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The difference between ‘broke’ and ‘poor’
- entwife 8y agoThe author didn't talk about the difference between wealth and income. That, to me is a key distinction in understanding people's choices and possibilities. I'd call someone who lacks income, broke, and one who lacks access to resources, poor. The article merely talked about different degrees of lack of income.
- pmorici 8y agoThis article would have been stronger if it simply addressed the issue of poverty directly and dispensed with the nit picking over the words broke and poor. I also disagree with the assertion that her middle class friends were using the word wrong or that broke was an apt description of their financial situation. Broke is a a synonym for bankrupt or being in bad debt. If someone says they can't afford something which is what was being expressed when someone says "I'm too poor" that doesn't mean they are broke.
- johnminter 8y agoThis is an important distinction. CBS reports [1] that a $500 emergency expense would put most Americans in debt. Our consumer-focused economy with easy credit lures people into purchases that they cannot afford. Many spend without careful thought and purchase homes, electronic devices, automobiles, and college educations that they cannot afford to repay. My wife and I had little savings when I got out of graduate school. Neither of our parents had taught us about budgeting. I found books that taught us how to make a monthly budget. The authors stressed the importance of working together to plan a budget and setting a goal of saving for an emergency fund that would eventually cover six months expenses. We drove our old car until it was too expensive to repair. Eating out was a rare treat. I carried a bag lunch to work. We bought a used tent and camping supplies for a vacation. We had a used B&W TV for years. We were able to purchase a modest house. We never upgraded to a bigger one. A careful lifestyle helped us get our kids though state universities with no debt. In time we could add more "fun" items because we had a buffer. We were still careful. My employer had perennial layoffs. We knew I could be laid off at any time. Happily, I was ready to retire when my time came (My company went from 65,000 employees in our city to less than 1,700 when I was laid off). I have a friend who ran his own computer business and counseled (free of charge)many families with money problems. His conclusion was that lack of money was not the biggest problem these families had. He concluded that poor management of what they had was a bigger problem. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/most-americans-cant-afford-a-500-emergency-expense/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/most-americans-cant-afford-a-50...
- thow16161 8y agoAny unexpected expense can knock you down when you're on the edge. Unexpected expenses are how people become homeless. I am friends with a camgirl who is a prime example of this. In her case, she made a go of full-time camming, and thought she was doing well. What she didn't understand is that the site she worked for paid her as a contractor and withheld nothing. She never thought much about taxes, and all her previous jobs had withheld taxes, so she didn't pay quarterly estimated taxes. Last month, when she went to file her taxes, she realized she owed thousands. She has been struggling to pay this while other unexpected expenses mount (car repairs). She's struggling with the decision on whether to pay her taxes or her rent, and is about to become homeless. The super irritating thing to me is that she had a gofundme setup for her friends and family to donate to help with her tax issue. The campaign was going well (close to 50% complete) but gofundme took it down and refunded all the donations. This was likely because they don't want to be associated with sex workers, and she apparently had a link to it from her cam-site page.
- thow16161 8y agoThat reminds me: Does anybody know of any US crowdfunding sites that are not hostile to sex workers? That seems unlikely after FOSTA, but it does not hurt to ask, and I figure this would be the place to do it.
- a1369209993 8y agoBitcoin? It doesn't really have a crowdfunding site per se, but "people who moral guardians hate" is basically the number two reason for its existence, right after "people who lawmakers/financial regulators hate".
- thow16161 8y agoSure, but bitcoin may be hard for her grandparents friends at church to figure out, for example. Heck, I've worked for tech companies, and I can't figure it out. Gofundme is comparatively easy to explain.
- xeromal 8y agoPoverty especially sucks when you're all alone like it seems this person was. Where I grew up, most of the people were poor, but we had rich lives for the most part. Lots of family dinners and outings. The people with more would let you take the leftovers home. You can't really train this and we all definitely need a social safety net, but I do think our closed off society prevents us from helping each other too.
- loblollyboy 8y agoExactly - I’m from upper middle class and while this meant I was lucky enough to go back home when unemployed, all my peers were just career oriented and it’s very lonely to be ‘a loser’ - I recently moved in w some old coworkers/friends in a diff city who are from a diff socioeconomic background. At first they just let me stay in the apt, now I make more than them (though not a lot). We share like family and look after eachother. Sometimes I wish I made more, like the other day when we were all posting our salaries, or when I browse ‘Who’s Hiring’ - but other ppl are more important than anything (unless you’re like a genius or something), you can lose work, money, etc. The internet can make you feel more isolated, being isolated can make you crazy - you need people, mostly to talk to, but also to depend on and to help in turn.
