Menotyou isn’t arguing; they’re agreeing.
This was one of our big reasons for leaving the UK — it was obvious to me that the NHS was being quietly carved up into smaller, potentially profitable parts, ready to be sold off or services subcontracted out to the private sector. I’d like to end my career still working in Public Healthcare.
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Or of returning home to a cold house and there being no heating to turn on. Or that the long term solution to the leaky roof is to evacuate the affected rooms during wet weather and add more buckets. Or even what it feels like to be hungry … The list goes on.
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I think I will always hate shopping because of it. I never could relate to people who would joyfully go from store to store and pick up stuff just because it’s cute and whatnot.
I shop for clothes twice a year (for summer and winter) and it stresses the crap out of me even though I’m no longer in as dire a situation. Every single article of clothing I pick up triggers a cascade of worries about how could I maximize this piece as much as possible as opposed to another one, is there a similar one a bit cheaper elsewhere, if I buy it will I regret spending the money on that one instead of a better choice later, etc, etc. It’s not fun at all; it feels like a huge puzzle. Even if I receive a gift card specifically to ‘treat myself’ and buy something ‘fun’, I can’t turn off the thinking and the blood pressure. I often return with absolutely nothing, not because I don’t have the money but because I couldn’t feel good enough about the whole process to actually make a decision and spend it.
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I can relate a bit to that. I’m long past my trailer-park upbringing, and I make a decent living in the entertainment industry. A decade ago, I worked for a company I won’t identify (though its name rhymes with the Schmational Schmodcasting Schmompany) on a popular TV show which was not quite named Schmill & Schmace. Every season, the show closed up shop and went on a 2-week hiatus over the Christmas and New Year holidays… but the company paid us anyway. Out of the goodness of what still remained of its vestigial, black, flabby li’l heart, by golly, they carried payroll for the whole show for those two weeks, though no union contract required them to.
On my current show, at a different company, we all get laid off after next Friday the 19th, until we get re-hired on Monday January 5. Some employees (including Yours Truly until a year or two ago) even lost their health insurance for those two weeks. And that happens every December, whether we like it or not. Merry Christmas, Cratchits! Thank you for your service. Now GTFO until we need you next year.
But I can’t complain, not really, since I work freelance, and I get paid pretty well, and like my boyhood hero Super Chicken always said, “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred.” Even in my line of work, the 21st century economic realities of the workplace are tougher on the rank and file than the latter decades of the last century were.
Still, that trailer-park upbringing has served me well, I think. My brother Mick is the millionaire in the family, but he was scraping by on food stamps before he had his big break in the mid-1980s. His childhood was more dire than mine. At the time, our mother was a single mom raising four kids by herself in Van Nuys in the early 60s, driving a lunch truck to make ends meet. (She met and married my dad in '67, then had me and 2 more kids.) So even after my brother had made a name for himself in Hollywood and had paid off his house, he was still cautious and frugal with his money. He was keenly aware that, as he put it, “you’re only the Flavor of the Month for a month,” and after that it might very well all go away. He drove a sensible, decade-old Nissan Maxima in the 90s, and now drives a sensible, decade-old Prius. Other than travel, he never seems to spend any money. My siblings and I occasionally tease him about it, but we do understand where he’s coming from.
We grew up that way, too.
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I’m currently experiencing a variation on this, because i have saved money in case my disability benefits get cut off (It has ‘accidentally’ happened before, and fixing it takes weeks) and because when I get more ill than usual my cost of living increases a lot. I now have to watch my money to make sure I don’t have too much.
My options are to tell the DWP when I go over the limit (If I was capable of doing that every two weeks then I wouldn’t be getting the benefits I am) or not tell them when I do (benefit fraud). Instead I spend the extra money despite my brain telling me it’s a bad idea, because the alternatives are worse. Then I hate myself because other people would love to be in that situation.
This has only become a problem because the Con/Dem coalition decided to cut the amount of savings I can have. I wouldn’t have reached the old limit until at least 2025 even if disability benefits increased in line with inflation.
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I have literally had that conversation. I had to go test in another town. I had no money for a hotel, and the testing was at a ridiculously early time. I drove there the night before and slept in my car. The guy I talked to just couldn’t wrap his head around the fact that I could not afford a hotel. When I tried to explain I had no money, he asked why I couldn’t put it on a credit card.
(Aced that test, by the way, on no sleep.)
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There are 2 separate issues here and as usual ,confused in order to achieve the result the writter wanted.
First is the question of quality.
Yes you pay more for better quality.
Second is the way wealth is divided in our world.
This is to say that poor or not ,if you can afford good quality you should ho for it.
I saw that in practice on sailingboats.
The cheap stuff will take you so far and then endanger your life.
The good stuff will take you through rough seas ,with ease and with your head relaxed from fear of sinking.
This has nothing to do with poverty.It has to do with attitudes.
The capitalistic world is designed to produce bad quality so you have to replace everything.
In reality ,today we can produce things that are long life,with not so high prices.We dont.
