(Apologies in advance) If you are poverty stricken, would you share with us how you became that way?

Well, my mom killed my dad when I was ten. I got left with my sister at a strangers house in Copala Mexico while my mom went back to the states to turn herself in. My aunt got us back to the states.

Pretty much I dropped out of high school since there was nobody to pay for college. I got a shitty job making minimum wage and was often homeless. Try keeping clean for a service job when you don’t have a shower. I was working 40+ hours a week and still couldn’t get a place.

Though I don’t think anyone can top @johnpowell‘s story, I’ll bite.

I was born poor. My mom had me at 19 years old, and raised me by herself for most of my childhood. Welfare, free school lunches, bill collectors, and hand-me-down clothes were the norm. I can’t tell you the number of times our electricity and/or phone was turned off due to non-payment. I knew I didn’t want that life for myself.

At 14, I got my first job. At 15, I started paying my mom rent and took over all expenses related to me except medical ones. At 18, I took over those expenses as well… even the long past-due bills. At 19, I got married and by the time I was 21 we owned our first home. Things progressed steadily from there, with my husband earning enough that I was eventually able to become a stay-at-home mom. As his income grew, so did our lifestyle. Our second home was a really big house in a nice neighborhood, two cars that were paid for, maid service… the works, really.

Then, I got a divorce. Big adjustment, there, but doable. My second husband made enough to get by without my working, but just. Much smaller, older home (that I love more than I ever loved the McMansion), not much disposable income.

Then dun, dun, duuuun he got laid off. In three months, we’d exhausted all of our savings, including a small retirement account, and fallen behind on every bill we have. He was finally re-hired, but at a dramatic pay cut. We’ve both been searching for jobs ever since the lay-off, to no avail. So, we live paycheck to paycheck, and my credit’s shot, too. We get cut-off notices, but so far we’ve always been able to make the payment before anything is turned off. It’s almost like starting all over, again. :/

Still, we’re in a much better position than many. Our home is paid for, and that’s the only reason we still live in it. If we had a mortgage payment to make, we’d have been forced out long ago.

I am thankful that I have been very fortunate. I thought I was poor in college, but I still got help from my parents… if I really needed it.

It’s funny that I considered myself poor when I had no bills to pay….. seems kind of close minded when I look back on it.

I’m not sure how to answer this. I suppose I grew up poor by comparison to the general population, yet there were people much worse off in our community. Dirt floors and no power weren’t hard to find within a half hour drive from our home.

We lived for a while with six people in a one bedroom but it felt warm and cozy to me, not restrictive like my early adulthood poverty did. As a child it just felt nice to have my family close to me- a warm cocoon in a hard world.

I truly became what I would consider poor later in life. I lived couch to couch (bless them every one) and worked full time but couldn’t make enough to come up with 500 dep, first and last month’s rent. Let alone that by then my credit was abysmal from bouncing checks and moving jobs when I could no longer get to work.

What was the catalyst for me being poor? My mental and physical illnesses. My meds were over five hundred a month and I simply couldn’t afford them. So I spiraled downward until I hit bottom. Living in my car, dumpster diving for food and bartering for clothing.

I didn’t go to soup kitchens because those were for the ‘really poor’ and I didn’t want to take food from them as I was physically able to dumpster dive and steal food from work. Pro tip- get a job in a hotel as they often offer a free meal in the cafeteria for each eight hours worked. It’s high fat/calorie dense so it can get you through.

More often than not it’s the price of medicine that keeps knocking us back towards the edge of being financially unstable. At one point my meds (with insurance) topped out at 1500 a month. That’s just no doable, even if we both were working 40 hours a week.

Looking back, I’m still not sure if I would consider myself ever truly poor. I grew up on WIC and food stamps, ate government cheese and always had free/hand-me-down clothes. Yet, I don’t count myself as poor. I feel like we still had so much that even if we didn’t have money we had laughter, hope and community.

gemiwing, my hat goes off to you. you now deserve a mansion with a long table loaded with food. you kept your sanity and thats should be rewarded. you have shared a closeness to your family that only other people wished they had had. i give you five stars for battling your way through your childhood and are still a survivor. john

We were very poor growing up. I had both parents. My dad worked on the railroad, and my mom stayed at home with us, doing absolutely nothing. I have issues with that which I won’t share here, but you can probably guess a little.

Neither of them had a complete college education, though, my dad was/is a very smart and practical handy man. While at the railroad, my dad was walking between cars when a piece that holds the cars together (I don’t know the name) broke off and he fell onto the tracks, breaking his back and legs. We were screwed. We had already been on welfare and barely keeping heat in the house. Now, we had all these medical bills and no insurance. We sued the railroad and got a small settlement- enough to cover some of the hospital costs and a used minivan. My dad still couldn’t do the labor intensive work required at the railroad, so he did what he could working part time doing odd jobs in appliance repair. My mom worked at a grocery store a few hours a week… for a few months.

