I grew up relatively poor in the U.S. under wildly different family circumstances, but I felt myself nodding to the solutions and approaches of both your mother

I grew up relatively poor in the U.S. under wildly different family circumstances, but I felt myself nodding to the solutions and approaches of both your mother and yourself -- some out of recognition, some out of familiarity. I've found it almost impossible to enumerate the ways in which growing up poor wildly alters your mindset about money. It's literally mind altering and often nonsensical or hard to explain to people who haven't been through it. My wife, who grew up in a fairly wealthy household (to parents who themselves escaped crushing poverty), has tried to train me to avoid many of those instincts now that I myself am in good financial status. But I still take a weird kind of comfort at least browsing local thrift stores, figuring out what we'd absolutely need in case of a major bankruptcy or working over scenarios on how to survive and get housing if we lost everything. The industries that prey on the poor basically exist because they've managed to use these instincts against the poor rather than trying to get people out of poverty. They've always been there, but I'm afraid that they've become much more sophisticated at extracting pennies from people with mere dollars.