Being poor was a good thing

[razztazz]

Having family and life long friendships helps make up for lack of money, too.

Yes. My family has always had me to make up for their lack of money

 

[NextInLine]

I grow up with less than $1 a day. I remember most meals for three of us were just one egg mixed with a cup of water to make it look more then fry it. with a lot of rice.

 

[mickeyd]

I have been poor and I have been not poor. One of them is considerably better situation than the other.


No-one here admits to having a wealthy childhood. Where are those guys?

 

[street]

Yes thanks for the stories and how things have changed.

My folks where born 100 years ago also. The stories they had were unbelievable and they were resilient people of a generation of its own.

My mon/dad parents were also very poor and I mean poor. My dad would get out of school in the spring and go work for a rancher and he would bring dad back home a day before school started again. He did this for about 5 years and at the end he got a used worn out winter coat for pay. The thing is he got feed for 5 summers and that was a big deal. He said he worked very hard started at 10 years old. What a deal that young being gone from your mom and dad live was to survive. People were happy and love and friendship is what it was about.

 

[Mdlerth]

I grew up in extremely unextreme circumstances. Solidly in the middle of the middle class. Dad went to work, Mom raised us five kids. When I was 6 years old I thought we were rich because we lived in a big house; I looked it up on Zillow a few years ago and discovered it is 900 square feet.

When the fifth kid was on the way, my folks felt cramped, so we moved up to a huge house: 1800 sq ft. I didn't feel rich anymore, though, because of contrast with the X family next door. They clearly were rich: owned a big boat on the Chesapeake, and every year Mister X replaced his Cadillac while Mrs X threw out every stitch of clothing she owned and bought an entirely new wardrobe.

The strange thing was, Mister X worked some middle management government job just like my Dad. How was he able to afford all that luxury that my family couldn't? The neighborhood speculation was they had hugely extended lines of credit. So what eventually happened to them was just what you'd expect. A year before Mr X retired, his own father died and left him $2M in life insurance.

Clearly, the lesson karma teaches us is that it's better to be lucky than good.

 

[aja8888]

While Dad was on a minesweeper in the South Pacific during WWII, I lived with Mom and my grandmother in Pittston, PA in a coal company house with no indoor toilet or bathtub. The only running water was a kitchen sink. We had an outhouse and raised chickens. I was there until 4 years old and spoke only Lithuanian. The small house was heated with coal in the pot belly kitchen stove. Memories of those early years are permanently burned into my brain.

Our best deal until I left home at 17 was our family getting approved to move into a low rent housing project, Dad and Mom had to have another kid to make the minimum requirements, hence my youngest sister showed up.

I guess we were happily poor because there were 200+ families like ours. I had fun being outside and had lots of good friends. We ate a lot of spaghetti back then.

If it wasn't for the Viet Nam war, I would probably still be there with a high school education working at Dunkin Donuts. I am glad I was drafted. It gave me the opportunity to see the world, evaluate other people's lifestyles, and get an education (GI Bill). The rest is history.

 

[Bamaman]

My father was a payroll accountant for the government owned power company. My mother was a stay at home mother. I remember eating salmon croquettes on Saturday night, as my father didn't get paid until every other Monday and there was no $.

We were still driving that old 1950 Packard when everyone in our neighborhood was driving new 56 Chevys and new Fords. We didn't have a decent car until I was 16 years old, and I about wore the new car out. My upbringing was very conservative, with a $50 per month house payment.

My mother went to work in order to pay college tuition for my sister and me--$117.50 per semester. And putting us into dorms was tough on her pocketbook. We were not given the option of not going to college.

We were not considered poor, but more lower middle class. But when you start at the lower end of the economic scale, the only way to go is up--and we did.

 

[Teacher Terry]

My parents would be 97 if still alive. My Mom only owned 2 dresses in 8th grade. One to wear to school and one at home. The neighborhood shared 1 car and 1 phone. Everyone was poor as it was the depression. My Dad worked in an auto factory and I was the youngest of 3. I always had what I wanted/needed. My older sister remembered times when she never got anything new. I had a new bike and she never did. By the time I came around my Dad had procured a skilled position in the factory so made more $. My parents talked about college all the time to the 3 of us. They could not afford to pay for it but let us live at home for free, fed us and paid the tuition and books. Then we were expected to pay them back for the tuition and books with no interest. It worked out well for everyone because we all valued our educations. Some of my friends had more $ and some had less.