Then came an opportunity. The pet store down the road was being sold, and my parents were tight with its owners. An arrangement was made so that my parents would be the new owners. I was young-ish, and wasn’t told the details (I still don’t know), but something happened. They didn’t make enough to pay the rent on time one month, and the old owners sued my parents, leaving us absolutely penniless. We lost our home, our cars, and all savings to that point. Luckily my grandmother took pity on us and kicked out her renters in a home she owned and let us live there. I was in high school at this point, and hadn’t known any financial comfort my whole life. So, when college time came, on top of having no parental support, monetary or otherwise, I had to rely on government grants to pay for it. My dad went back to appliance repair.

I gave it a try, but I could no longer afford it. My mother came upon a fair inheritance and, so, the government felt that I didn’t need the assistance any longer. I stopped going, because no way in hell would my mom pay for college for me out of her well deserved inheritance. Issues! She paid one semester for my books and bought me a winter coat that year. I guess that was enough…

After moving in and out of my parents’ (because my mother began to charge me rent for living in the fucking unfinished basement) and with friends while working my minimum wage job, I moved to Baltimore with a friend. I tried to go to school again, and still couldn’t afford it, and instead racked up debt and dropped out. My fault completely, but I thought I could muddle through and get a better job. I couldn’t.

I finally had started to get comfortable after advancing to a manager position at a hotel in Baltimore. Then, I got pregnant. I thought this would be the end of my life… how could I afford a child?

But, instead, the baby’s father just happened to be the greatest man in the world. Despite my hopelessness, he wanted to marry me and fix me and start a family. I honestly owe him my life. I’ve since been taken care of and then some. I’ve been able to get an educational certificate with my name on it. I’m starting my own family now, and I feel like I’ve already made better decisions than I saw growing up. The Taylor curse stops here.

My dad is very successful now. He has his own appliance repair business and is doing very well. I’m so happy for him that it brings me to tears. :)

Growing up, we were poor. I didn’t really know it though. I knew we weren’t rich, but my parents always made it so my brother and I didn’t go without..and the things we did just seemed like the norm I guess.
The had my brother at 21, and me at 25. They struggled for a long time, and when I was 4 they moved to Pennsylvania..where my mother was from, and we moved in with my mother’s twin and her two kids (she was in the midst of a divorce) and they sort of co-parented. Three adults working different shifts, so my Aunt watched us during the day, and my mother in the evenings..my father worked a lot.

Things just slowly got better. From I’d say the end of elementary school until high school, my mother ran her own house cleaning business with high end clients…I’d help her clean houses all the time. My father worked his way up in the HVAC field. And while my mother worked, she was going to a paralegal school. She then got a job making pennies at The Vanguard Group, but insanely good health insurance.
So, then they were from there..just gaining experience. Always providing for me and my brother. Eventually, my father became the top HVAC guy in the area…as in the Southeastern PA area. (Yeah, I’m tooting his horn lol) And my mother’s pay increased has I believe at least quadrupled and they are paying for her to get her bachelors and then possibly law school (she’s undecided).

But, my family life now is quite similar to how my parents started out. My parents had to live with my father’s parents, and my mothers mother in the beginning, and also borrow money. I became pregnant at 20, and had my son…then married at 22. Now, I’m 23 and about to have our second child, and I’d say we’re far from financially stable.

My husband works in the service industry, so we rely on other people to pay our bills. It’s difficult, to say the least. Since we’ve been together, he has been laid off because of the economy at least three times, and lost other jobs for various reasons. The last two lay offs were probably the worst. I still remember the feeling of him coming home and having to tell me what happened, and knowing we didn’t have enough in the bank to cover rent and to feed our child, let alone ourselves. It’s probably one of the worst feelings I’ve ever felt. I have never resented or hated my husband because of it. I know it’s making us a stronger couple to go through these things. It’s just painful sometimes.

When he lost his last job, he worked the day shift then at the end they came to him and informed him the place had been sold…and that he could leave. That was awful. I had to scramble to get government assistance so we could buy food, and still pay rent with what little money we had. Thankfully we had already planned on moving in with my parents, because it was meant to be a money saving move…not a necessity move. But, it became a necessity.
I just hate how being poor is so unpredictable. Drives me crazy lol.