- WoodenChair 8y agoI’m surprised you would even think your experience is comparable enough to the person in the original article to post in this thread. She was sick, had a disabled child, and no safety net. It sounds like you were single, healthy, with no dependents and an upper middle class family as a safety net. Perhaps there are other hardships you didn’t explain? How is your anecdote relevant to a discussion surrounding the issues the woman in the original article faced? Yes, being alone sucks. Is that your point?
- crumpets 8y agoReread the comment you replied to and it’s parent, then decide if shitting all over the comment was still appropriate. Op’s very first sentence admitted how relatively privileged he/she was.
- sudhirj 8y agoLeaving aside the politics of a universal basic income, would a UBI have helped or hindered this person? Do most UBI schemes assume that healthcare subsidies would stop for instance, and the money be redirected to the UBI? Or would the income be on top of whatever healthcare subsidies already exist?
- rfugger 8y agoI think the article is a good example of why universal healthcare would have to remain in place when UBI is implemented. UBI is unlikely to be enough to afford quality healthcare.
- ghaff 8y agoOr even some base level of healthcare for anything remotely serious. It's implicit in UBI that it would have to be paired with something along the lines of universal Medicaid. Otherwise, an income that is truly base--say $8K/year in the US--is not going to have any real slack to cover healthcare.
- _bxg1 8y agoAgreed. There are two types of healthcare expenses that insurance is important for: 1) massive, unexpected ones, which $1000 a month would be useless towards, and where the word "insurance" actually makes sense 2) recurring costs like doctor appointments, prescriptions, and teeth cleaning, which could arguably (but still probably shouldn't) be lumped in with UBI #2 can still wreck someone who's truly poor, to be clear, but the author's case sounded more like #1
- majewsky 8y ago#2 should not be lumped in with UBI since the costs wildly fluctuate between people. A 25-year-old person will have fewer preventive checkups than a retiree or a small child. And people with chronic diseases have way higher recurring medical expenses than people without. My bookkeeping shows that I spend two weeks' worth of salary per year on medications, most of which is for keeping my chronic ailments in check.
- chimi 8y agoWith all the hands out on that web page, I think it's The Guardian that's broke.
- mhh__ 8y agoThe Guardian isn't run like most newspapers
- chimi 8y agoClearly. A full page piece on a semantic argument. Most newspapers don't waste our time like that. There's nothing of value in that article.
- PorterDuff 8y agoThey probably didn't pay her very much.
- unionpivo 8y agoMaybe you are just not the target audience. I don't consider stories like that waste of my time.
- mhh__ 8y agoIgnoring that (in the UK) the Guardian is probably influential newspaper of the last few years (Breaking large stories), most do. Newspapers can't just sell news anymore, it's not profitable. Besides, do you not try and expose yourself to opposing views? Maybe not applicable here, but opinion pieces are important.
- Buldak 8y agoMy impression from the author's description of her friends is that they aren't broke either. >I often hear my friends say, “I’m too poor” when they’re frustrated about what they can’t have. Maybe it’s a trip they can’t afford, a renovation they want to start right now or a pretty pair of shoes they spotted in a shop window.
- rfugger 8y agoAnd this is in Canada, where the author's surgery and other medical care was covered in full by universal health care. Without that, her situation likely would have been far worse, and yet we can still do so much better.
- microcolonel 8y agoTo be fair, this person would likely qualify for Medicaid in the U.S. Also, in Ontario there's a healthcare-specific tax which is not eligible for credits like normal income tax, but instead uses a standard deduction like the U.S. Federal income tax.
- scarface74 8y agoI use to work for a company that facilitated in home nurse care for special needs children. The majority of our reimbursements were from the government.
- bryondowd 8y agoThe bar for Medicaid for a two person household in most states was $22,715. Pretty good chance she was over that.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y agoI was under the impression that Canada’s health system does have a yearly deductible for perceptions at least. $750 I thought. Edit: Yes, this was for BC or Alberta and is still the case in at least one of those.
- pcdoyle 8y agoIt's different in every province. The Federal Government has a very narrow jurisdiction in Canada, and healthcare is not in it. In BC I pay for my prescriptions but it's heavily subsidized for most of them.
- hackermailman 8y agoEvery province has their own system, some provinces extort their population with all kinds of fees/deductibles and some don't depending on how shady the regional ruling regime is. This article is about Ontario's system but there's much worse, such as looking up the FVRD's policy of ordering hospital beds be turned faster by using a taxi to dump patients, sometimes in different jurisdictions https://globalnews.ca/news/5033260/chilliwack-mayor-fraser-health-homeless/ https://globalnews.ca/news/5033260/chilliwack-mayor-fraser-h...
