growing up poor... how has it shaped you?

[miss fortune]

my family was below the poverty line when I was a kid.

I never really realized it when I was a kid, but my parents pointed it out to me when I was older, and in retrospect it makes a lot of sense. We repaired everything instead of replacing it, I never got new clothes and only wore hand me downs (first new clothes I owned, I bought myself), our christmas presents were homemade and there were field trips that we couldn't afford to send me on. Lucky for us, we lived in the country and could can or freeze a lot of our own food so we never really had to scrape by on what we ate, but most of what we ate we'd made ourselves from things grown or hunted on our land and we never went out to eat or picked up something because it was quicker. We were also lucky because we owned our house and property (it was inherited), so we never had to worry about having somewhere to live... only had to worry about having the money to pay property taxes on it apparently, which I never realized at the time either (should have realized because you did NOT ask for anything in the spring in my family).

I've come to realize over the years that my upbringing has shaped a lot of my present day behaviors in some odd ways and some expected ways, such as I'm always all for repairing things that break instead of buying new things and I'll panic over expenses even though we have enough money to cover them. I also know to never talk about money and have taken jobs just for the money even though I know that they'll kill some part of me and I know that I don't really NEED to take that job for us to live comfortably... but I feel the need to anyway because WHAT IF THE MONEY GOES AWAY?! There will always be some part of me that obsesses over going broke and losing everything (which I've done before on my own and have even been homeless for a bit) and I will always be working my ass off as if poverty is right around the corner... and I know that not everyone is like that... there are people out there who don't figure out dreadful ways to fix shit that breaks just so that it'll last a few more months and who don't wear things until they're well past dead (like my shoes that HR once informed me were technically closer to sandals than closed toed shoes) and who don't go overboard on presents occasionally because they can finally afford to give someone something nice that they feel like they've deserved for years.

for those who grew up poor, how has it shaped the person you are now?

 

[ZNP-TBA]

I grew up working/lower middle class. Our net income growing up was just a little above the poverty line. We were not on any special programs most of the time (except for an intermission where my mother was single after divorcing my father until she met her second husband). My step father had a respectable income but we didn't enjoy the fruits of that mainly due to him having to pay an enormous amount of alimony and child support to his first wife and two daughters from that marriage. With my step father introduced into the picture our living situation was 'upgraded' from working class semi-ghetto apartments to lower middle class condo. It was actually safe to walk out on the street most of the time.

Our financial situation contributed greatly to my trajectory in life. Already from the get-go my parents didn't save any money for me to attend any college. I rarely got new school clothes and due to my parents working all the time and not being able to afford a car for me I walked 3 miles everyday to school. I literally had no spending money of my own until I was hired at my first job as a deckhand on a sport fishing boat when I was 15. A lot of my friends had parents that saved for them to at least pay down tuition for their college. My situation was even set further behind when I dropped out of high school due to dumb teenager decisions I made. Being a drop out with a late GED didn't really make it easy for me to get any loans.

I made the decision to join the military when I was almost 19 and did that for 6 years which gave me an opportunity to not completely fail at life. I haven't been dependent on my parents or family, for the most part, ever since I was 15 so I think that contributed greatly to my views on personal responsibility and on economics.

 

[magpie]

When my mom and dad were together we had quite a bit of money. We moved a lot but some of the houses we lived in were quite big. And we could afford a house. After my parents got divorced when I was 12, my dad kept the big house and my mom, sister, and I moved out and started renting places. My mom was a freelance violist at a time when a lot less people were being hired to play. One of the concert halls she used to work regularly at shut down. So my mom started working on being certified as a chef. I remember eating corn pops (the cereal) without milk for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My dad bribed me with money to see him during visitation so I did in order to earn money to give to my mom for rent/food expenses.

And that's that.

 

[human101]

I grew up in a large housing project. We were poor but some some of my childhood friends were only eating a couple of times a week. I grew up smelling crack outside the house, petrol bombs would be placed in letterboxes. There was a constant drugwar. Worst of all it was a completely unforgiving environment for a child if you were weak or showed emotion, you were getting robbed or beaten up in broad daylight with no mercy. Being innocent didn't matter. It made me empathetic towards all people, but the moment anyone crosses me my instincts are honed in such a way to never run from direct confrontation. If you can preserve hour compassion and heart, you carry so many lessons from a poor beginning in life. I would also have to say while I empathise with people, I take economics and financial security serious you have to be on top of things constantly, I don't love capitalism but I can never understand caring so much about what politicians may or may not do for you. I believe in God but don't believe whatever that thing is benevolent or on my or anyone's side.

 

[Blackout]

Yeah, my family was pretty poor growing up.

