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Old 06-07-2013, 01:50 PM
 
483 posts, read 1,555,672 times
Reputation: 1454

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I'll tell you who are the type of people who look down on chronically poor people with disdain: It's those who grew up poor and become successful. The people who grew up in affluent families are actually more sympathetic toward poor people.

i grew up very poor. Our family was at or near the poverty line for many years. I graduated college with tens of thousands in high-interest loans (in the 90s, interest rates were high). Then became a millionare in my late 20s and a multimillionare a couple of years later. Yeah, I do look down on chronically poor people. I'm sick of the excuses they make. I had every reason to remain poor -- like going to bad public schools with gangs and a high drop-out rate -- but I was really driven. So were my siblings. We're all doing well now.

Attitude and ambition are what get you places, and chronically poor people have a bad attitude and no ambition.
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Old 06-07-2013, 04:24 PM
 
373 posts, read 641,955 times
Reputation: 489
Quote:
Originally Posted by laughandlove View Post
I ask this because I came across a post on a different forum and the comments got heated. Some of the people were so stuck up and not understanding or sympathetic at all. It made me wonder if they used to be poor too and now they aren't so they kind of have a disdain towards those who haven't gotten ahead like they have.

I grew up poor. I was homeless for the majority of my childhood and then when I was teenager was placed into foster care, which didn't really help. Now I'm in college but for a year, I worked two jobs and had nowhere to live so I slept on the all nighter bus (the route took a few hours), took showers at my gym, went to school then job #1 and then job #2. Eventually I saved up enough to get my own place and I'm still struggling kind of. I eat mostly salads and pb&j and occasionally ramen. I clip coupons, take public transportation and my apartment is furnished by secondhand furniture that the local st. vincent de paul donated to me. I am no longer homeless but I still consider myself poor so it saddens me to think people look down on people like me (and those who are worse off) because of my income and lack of assets.

So I ask: Have you ever been poor? How poor and if you aren't anymore, how did you move up?
Wow sounds like you really had a tough go of it.

I grew up in an upper middle class/low high class home. I did not experience poor until I left my first husband. Poor was living on a budget,living in a two bedroom apartment and driving my more economic car instead of my diesel truck.

It is ashame that no one took you in until you could be self supporting. My parents randomly had extra children that needed a place to stay, or never went on vacations, so my parents would let them come along on our family trips.
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Old 06-07-2013, 04:31 PM
Status: "Octopi tastes like snake" (set 18 days ago)
 
Location: in the miseries
3,573 posts, read 4,486,678 times
Reputation: 4400
I grew up in a farm family. 8 kids who were good farm hands.
We had plenty to eat as long as you liked vegetables. The poorer
people in the neighborhood used to help themselves to our
produce.
Our clothes were left on our front porch by good samaritans.
College you paid for yourself if you wanted to go.
I bought my own clothes with a paperroute from the age of
12; girls were not allowed to have a route so it was in my
brother's name. But we didn't know we were poor!
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Old 06-07-2013, 05:43 PM
 
Location: SF Bay Area
13,520 posts, read 22,014,546 times
Reputation: 20234
I grew up poor, but not impoverished. We were immigrants, had nothing but some clothes when we got to the US, 9 of us living in a 3 BR apartment. I had to share a queen bed with my 2 brothers, sleeping head-to-toes to save space. Our clothes were donated and we depended on foodstamps.

A few years later, my father begged and borrowed some money to put towards the purchase of a house. We got off foodstamps but there were still 9 of us in a 3BR house and I'm still falling asleep looking at my brothers' toes. I worked my way through college and now I'm pretty comfortable - -which means there's nothing I need that I cannot afford.
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Old 06-07-2013, 10:22 PM
 
Location: Northern Wisconsin
10,379 posts, read 10,846,452 times
Reputation: 18712
Well let's see if you consider this poor? In graduate school but no loans and fast running out of money. A Part time job in hospital 2 days a week, living in dorm, eating cereal for breakfast, peanut butter and jelly for lunch, no car, supper was often canned Chef Boy Ardee in a can heated on a hot plate or hot dogs and mac and cheese. Yes, pretty poor in my book.
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Old 06-08-2013, 12:09 AM
 
30,856 posts, read 36,771,477 times
Reputation: 34394
Quote:
Originally Posted by Oleg Bach View Post
In North America with it's vast resources - it is a decision to be rich- and a decision to be poor..>I just never wanted the responsibility of maintaining riches..>It's a lot of work.
I don't necessarily think it's that much responsibility to maintain riches. Investing is often made out to be unnecessarily complicated. At least in America, you can buy a mutual fund that invests in a mix of stocks and bonds with low expenses that performs pretty well. You just have to make sure you don't take too much out once you've accumulated your nest egg. Most experts say your withdrawal rate needs to be 4% or less. I'm assuming similar things can be done in Canada (although according to a recent study by morningstar.com...the U.S. tends to have the lowest mutual fund fees).
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Old 06-08-2013, 09:25 AM
 
