I recently read a Tumblr blog post titled “It’s Literally Impossible To Save Money When You Are Poor.”   One of the things about the blog that struck me was the author said she had never been given any good financial advice from a “non-poor” person.  She went on to say that basically, poverty is engineered by capitalism and is not necessarily the fault of the poor person.  Maybe, maybe not.  That’s an important discussion to have but, not in this blog post so, talk amongst yourselves and see where you get with that.

 

When I googled that post, I realized a couple of things.  First, this blog has been around for a while with lots of people commenting on it strongly, and then reposting it.  I’m not surprised, since poverty has been around well, forever and has always been an emotional issue.  Rightly so.  Second, it contains a hard truth that I understand from personal experience.  It’s this, our society is designed to produce consumers, not teach us how to be self sufficient.  Finally, it illustrates the truth that when you are poor, $100.00 might as well be $1,000,000 when you don’t have enough money to pay the bills.

 

What I know about being poor

Allow me to explain.  I grew up in a poor family.  My parents were very good people but they were terrible with money.  They married young, before they finished college, and proceeded to have four kids.  My father came from a poor, southern farming family and my mother came from a lower middle class family in the Midwest.  Her father was a factory worker who made extra money building houses after the war.  They were a little better off than my father’s family but not much.  Also, my mother was the only girl.  In those days, she was expected to marry and have kids, not get an education and learn how to support herself.  Sadly, that social failure affected her for the rest of her life, as it did millions of Americans.

 

So, my parents were two very young people without college degrees and with four mouths to feed.  Life for my family became a hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck, daily struggle.  I grew up eating at McDonald’s regularly, coming home from school to find the lights turned off pretty often and rarely having brand new clothes.  The real fun started when I was eight and my mother divorced my father.  He wasn’t great at paying child support so the loss of his income, small as it was, hurt the family a lot.

 

When I say I know what it means to be poor, I’m not kidding.  I really know what it’s like to be poor.  I know from personal experience that poverty brings along with it a heaping side dish of soul crushing stigma that we create for ourselves and project onto other people. 

 

Let me say that another way.  When you’re poor, it’s really easy to constantly think about being poor and to convince yourself that because of your poverty, you are “less than.”  We project that assumption onto others, too.  This happens when we see poor people and make judgments about them because of their poverty, like they don’t work hard enough or they’re lazy, unintelligent and worthless.

 

The hard truth about financial advice

The problem with giving advice about money to someone who is poor is that no advice can do what the poor person wants it to do, instantly produce a giant pile of cash.  When you’re poor, your immediate problem is usually how you are going to pay the bills and put food on the table.  That, of course, takes money.  Most run of the mill money management advice doesn’t produce immediate cash flow to help pay the bills and put food on the table and so therefore, it isn’t really helpful in the eyes of the poor person.  Duh!

 

When I was a starving kid, if someone came to me and said “the way to fix your problem is to learn how to budget,” I would have laughed in that person’s face.  Making a budget when you have no money, though extremely important, is hard to do.  Why?  For lots of reasons but, mainly because it can brutally highlight the fact that you have no money!  I’ll say it again, DUH!

 

The vicious cycle of poverty

Then it’s easy to get caught in the vicious poverty cycle.  You know the one I mean.  Here’s an example.  Let’s say you need a car to get back and forth to work.  Your old hand me down crapped out and you need something now, or you’ll lose your job.  You don’t have any money saved, great credit or a decent paying job.  Incidentally, if you want to work on fixing your credit, start by clicking here.  You wind up buying a car at a “buy here, pay here” dealer who gives you a loan with an enormous interest rate and huge monthly payment. 

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Now you have a huge car payment which you didn’t have before.  You are then forced to get a second job, just to keep the car and pay your regular bills.  Because of the second job, you have to quit the night classes you were taking to get a degree so you can get a better paying job and eventually climb your way out of poverty.  Sound familiar?  It sure does to me!  This is just one situation out of many like it that create the poverty cycle.

So, what money management advice is good for someone who is poor?

Alright, so where does all this get us?  Having pulled myself up from my own bootstraps, the best advice I can give to someone who is starting out like I did is, this:  As hard as it is, the first thing you MUST do is change your mindset.  If you keep wallowing in your stigma, you’ll likely sink farther into the vicious poverty cycle.  The way it works is, you can’t see money opportunities if you are blinded by negativity and blame.  If you can learn to act out of determination instead of desperation, you’ll begin to see the money opportunities, no matter how small, you might have missed before.  It took a really, really long time for me to learn this lesson, but I did learn it.  Believe me!

 

Second, small actions matter.  Poor people actually understand this idea already, just in reverse.  They usually have to live in a moment to moment world, where even the smallest transactions can change whether or not they can pay the light bill.  This truth demonstrates how profoundly a small action can affect your situation.  It’s like understanding that using your cruise control can keep you from getting an expensive speeding ticket, making your car insurance go up.  See?

 

Now, a small shift in thinking will show you how this idea can also be used in other ways to help your financial situation.  For example, a small action that could make a huge difference is getting a roommate to help share expenses.  Two can always live cheaper than one.  Getting a roommate doesn’t take any effort and can drastically change your financial situation.  Though they may be hard to see at first, there are lots of small actions you can take that will dramatically change your finances in ways you could never imagine.  If you need to change your financial situation, this is absolutely the best advice I can give you.

Finally, I’ll leave you with this quote to ponder:

“Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.”  Ovid

Sincerely,

Joy Alford-Brand

Your Dollar Lama

 

P.S.  These two pieces of advice are just the starting point.  If you want to continue on your path to financial freedom, click the button below:

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