Because we want to keep these indonesians and these chinese slave labourers (cheap ) busy.
Or else unemployment will skyrocket and profits for the few will fall…
Make your choice.
Change socioeconomic system and solve all your problems.
No not communism.
\we tried that in a wrong way.
I m talking justice here
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That is a particularly recursive flavour of evil, isn’t it? “We will penalise you for saving for a rainy day. If you can save it, you are getting too much”. Later, when payment delays & unexpected bills inevitably come up: “Why didn’t you anticipate this & prepare for it? Poor people are so bad with money”. I am so sorry you are having to work out strategies around that.
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I call that crapitalism.
That has one certain advantage. Things often fail in the same point where they got one cent too cheap. This translates to known failure modes and known repair methods. It also gives the possibility of aftermarket upgrades, replacing known-failing parts with better just after purchase (or just after warranty expires). And because people throw things out, you can often get free stuff that’s one capacitor away from functional.
Can you keep a secret, off-the-books, possibly physically concealed, cash stash? Is that a viable option?
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This is my strategy, too, because I get the same paralysis and sense of insecurity when I am in in a store. I really feel like I do not belong when I am looking at all the trendy goods.
Now I go to Macy’s about twice a year when they have these sales that are 25% off everything (there’s one that’s a charity event which they don’t advertise too much that I particularly like because it’s right before school starts - and you can put the clothes away ahead of the sale date so you don’t have to shop when the store is crazy busy). I go for a whole day. I try to buy things that match and that I like. I don’t look at the prices too much because it’ll tend to even out anyway - a few big ticket items and a bunch of cheaper things.
There’s one sales lady who will save all the coupons for me and she will put the total amount on a gift card so that I can use the coupons for the credit card customers.
And then I’m done. This is the only way I can actually shop in a mall.
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I originally thought this was funny, because it was on Cracked…but it is a very true example of how you get affected by being poor.
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I think that was Labours justification for raising the amount of savings you could have. Not that they were particularly benefit friendly, just better than the current government.
This would be an incredibly bad idea. The punishment for the first offence of benefit fraud is repay the overpayment + 30% fine. i did briefly consider using the same tricks that tax avoiding companies use but decided against it because I don’t have accountants and legal teams working for me, and I can see myself on the front page of the Daily Mail if it went to court.
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I’m giving another example of the same kind of thing she wrote about, one that I have personally experienced.
“…being very wealthy comes with it’s own set of issues…”
Just try to imagine how sorry I feel for those poor little dears crying their eyes out over the question of whether or not their clothes are stylish enough while I my dinner is a $0.48 cup of Ramen noodles for the 3rd time that week. (Right now that comment about dinner isn’t true, but for several years it would have been.)
Here’s the real difference with the problems that come from having money - All the problems that come from having money can be cured by spending money. All the problems that come from not having money are impossible to cure without spending money.
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I know what you mean, and for me it causes a peculiar dichotomy in self-identification. I used to hate rich people (jealous, I admit). I used to have to turn over the couch on Thursday trying to find enough change to buy one more pack of cigarettes to get by until payday on Friday. Now, I get jobs that pay enough I can actually pay all the bills in full on time, and still have enough money left over to buy several cartons of the cigarettes I no longer smoke (big savings right there). But by my own standards from 20 years ago, I am now the rich people. Should I hate myself?
Stick it under the mattress?
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I know someone who did it successfully, but I warn you: it requires a friend you can really, really trust to give you your money back when you need it.
If all your friends are equally desperate to stay afloat, it’ll be hard to find someone with pristine-enough ethics to overcome the survival instinct.
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“Money is fucked up, and growing up without it fucks you up forever” and apparently it, like abuse causes me to torture my kids about money like I was growing up. My wife hates it. Go to a park and the kids check all the garbage cans for aluminum cans that we can collect for scrapping day. Boy number 1 gave grandma a sculpture he made out of copper wire and it was extra special because copper is the most expensive scrap. We also wash out plastic bread bags for the kids lunch bags the next day. The kids bring back their brown paper lunch bags all folded neatly for reuse. 5 minute showers, because hot water is not free. We grow all our fruit and veggies and when there is a surplus we share up and down the road so we have quite a variety because while we don’t have an apple tree., Someone does and when the kids drop off a bucket of pears from us they come back with a bucket of apples from someone.While we may not have much ready cash, we are far from poor. We have a happy little broke family who camps out in the back yard rather than going to Disney. We go swimming down at the quarry instead of having a pool. We don’t have horses, we have bikes. We have family rather than expensive toys. It helped that much of the elders of the fmily lived through the depression, and so we as a family are used to being broke and are ok with it.
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Well you definitely have more means to fix emotional issues, and the issues are not about the basics like eating, having a place to live, so yeah, given a choice between rich people problems and poor people problems, I’ll take rich people problems.
But as a poor person there was a tendency to think money would solve all my problems. Having a chance to mingle with folks from every economic sphere, I got to see that there wasn’t a point where the problems went away. We all have stuff to deal with.
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