Location: Middle America
37,409 posts, read 53,295,190 times
Reputation: 53066
Quote:
Originally Posted by josh u View Post
I'll tell you who are the type of people who look down on chronically poor people with disdain: It's those who grew up poor and become successful. The people who grew up in affluent families are actually more sympathetic toward poor people.

i grew up very poor. Our family was at or near the poverty line for many years. I graduated college with tens of thousands in high-interest loans (in the 90s, interest rates were high). Then became a millionare in my late 20s and a multimillionare a couple of years later. Yeah, I do look down on chronically poor people. I'm sick of the excuses they make. I had every reason to remain poor -- like going to bad public schools with gangs and a high drop-out rate -- but I was really driven. So were my siblings. We're all doing well now.

Attitude and ambition are what get you places, and chronically poor people have a bad attitude and no ambition.
...And limited opportunities, limited mobility, undervalued skill sets, disabilities, chronic health problems, etc. There is no one reason people who live in generational poverty live in generational poverty. It's usually a combination of factors.

Let's not oversimplify, or pretend that everyone is on a level playing field. It's great that attitude and ambition helped you reach your goals. Others may start much deeper in the hole (and I'm not talking just financially). If everyone "could" become a multimillionaire before half their life was over, more would. Let's get real.

IMO, the most offensive people are those who grew up affluent, with all kinds of safety nets in place, but CLAIM to be "self-made." People who have not known what it is like to actually want for anything, because if they did, in fact, get in a tough spot or make a bad choice, always had family on hand to make the problem go away, and set the stage for it to be repeated, since nothing was really at stake. People who then claim to know what it is to have "done without." Nah. No, you really don't. That's playacting.
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Old 06-08-2013, 11:48 AM
 
Location: SF Bay Area
13,520 posts, read 22,014,546 times
Reputation: 20234
Quote:
Originally Posted by augiedogie View Post
Well let's see if you consider this poor? In graduate school but no loans and fast running out of money. A Part time job in hospital 2 days a week, living in dorm, eating cereal for breakfast, peanut butter and jelly for lunch, no car, supper was often canned Chef Boy Ardee in a can heated on a hot plate or hot dogs and mac and cheese. Yes, pretty poor in my book.

Hey, I lived on 7-11 hotdogs (2 for $1) in college ... came with all the fixin's too!
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Old 06-08-2013, 04:08 PM
 
Location: Elsewhere
88,060 posts, read 83,928,707 times
Reputation: 114306
I thought we were not exactly poor, but poorer than others when I was a kid because most of the people around me or that I knew had nicer houses, nicer clothes, their parents drove nicer cars. I was embarrassed that I had to wear my older sisters' hand-me-downs before I got anything new. We were the last family on the planet to get a color TV because my parents wouldn't buy a new TV as long as the old B&W still worked.

Then I got out in the real world when I got a job in NYC, and I met people who had been evicted and then their mother would wait until sundown because they knew the sheriff wouldn't come back into the ghetto after dark and she would pull out her tools and break the lock and get them back in the house. They'd eaten rice for dinner for days on end. Got Thanksgiving baskets from a church every year. I met people who had spent their childhood summers picking cotton or vegetables to help their families.

I realized I had NEVER been poor in my life. I was one of 7 kids and my parents were Depression kids and my mother especially had been dirt poor, where they ate turtles caught from the local pond because there wasn't anything else. But my father always had a job, we had two cars--used, because my parents knew that cars depreciated right away so they only bought used--the use of hand-me-downs from my older sisters were just them watching their money. I'd always had a good dinner, and my mother sent us to school with homemade lunches. My parents owned their own home, we had doctors when we were sick, toys at Christmas, summer vacations to a lake. I had NEVER been remotely poor.
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Old 06-08-2013, 04:35 PM
 
Location: Middle America
37,409 posts, read 53,295,190 times
Reputation: 53066
Man, I was THRILLED to wear my cousin's hand-me-downs. I had four siblings and parents who struggled to keep a mom n' pop business afloat. Our money went into necessities, vs. luxuries. My clothes were serviceable, but nothing costly or trendy, just the bare basics. My cousin was also middle class, but had divorced parents who were continually trying to buy her love and outdo one another by heaping designer clothing on her. She had more than she could even store, so I got her hand-me-downs, usually tags still on, and at a much higher price point than my parents would ever have been able to buy for me.

Turns out, my life was exactly the same, whether I was wearing her high-end trendy attire, or my Wal-Mart jeans and Payless shoes.
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