 

[rodi]

I think when you are young what is around you is your only perception. It is your world.

I completely agree with this. I grew up in an upper middle class suburb... but dad was the classic millionaire next door. He got the house that was 18 months old because the first owners were foreclosed on and the bank was looking for someone to assume the mortgage (so no down payment.) He rented the house we already had until it became a sellers market. But we never had the latest clothes/cars/etc of many of our neighbors and my peers. So, relative to them, I felt poor. It was what we knew... I saw friends getting new clothes, bikes, etc and I was wearing hand me downs and riding a hand me down bike.

My dad pointed out that many of our neighbors were living beyond their means and not saving for retirement. At 10 or 11 - that didn't mean anything to me... but looking back now, he was right.

I didn't know poor till I moved out and was working at age 18... Working for an insurance company I saw that many of my coworkers were from much poorer backgrounds and had to make the minimum wage salary stretch further since they had kids...

 

[CardsFan]

I guess I grew up lower middle class. Dad drove a front end loader at the city dump, and mom stayed at home with me. Then he got on as a truck driver for the USPS, we moved to a house in the outer (lower end) burbs of Boston (i am guessing 1,000SF), and my brother was born. We never really wanted for anything, but we did not have luxuries like a clothes dryer, color TV, or significant vacations until mom went back to work later as a cafeteria worker. And even then all vacations were road trips (New Hamshire, Maine, Pennsylvania, New Jersey). And I never had a pair of store bought PJ's, Mom made them all.

My grand parents lived on cape cod (no, not rich, just moved there in the late 40's), so we Did have fun family vacations, on the cheap.

Tuna casserole, salmon casserole, hamburger helper, stew, stuffed peppers, meatloaf, chuck steaks on the grill. These were the staples of dinner. I still enjoy stuffed peppers and meat loaf!

However, Sunday dinner was always special. Roast beef (cheaper cuts), New England boiled dinner (smoked pork shoulder boiled with potatos, carrots turnip, and cabbage), baked stuffed Haddock (back then it was cheap and not considered high end), and occasionally LOBSTERS and clams (one advantage of the location).

Since every one in the neigborhood lived the same way, I did not really know there "better" ways to live. And I not sure there really are!

 

[Gumby]

We were poor, and I knew it. The only good thing about growing up that way was that it gave me a great drive to NOT be poor after I left home. Other than that, it pretty much sucked.

 

[unclemick]

Oh please! You guys had it easy...

Thank you for bringing this back. I love this one!

heh heh heh -

 

[Redbugdave]

Yes. My family has always had me to make up for their lack of money

I had to laugh at that one!

 

[HadEnuff]

Being poor is only good when in the past tense.

 

[Amethyst]

I hated being poor except for one thing: When I was poor and lived among the poor, they were mostly nice to me and to each other (granted we were not in the inner city, where there is more danger associated with poverty). When I moved up to middle and then upper-middle-class, competition and exclusion became very prevalent.

 

[RobbieB]

Solid middle class for me. Never rich and never poor.

I like the middle, the middle is good -

 

[MRG]

Being poor is only good when in the past tense.

Agreed. I swore I'd never be poor again. I remember an example from my childhood.

My DF was a genuine hard a$$. Never showed much emotion and sometimes difficult to get his point. He told stories of how afraid he was when his dad died and of not having enough to eat. His point unfortunately often missed due to his gruff exterior.

We were back in the mining town they grew up in an headed home, I was young maybe first grade. We stopped in this diner, the trailer style, for dinner. The food was really bad and the portions small. I didn't care about the portions as I didn't want to eat the food. We ate and left quickly but DF was terribly upset about the meal. He later talked about it, wasn't the bad food, it was the lack of it. I remember his lips trembling(first time I ever remember that) as he talked about the difference in food you didn't like and food you ate because you were hungry.

 

[ABQ2015]

During elementary school, I lived with my divorced mom and four siblings in a large city housing project. My dad paid child support but my mother had mental issues and could not handle money. No car and we sometimes went hungry. Similar to Gumby, we were poor and knew it and it sucked. My older brothers were early teens and starting to skip school, shop lift, and hang out with a bad crowd. Although I loved to read, I also hated school as I felt inferior to my classmates and would volunteer to stay home and babysit my younger brother while my mom went to work. It was a dysfunctional family with little parental involvement.