- 0xcde4c3db 8y ago> I often hear my friends say, “I’m too poor” when they’re frustrated about what they can’t have. Maybe it’s a trip they can’t afford, a renovation they want to start right now or a pretty pair of shoes they spotted in a shop window. I'm pretty sure I've literally never heard someone describe that as being "poor". Maybe this is some regional language thing?
- tgb 8y agoI think this article (and I've seen another before just like it about the poor/broke distinction that had a really powerful piece about mental math while buying groceries) do a disservice to themselves by focusing on the usage of two very common, widely used words. It's fine for words to have multiple meanings in different contexts and those meanings are defined by usage. If people say "I'm too poor to get a pool membership" then that's what poor means, at least in some contexts. Prescriptivism of common, mundane words is a terrible way to make a point. The author is hiding their real point, which would be still more powerful without this unnecessary baggage. See what we're discussing instead of what the author probably wanted us to discuss? If she wants a distinction, then there are other words or phrases (chronically poor, perhaps?) with more specific meanings. But it is fruitless to get "heartbroken" that people don't understand a distinction that isn't common use.
- freewilly1040 8y agoSeems like these kinds of articles always need to have a scold or a guilt trip associated, though I’m not sure it’s irrational of the author. We are discussing it, aren’t we?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cm2012 8y agoI've heard this often growing up in NYC.
- johnkpaul 8y ago
- tyingq 8y agoI have noticed there's been some progress on reducing the stigma when you're poor and are surrounded by those that aren't. When I was young, free and/or reduced school lunch paper punch cards were a different color than normal paid ones. Similar for food stamps, WIC, etc. Now they are all plastic cards that don't look obviously different from the cards the people with money use.
- jstarfish 8y agoEBT moved to discreet debit cards more for ease of accounting and disbursement than recipient dignity, but WIC still uses stacks of paper checks that have to be run as a series of discrete transactions. They're embarrassing to use, almost more trouble than they're worth. It's obvious when people are paying with it-- the conveyor belt is lined with bunched groceries and paper slips while the line behind the customer backs up into the aisles.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tyingq 8y agoAs with many things in the US, varies by state. Many states do have WIC cards that work like a debit card and many grocers have support for a single checkout process with two swipes.
- ryanmarsh 8y agoIn my early 20's I had a girlfriend who was raised in Colombia and immigrated to the US in her teens. I remember one day recounting some bullshit middle-class slogan about how "it's better to be poor and happy, than rich and sad". She slapped me across the face and yelled at me. Passionate as she was she'd never done anything like that before. She told me what it was like growing up so poor you can't afford toothpaste. She basically gave me the whole "you know nothing John Snow". She described what a hard life it was. She'd take anything over that life. She also wasn't poor in a 1st world country with community pools and libraries. Being poor in a 3rd world country is a whole other level.
- cm2012 8y agoYou're both right. Research shows that more money doesn't make you happier - after around 80k a year in family income. Before 80k a year (depending on location, etc, I think that was the average for the USA), every dollar absolutely makes you happier with a linear line graph. This is also a great argument for more marginal taxation.
- yyyymmddhhmmss 8y agoIf 80k/yr is considered poor, then sure, but that’s absurd. She was right. He was wrong.
- cm2012 8y agoTotally agree, I should have phrased it better.
- zaroth 8y agoThat’s funny, because when I read “every dollar absolutely makes you happier with a linear line graph” I immediately thought of marginal tax rates. The fact is that marginal effective tax rate approaches 100% at various points on the first $80k of household income. If you are a family of 4 and require any health care, the first $80k is practically treading water. This is because you lose out on $500/mo in food stamps, at least $2,000/mo in healthcare subsidies, and pay over $17,000 in total taxes. That’s not including various other programs you might qualify for as a family of 4 with zero income versus programs you no longer qualify for after earning $80,000. On top of that, it actually costs a lot of money to go out and earn that $80,000 (direct, indirect, and opportunity costs) which eat into the very little money that actually remains after taxes and disappearing subsidies. Here’s a CBO analysis on marginal effective tax rates for a single parent with a single child which shows gross income vs effective income — see how it flattens out? [1] The marginal effective tax rate is higher the more children you have. This analysis does attempt to take cost-sharing subsidies for health insurance into account, although it’s not clear what level of health care utilization they are modeling. The most fascinating thing about the curve on slide 6 is how “After-Tax Income” starts at about $19k (the value of the govt subsidies) and by the time the parent is earning $60,000 has only increased to about $40k (66% effective tax rate), and there is a point on the curve where slope is negative — earning more leaves you worse off! [1] - https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2018-06/54093-taxrates.pdf https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2018-06/54093-taxrates.pdf
- vondur 8y agoI grew up poor. I don’t know how my dad managed it. I’m thankful every day that I don’t have to worry like my parents did.