There were periods where I think that, it kind of sucked.
Practically everything we owned was hand me downs or used, and we could never really afford to go and buy anything new or go to any of those cool stores or really enjoy any luxuries. My family was very rural, and almost kind of southern-esque? at least, the Canadian equivalent. We lived in a very small rural country town, surrounded by farms and the like. We practically lived in a shotgun shack, a really old house that was given to my dad by his grandmother. If it was not for that, I don't think we'd even had lived in a house. I honestly don't really know.

I wish my parents would have given me away, I hated living there. here I was, even when i was a kid I was more interested in what lay way beyond the town, in the world and about the culture and civilization out there; but yet I was forced to live and stay in this really repressive old fashioned and heavily religious area where I was treated like some kind of...freak? it was a terrible place for people like me. Very intolerant and stuck in the past in soooooo many ways.

When my parents finally divorced it was even worse. I grew up surrounded by poverty, dysfunctional and drug/alcohol abuse.

The town I grew up in was just very, very sad place, one that was run down, dying and seemingly with a lot of really unhappy and screwed up people lived. There was a lot of tragic things I witnessed there, a lot of people who lived lives of emptiness and without reason or hope. They simply wasted them all away. I think that a large portion of it was a freaking trailer-park. Honestly, the town was probably only slightly removed from being that.

In saying all this, it's like I am a stereotypical poor person or something, it's just lol.


It was terrible, it was only until I was a teenager and I started working all of the time while in school that I ever got to taste what it's like to really have money and to know what it's like to go to those stores and buy things I've always wanted, things that made me happy or even being able to buy freaking beer or whatever like everyone else did (that's all anyone else did) I loved that feeling of independence. It was really hard to do well in school and hold down a job, especially because I was so beyond on account of the fact that I was literally thrown out of school because I would not listen and would always cause a ruckus and misbehavior. My mother later disowned me hen i was growing up, and I could never really talk or get along with her because she was such a git. I mean, talking to her is like trying to get through of wall of massive idiocracy, intolerance and irrationality, and old fashioned out dated beliefs that make no sense or even hold sway to day. It's like how it was growing up, I was an alien, a completely occultism side show freak of nature that only beguiled, scared and mind-freaked the fuck out of everyone. Just too "different" for a place like that.

S anyway, I just left when i was fairly young to go live in the cities(after I went to go live with some of my relatives, because my parents were fuucccccckkkkeeeeeeeed) and they taught me things, but again it was just like I hit the wall of redneck and they were utterly confused by me. It was very difficult. It was scary, and nobody really cared about me.

I was alone most of the time. I don't even know if it was altogether worth it leaving. Now I am glad to have I guess, but it was very difficult.

For all these reasons, it has made me a perpetual outsider.

 

[Blackout]

But I have serious emotional problems now.

Geesh. I'm all scared up.

I have worked through most of them, but still certain things persist a bit. I guess I mean I will probably always have issues. I am practically scarred for life it would seem. I don't know how I'm alive and still in one piece to be honest! I've done some really crazy things. I guess I'm just slightly more lucky then I am not. I don't get why I had such a hard time fitting in though. I just didn't get along with anyone.

I've seemingly never been able to fit in.

 

[Blackout]

I grew up working/lower middle class. Our net income growing up was just a little above the poverty line. We were not on any special programs most of the time (except for an intermission where my mother was single after divorcing my father until she met her second husband). My step father had a respectable income but we didn't enjoy the fruits of that mainly due to him having to pay an enormous amount of alimony and child support to his first wife and two daughters from that marriage. With my step father introduced into the picture our living situation was 'upgraded' from working class semi-ghetto apartments to lower middle class condo. It was actually safe to walk out on the street most of the time.

Our financial situation contributed greatly to my trajectory in life. Already from the get-go my parents didn't save any money for me to attend any college. I rarely got new school clothes and due to my parents working all the time and not being able to afford a car for me I walked 3 miles everyday to school. I literally had no spending money of my own until I was hired at my first job as a deckhand on a sport fishing boat when I was 15. A lot of my friends had parents that saved for them to at least pay down tuition for their college. My situation was even set further behind when I dropped out of high school due to dumb teenager decisions I made. Being a drop out with a late GED didn't really make it easy for me to get any loans.

I made the decision to join the military when I was almost 19 and did that for 6 years which gave me an opportunity to not completely fail at life. I haven't been dependent on my parents or family, for the most part, ever since I was 15 so I think that contributed greatly to my views on personal responsibility and on economics.

Hahaha, me too but in the opposite way.

