, has her own businesses, moved to and lived in the UK for a dude she met, always uses expensive ingredient and cuts of meat for her recipes, and is now in the process of buying a condo/property in a fairly expensive area of Korea. Oh, and the living-room/kitchen where she films her videos are (each) larger than my *entire* apartment. The whole video came off as incredibly tone-deaf and almost as a self-aware joke, but she was dead serious... and she got slammed hard for it on the comment section/like bar. To her credit, her comment/reply was essentially "Oh... I guess I'm *also* rich/privileged myself!... Huh..." Like yes... Yes you are. Even if your other friends were more rich/privileged, that doesn't mean that you weren't also rich/privileged.