“Being poor”

Frugal for Life had this post today on Being Poor from Scalzi.com's “Whatever” blog.

This post has taken a life of its own over the past few days. So much so, that comments were capped on the original post and started up again in a fresh post here.

Hundreds of comments were posted in response to a list of things that mean being poor, mostly from poor people, those who consider themselves poor people, and those who were poor people. It might take a couple of hours to read the whole thing. My scroll bar was barely an inch from the top before I started wandering through the rest. This is endurance — but probably a mockery of endurance, considering what many of these people apparently are going through or have gone through.

Here's a sampling:

• Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.
• Being poor is knowing you're being judged.
• Being poor is a $200 paycheck advance from a company that takes $250 when the paycheck comes in.
• Being poor is a cough that doesn't go away.
• Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.
• Being poor means making decisions like “is stealing food a sin” outside of an ethics class.
• Being poor is find that your landlord has tied $20 to your steering wheel out of pity.
• Being poor is trying to decide which one of you gets to eat today – the one of you that is pregnant or the one of you that can work.
• Being poor means being grateful that you're living paycheck to paycheck.
• Being poor is buying what you can afford and carry while walking that two miles.

And on. And on. And on.

These posts have some coarse language. But if you are not poor (and never were) and ever recall what you thought when you ran across a poor person, this post will show you many aspects of what poor people deal with every day, and what they deal with even after they've gotten out.

It was sobering for me. I'm drawn back to the posts. They're hard to stop reading.

I never was wanting for anything. My wife, on the other hand, had some rough times when she was younger. She recalls dumpster-diving and “unusual meals” because of few available options. She also has been a bit averse to thrift stores, pawn shops, and picking perfectly good things out of the trash, even though need is not an issue now. After reading these posts, I understand much better why.

The key here is choice. If need isn't an issue, making things last, picking up dropped money on the street, scavenging, and walking to work are “frugal” activities. They're much different activities if you do them so that you and your family won't go hungry, be in the cold or in the dark, or be evicted. They're degrading and embarrassing.

I'm sure they're were many people who were poor on the Gulf Coast before Katrina hit. Now there are many more, and those who were already down got the wind knocked out of them even more.

This is a side of personal finance I haven't seen. Maybe I have a very narrow view of personal finance. These posts on being poor gave me a small, distant taste of how bleak people's financial lives can get, and how it affects the rest of their lives.

(Note: The link for Samaritan's Purse is in the upper left of this web page. Or go to Charity Navigator to help the recovery in the Gulf of Mexico through your favorite charity.)