I had to actually become a ward of the state for a while because I had so many emotional issues from being raised the way I was, as well as I was just really screwed up in a multitude of ways. I needed serious support and guidance but yet it was just not given to me. If somebody could have just reached out and shown some warmth and caring things would have been much different for me, but instead if anything it was often refused and I was merely stereotyped. I also could not hold down jobs, not even necessarily because I could not do the work itself, but for the fact that no one even really trains you; no one works around or accommodates you if you have any issues, and if you do have a problem or trouble fitting into the general organized scheme or structure of an organization or how we have decided work must be performed, then you are immediately labeled as "mentally ill" and then that's just basically to most people saying that you are mentally unfit all together. You are stupid and there is something inherently wrong with you.

It's terrible, and then how does that help anyone?

Even the social intuitions in place to help people who have been marginalized and the like are not really there. It's fucking bullshit.

But I know most thinkers will just look at my MBTI type and go "omg, typical feeler. Feelings are irrelevant. You just ignore them and think logically" But it's anything but.

The only way I did overcome my background was just by reading a shit ton of books, following my intuition (everyone thinks this is bad?) and not at all abiding by popular convention and what most people try to tell you to do, because our society is beyond stupid at this point. Hardly anybody has any sense of what is really going on. There is only advice and wisdom that serves to keep you completely stuck.

 

[Tellenbach]

We almost never went out to eat. We'd go several years without dining out and going to McDonalds once a year was considered a treat. No allowances; no toys. I guess that's why I was such a TV addict and still am. Still, I never gave much thought to money as a kid because I was a happy kid and the family was happy. I'd like to think that I appreciate the smaller and simpler things in life as a result; I have almost no desire for the newest and latest gadgets. I don't have a tablet or a smart phone and I don't want one. I replaced my 25 year old 20 inch Zenith TV about 3 years ago.

 

[Blackout]

We almost never went out to eat. We'd go several years without dining out and going to McDonalds once a year was considered a treat. No allowances; no toys. I guess that's why I was such a TV addict and still am. Still, I never gave much thought to money as a kid because I was a happy kid and the family was happy. I'd like to think that I appreciate the smaller and simpler things in life as a result; I have almost no desire for the newest and latest gadgets. I don't have a tablet or a smart phone and I don't want one. I replaced my 25 year old 20 inch Zenith TV about 3 years ago.

It was like that with me and music I guess.

It's still something I do the most as far as entertainment goes nad is almost an obession

At first it was mostly video games, because I guess I had this weird knack or tenacity for finding really used cheap things, or getting people to just give me hand me downs (in the case of video games) I was always behind though in turns of what system was current.

Honestly, I think it was because there was nothing else for me to do. It was like, it was either that, or just hang out with all the other losers and do drugs and drink too much. I wasn't good at anything else and was a proverbial failure. The thing is, I just couldn't concentrate on school when i was younger and I had too much energy and I always got into trouble. I guess I quit playing video games because I realized they didn't really make me feel fulfilled and something was missing from my life.

I guess that's how I sort of eventually found music really. I'm surprised no one else talks about that aspect though. Usually in low-income areas, there's quite a bit of crime and drug abuse, lol.

 

[ENTP-Guy]

I grew up with a mother who had stress during her work as a cleaning lady, my father still works in the place where thousands of people who've either escaped war or has some weird disability work (My father does not have a disability, but he, my mother and my siblings all escaped the war in Balkan.) I didn't understand poor or rich as a kid. I always thought adults had a good life. They could become anything they wanted and I could spend as much money as possible. I was a good kid, thought the world was good and nothing evil was there. But as I grew up, getting bullied, bullying people, seeing other people bullied, seeing the news talk about war and all this depressing shit really hit me. I started looking at my family different. I still do. I don't know if I see them as a family, or if I just see them as people whom live with me, people i'm related to, people who try their best to survive in this shitty world and try to give me a good life. During all this, my mother got breast cancer and that literally hit me in the heart. I blamed myself, I couldn't live with myself, I couldn't live in a world like this. Seeing people sad, destroyed. These factors were one of the reasons I feel under depression and literally wanted to kill myself. My life hasn't been good, neither has it been welcoming.

I want you all to know before I stop this story: There's more to it than what I've said. A lot more. I can't share it because of personal reasons. But this page hit me really hard, and I had to share at least what I could.

Thank you.