Fortunately we then went to live with my dad who quickly straightened us out. He was hard working, frugal, blue collar class and insisted that we do well in school. However, we were still lower middle class and money was tight. While I never liked being poor and felt different from my peers, these experiences produced a strong loving bond between us siblings and motivated us to get an education and not make the same mistakes as our parents.

 

[bclover]

Pops had a good phrase for it; "It's good to want things"

He used it many times when I said I wanted this or that.

Some of them I got and others I didn't. Just like life.

Excellent!!

so my mom and dad both grew up in segregated south and my mom went on to become a civil rights attorney, so my parents never emphasized material things. They wanted their kids to have equal opportunities.

My parents encourage me to stay in school and get a good job, the reward being able to get my "wants".
like many African Americans they left the south for us kids. We weren't poor but we weren't rich either. My dad use to tease my mom because she lived in a building with a doorman.

BUT.... I also know times are very different. as I've said before, when I was a kid very few people had credit cards. now kids somehow need them at 15, Kids get bored now and they go to the mall, lol when I was a kid there was NO mall.
We also did not have 24/7 informercials and cable tv telling us we needed a cell phone to make our lives complete.


true story, my neighbor was having a bday party for her 7 year old and wanted Cirque du soleil to perform. WTH whatever happened to just getting a cake??

We're not in Kansas anymore

 

[Walt34]

true story, my neighbor was having a bday party for her 7 year old and wanted Cirque du soleil to perform. WTH whatever happened to just getting a cake??

I had to look up what Cirque du soleil is, I'd never heard of it but apparently big in Canada.

We just got birthday cakes and a one or two presents, that was it. It simply never occurred to us to ask for anything more. And so far that's all that the grandnieces and grandnephews get.

 

[aja8888]

Birthday parties? I never knew there were parties for these when we grew up?

We were so poor, we didn't find out when our birth date was until we left home!

 

[nvestysly]

I wouldn't go as far as saying we were poor - there were certainly families in the area that had much less. However, it does seem that we all made the best of it and didn't allow ourselves to be consumed with the fact there were some that had "more."

Yes we did have food, but it was certainly not meat every day. We had automobile(s) but there were seldom new. My first bicycle was assembled from hand-me-parts from friends and family and I loved it. We had plenty of things to do to keep us busy and those things didn't include the latest toys and games - instead we mowed the rather large yard, maintained equipment and vehicles around the house and generally found ways to make-do or do without.

The lifestyles I see with most friends and family today seem to be centered around the latest electronic gizmo. On the other hand, I got a warm-all-over feeling recently when one of our teenage neighbors purchased a used forge and made his own heat-treated knife blade for a school project. Of course he couldn't bring the knife to school - a slideshow and video presentation had to suffice to prove he made the custom knife.

Did I mention that I grew up in Florida and walked uphill to school, both ways, in the snow! Those were simpler times for sure.

 

[Sue J]

We were solidly middle class when I was growing up. Both parents grew up in The Depression and that experience shaped them. Mom's family was never poor, just lived through hard times like everyone else.

Dad's family was poor. Single mother with two kids and no help from her ex-husband. Dad told me that they were "on the dole" at one point and that had an impact on him.

During my upbringing Dad worked as an electrician and then a roofing salesman. He always worked but had a month or two of downtime most years for winter months. As a roofing salesman he knew that people don't want to think about roofs during the holidays so he expected to not have much income in December and January. He planned for this and these were our leaner months although he always provided what we needed.

By my teen years he was doing well and it showed. Instead of moving to a bigger, better zip code they added on to the house and took some nice vacations. He wasn't interested in keeping up with anyone else, instead he saved for retirement. He successfully retired at 59 1/2.

My parents paid for college for us, a state school that was very affordable.

I've never felt poor or broke or financially desperate. When DH and I first got married things were lean. There was always income even if it was just enough to get by. We learned to be frugal and careful. We had enough times where we lived paycheck to paycheck that I knew how important it was to always have savings and a backup plan.

 

[travelover]

.......... Instead of moving to a bigger, better zip code ..........

You had a zip code!? We were so poor ours was 00000.

 

[unclemick]

You had a zip code!? We were so poor ours was 00000.

RR 6 Box 210H And that was in the City and Parish of New Orleans.

heh heh heh - Poor? Poor! I was an aggressively cheap SOB and proud of it.