All we can do is continue our path. With me going to school, staying home to save money on childcare, becoming a nurse and helping to support the family and getting us decent health insurance. We aren’t aiming to be rich, although being in my parents class would be nice. I think at this point, just not being scared to spend money would be nice.

thank you for such amazing stories of struggle and perseverance and inspiration
My parents tell me that we were so rich once, my mother had to put stacks of cash in the fridge but I never got to experience this consciously as I was an infant then…things changed drastically when I was around 4 and my family was being sought after since we were half Armenian and due to the Nagorno-Karabakh issues, people in Azerbaijan (where I was born) were killing Armenians on their territory (and Azerbaijani people were being killed in Armenia)...we, as a family, had to run and leave everything behind…my father remembered (when he was alive) that he had to pay a huge sum of money to some boatmen who would put my greatgrandmother on a boat so she can be transported safely to southwest Russia where we ended up eventually…life went from urban city to tiny village – a big shock for my parents…we had a house, no heat, toilet very far outside in the field (that we had to learn how to farm)...that is the childhood I remember…I remember dad trying to do odd jobs that never worked out, always have these ideas…I remember mom working in the hospital where I spent a lot of time because I was sick so much…years later I would learn that my parents were discriminated against for being ‘darkies’ – Armenians in a Russian land…I never knew until much later that my mother had to work nights so that she can pay for my English classes…she didn’t know where life would take me but she knew that I had a talent for languages and so when I expressed a desire to learn English, she took more work…I look back on that part of my life fondly…I never felt unhappy, just that this is how things had to be….my parents applied for a green card and won one in the green card lottery and so we came here in 1995…my father tore his Achilles tendon and couldn’t get work – thankfully, we were able to stay with his best friend’s family…mom worked odd jobs at Russian grocery stores and eventually got a job as a housekeeper in a hotel ( a jot she still does today…a job that is a waste of her brain, a brain of a biochemist…but she’s never learned the language, there was no time…)...eventually we were able to afford a small apartment but for many years we shopped at what I now realize are ‘immigrant shops’ (though there is no shame in that – other people find it shameful, not me) like Rainbow and Payless…I still shop there as now I have my own kids and times are tough…we have a house – we can’t really make the mortgage payments (something I’ve been working on with the bank, lawyers, brokers for 3 mo. now)...I am determined to keep the house…my father passed away, we lost the biggest salary…we are living now on his life insurance money…I make enough to cover the rent, my toddler’s pre-school, classes for my husband and I and that’s that…no savings…many tens of thousands of dollars of loans…but I consider myself very lucky…and not at all poor…all things are relative…

I got married.

If someome was now poor, would they have a p/c or a laptop & therefore be able to answer this question? Probably not.

@ucme Maybe if they are poor in the sense that they are homeless or something. But, even people on government assistance can have laptops and internet. I have to have internet, for school. I know a lot of people in the same situation.

I have flagged ucme’s ridiculous answer. Some people could of course use a friend’s pc, a cafe pc – or their own cheapo pc, like I do. From the amazing stories above, I think my question struck a chord. @ucme – stay clear of my threads, please – you are consistently unhelpful, and quite irritating. Grow up – or go back to whatevrville you came from.

@Zen_Again, public libraries, as well.

@jmah Exactly.

@ucme I’ve known plenty of very poor and homeless people to use library computers. Usually for correspondence with friends, family, and employment contacts, but it’s still a possibility. Also, students K-college have access to computers through their schools. Adults, through work.

@ucme all of my homeless patients use the internet in the public libraries or local Burger Kings.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir Fair enough just a thought that’s all.

I was born poor.
Given up for adoption by two teenage parents, and shuffled through many foster homes and boys homes till the age of 16 when I became emancipated. I held a job working everyday after school until 11 and all day on the weekends. I earned enough money to be able to live in an apartment, and eventually stop riding the bus and buy a car.

Unfortunately, I became addicted to drugs at 17 and spent most of the year in rehab.
Now I’m out, have a minimum wage job, and I’m living week to week trying to pay bills on time. Hopefully I’ll be able to finish up my school education, but it’s difficult when you have to work during some school hours just to get by.

@JONESGH keep going, you can do it.

I second that @simone, and a round of {{{{hugs}}}} to you brave, intelligent and resourceful jellies. Thanks for your honesty and courage. Lurve.

I have five brothers and sisters, my dad was a teacher, and my mother a stay-at-home mom. Needless to say we were never very well off. As a grown up I had a pretty successful career and was married to a man who also had a good career. Now I am divorced and broke. I am this way because I have chosen to take a long view of my life rather than a short view. I am going to school full time and working two part-time jobs so I can finish my degree and get a job that will allow me to support those boys.

because i refuse to clamber over people for a few extra bucks. But poverty stricken is a relative term.

I am in the middle of many years of grad school. My husband just finished. THere were several years when both of us were full-time grad students. At least we both went for free…poor but no debt!