 

[RedAmazoneFriendZone]

I was raised on "a military ground". My father was in the army. The money was ok. My mother was always anxious about it (and about everything generally speaking) and managed everything at home. She was very stressed and often angry against a small detail here and there, because she took so many things on her back. She was a model to me for money saving, often criticising out loud my father for what he wanted to buy and so on.
Due to my background (and I precise we weren't lacking money), I grew up very minimalistic. I don't need a lot to feel happy ,really !
I need to feel comfortable in my house with decoration, a terrasse with the sun, a bath, a nice living room with a sofa for massages, my no roof car for fresh air (useless to speak about oil, we are having so many strikes in France right now !), I take care of myself alone (nails, body, shaving, hair) most of the time and I have no children. I never feel stressed about money, and when a friend of mine asks me if I wanna go to the restaurant in 3 weeks I propose him to go tomorrow ! I want people to feel happy, not stressed, and this as much as possible ! Nevertheless, I respect my own principles : never spending in a foolish way, only buying what is necessary or, what I find useful for my own pleasure, or else, it's all about culture
(I never count the books I buy). I'm generous with my friends, but actually I'm thinking about being mean The crisis tends to stress people and increases their obsession with money.

 

[ZNP-TBA]

I was raised on "a military ground". My father was in the army. The money was ok. My mother was always anxious about it (and about everything generally speaking) and managed everything at home. She was very stressed and often angry against a small detail here and there, because she took so many things on her back. She was a model to me for money saving, often criticising out loud my father for what he wanted to buy and so on.
Due to my background (and I precise we weren't lacking money), I grew up very minimalistic. I don't need a lot to feel happy ,really !
I need to feel comfortable in my house with decoration, a terrasse with the sun, a bath, a nice living room with a sofa for massages, my no roof car for fresh air (useless to speak about oil, we are having so many strikes in France right now !), I take care of myself alone (nails, body, shaving, hair) most of the time and I have no children. I never feel stressed about money, and when a friend of mine asks me if I wanna go to the restaurant in 3 weeks I propose him to go tomorrow ! I want people to feel happy, not stressed, and this as much as possible ! Nevertheless, I respect my own principles : never spending in a foolish way, only buying what is necessary or, what I find useful for my own pleasure, or else, it's all about culture
(I never count the books I buy). I'm generous with my friends, but actually I'm thinking about being mean The crisis tends to stress people and increases their obsession with money.

This was some of the reasons I was attracted to my ESFP ex. No matter what the fuck happens, they can always lighten the mood.

 

[RedAmazoneFriendZone]

This was some of the reasons I was attracted to my ESFP ex. No matter what the fuck happens, they can always lighten the mood.

Yeah..... unless you depress. I try not to play the psychoanalyst with boys anymore. I don't wanna cast pearls before swine. I'd rather borrow your ENTP psychopathic technic Let me think about it.

 

[ZNP-TBA]

Yeah..... unless you depress. I try not to play the psychoanalyst with boys anymore. I don't wanna cast pearls before swine. I'd rather borrow your ENTP psychopathic technic Let me think about it.

This is exactly why. I never always understood what she was saying but it only intensified the chemistry.

 

[Poki]

I didnt grow up poor, parents went from lower middle to upper middle in the 18 years i loved at home. They grew up poor though. My dad was the oldest, he took care of the siblings alot. He learned to sew to fix clothes they tore. He is very frugal and refuses to handle finances. He would be a millionare living in a shack if it was up to him.despite that he is very giving with his money to those he loves. He doesnt really care about or need money, my mom gives him cash and when she asks he says he has none, until i ask(as a kid) and he pulls out a couple hundred he has hoarded and smiles and laughs because he has been caught. Its been going on for years, my mom doesnt care. She manages the money, he just gets spending cash which he never spends.

Before he met my mom he was stuck in poverty due to acceptance. He just assumed thats how things are. Broke and shitty marriages So he really never tried to break out of it. My mom changed that. He hasnt touched alcohol since i was around 2 or 3 and he moved up in the work place as a mechanic. Worked 7 days a week most times for overtime which they dumped it all in retirement and lived below their means which was still above what they were used to. In 20 years they saved up enough to retire comfortably. They now live easy, no worries, go on trips every couple months. My dad is still frugal for the most part.

 

[PeaceBaby]

What is poverty? One person's definition is going to be another person's riches no doubt.

 

[RedAmazoneFriendZone]

This is exactly why. I never always understood what she was saying but it only intensified the chemistry.

She was probably french ....French are good "chemical sisters" actually...and you.... never understood either

 

[ZNP-TBA]

She was probably french ....French are good "chemical sisters" actually...and you.... never understood either

Not French but she was European. I like the sound of 'chemical sisters.' Sounds like a good name for a band or chick drug dealers. I understood her enough but we never connected mentally.

 

[laterlazer]

idk i wasn't like super poor, but i was definitely like mid-working class maybe and i believe our family experienced a little bit of social mobility, especially my parents (my mum had no job for a while and dad couldn't get one in uk not being a citizen but had a small business in our home country). i do the same kinda thing when things break or don't work, except i just kind of leave it as it is and try to work with the broken things to my best ability, my family does that a lot, even now when i believe my dad has more money, when things like lights stop working or stuff breaks they just kind of temporarily fix it with something or leave it alone until it's pretty bad or until my mum nags him enough to get someone professional to fix it (but tbh my dad is just hella stingy). we lived in a pretty rough area of london initially in a small 2 bedroom council flat, me and my sister in one room on a bunk bed, my parents and my brother cos he was still pretty young in the other. the area was pretty dirty, noisy and so-called dangerous but i feel like it made me less afraid of 'shady' areas.

one big thing i noticed through moving schools and houses into a more middle class area eventually, is that the smaller poorer laces are definitely friendlier with a better community feel, and i wonder why the correlation exists tbh. i suppose there are multiple reasons. but through being in my middle class school, i noticed so many things that the middle class took for granted and it bugged me in many ways, i think that because of my past in the poorer areas i'm very adaptable and take on things super easy when i'm disadvantaged, i don't let lack of money or resources or whatever get me down cos i know there's always a way to get through it and that life isn't over if i don't have these things. and i feel i'll definitely be better equipped for losses of finances etc than people who've lived middle class and higher all their lives. my parents know some pretty rich people from our home country and when their kids used to come over and we hang out it shocked me how easily they could rely on their finances to be there and how they splurged without thinking about it and i cant help but think of how much they'd struggle if the money was not there anymore all of a sudden. but mostly y'know jealousy

also i stalked a couple people from my primary school on fb in the past and it made me sad to see how some of them ended up living their lives, i distinctly remembered a couple of them who were smarter and more hard-working than me as kids and they didn't end up going to university or using their potential to the max, kinda pisses me off that things are that unfair because if some of these people had half the opportunities given to the middle class they could achieve so much.

 

[highlander]

I did not grow up poor. We were middle class. We lived in a small house - about 1200 square feet, three bedrooms and one bathroom. What I realized when I got older and had kids is that a small house does drive more interaction between the people who are in it and that is a good thing. What I found odd at the time is that my dad would talk about how much money he made but there never really seemed to be a lot to go around. It's not that we were wanting. We ate good meals and our basic needs were taken care of just fine. We didn't do things that a lot of my friends did. We didn't take vacations. There were five of them during the entire time I grew up and three of those were before I was six so I don't remember them well. We didn't go camping, didn't have a boat - didn't do much of anything as a family together - any kind of weekend outings or things like that. My dad worked for Ford so we always had pretty nice cars and got a new one every year. I remember learning at some point in college that my parents had saved no money for retirement. I was astounded. They also never saved up a dime for any of us to go to college. In the end, I was the only one of us three to finish college and my options were limited to a state university because anything else would have been cost prohibitive. My dad was building an airplane when I was a teenager and ended up having to sell his engine to help pay for it. That engine paid for about one year. In the end, I paid for about half of school between working full time in the summers, part time during the school year and taking out loans. I suppose it made me not take my education for granted. Because I never had any money in college, my girlfriends typically paid for me which seemed perfectly natural at time time.

I realize reflecting back where the money went. My dad was very frugal but my mom was not and didn't like to think much about money. Apparently when they got married she was buried in tens of thousands in credit card debt from buying clothes - like enough money to buy a house back then. Once I looked in her closet and she had 200 pairs of shoes. She went out to eat four to eight times a week - about half the time with all of us kids instead of cooking. We got our clothes at Marshall Fields which was kind of like the Nordsrom of its day when I was little (who does that? we mostly gave our kids hand me downs). The biggest thing was that she had a horse and I think a lot of money went towards that. It can be an expensive hobby. I guess it was a reasonable strategy at the time because my dad felt that the horseback riding and spending all day at the barn kept my mom sane and got her out of the house and away from us (she had BPD).

The thing that bothered me is it seemed like they they didn't plan for the future and spent money foolishly at times. We were not ever spoiled. I suppose that is good because it it made me want to work and make my own in the world. I guess the things I took away from it was that I never wanted to live in a house with one bathroom again (seriously), I was going to take vacations when I got older and we would do stuff with our kids, I wasn't going to waste a huge amount of money eating out and I was going to save money to have security when I got older. I was going to make sure there was money to pay for my kids education. As I've gotten older, I spend a lot more money on leisure time and hobbies. I like to have a nice car. I guess I should be careful about those things.

Interestingly, my parents have been fine financially because my dad had a really good pension. They just spent less money in retirement and continued to live month to month.