- jmkni 8y agoLikewise. My parents raised myself and my siblings well, and somehow managed to give us all a good education and life despite both being on minimum wage. As an adult, I'm angry at my younger self for being annoyed at the things I used to be annoyed at, now I realise I couldn't have done it any better (probably a lot worse). Luckily, we are all doing well now, and we have a good relationship with them, and get to pay it back via buying them gadgets, sending them on holidays etc, and just being there for them.
- tedmiston 8y agoWe work in a very fortunate industry with respect to economic mobility. I've seen many people in tech go from a lower class or lower-middle class socioeconomic upbringing (myself included) to reaching a much more stable and comfortable point. This is why I'm so excited for startups like Lambda School that allow more people to cross over even if they couldn't afford to take on the financial burden of an engineering degree. The aggregate economic impact on people's lives is astounding.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- zimablue 8y agoI thought that the article was going to make the more relevant distinction between "transient low income/wealth" and "reasonable expectation of permanently low income/wealth". If we're going to specify a useful word, I think that's more interesting than what she's saying about "so little income it impacts your life stability" vs "low disposable income". I don't think it's useful for this woman to call herself poor, she had an explicitly transient state of unusually high outgoings and low income. She never looked down the barrel of 20 years of the same situation.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- scarejunba 8y agoThe prevalence of charity is evidence of the failure of society to provide equity of opportunity. That's okay. I prefer proportionality to equity, personally. But the ideas that everyone must be given a chance to make it are incompatible with the absence of the welfare state.
- rdiddly 8y agoI've been where this author has: selling off stuff and wondering how to pay rent, waiting in line for free food, donating blood plasma for $15, walking everywhere because it's cheaper than the bus, getting arrested for not paying child support. Nonetheless apparently I had it ass-backwards in my head: rather than "poor" I mostly still considered myself what this author would call "broke" the whole time. Maybe it was denial, maybe I was just another "temporarily embarrassed millionaire." But I adhered to the thought that I didn't belong in that situation, that it was temporary. Regardless, poor and rich are relative terms; it's a continuum. You can never be "poor" and you can never be "rich." You can only be poorER, or richER, than somebody else. But there will still always be someone else poorER or richER than you. Ask Steve McQueen if he's rich, and he'll say well I'm not as rich as Paul Newman. Both dead now of course, but they once squabbled over who would get top billing in The Towering Inferno. I think what I'm saying is that in some way, "poor" is in your mind, and as soon as you consider yourself poor, you are poor. I still wouldn't fault the author's friends for saying they're "too poor" to afford something; it is literally true. They're "rich" enough to afford food, sure, and I guess that offends the writer's sense of victimhood. The whole drama of this piece takes place in the writer's mind. It's a story of falling tragically from a place of privilege. People are "poor" every day and don't feel the need to write an article about it and nobody asks them to.
- cableshaft 8y agoYour last paragraph is spot on. I definitely had a "I'm too poor" mentality for most of my 20s (I did some similar things to the author of the piece, but without the kids), and that mindset was definitely a limiting factor in my life. I was always too poor to do anything I wanted to do. I even considered myself too poor to date anyone, so I just didn't. Now that I'm in my 30s looking back, and even though I'm more financially secure now it seems like I had a lot more freedom then and could have done a lot more then, possibly more than I can afford to do now (because now what I'm poor in is time and energy, not so much cash). I still managed to do a few interesting things in my 20s, but not as much as I would have if I could reverse time but with the knowledge I have now.
- ddebernardy 8y ago
- cperciva 8y agoAs tragic as this story is, let's not pretend that it's commonplace. A disabled single mother of a disabled child? She won the reverse lottery.
- xtiansimon 8y agoI agree words matter. I'm working as a bookkeeper and broke is when you're spending more than you make wether you're making < 22k$/year or > 500k/year. Poverty is a completely different animal. "Sometimes I splurge and make homemade hot cocoa. [...] every week we give to the food bank..." ?? Land-o-Lakes hot cocoa mix is $1 at my local grocery store. What kind of hot cocoa are you making lady?
- wutbrodo 8y agoIt says "homemade hot cocoa", so it might mean from chocolate or something? Not really sure
- leg100 8y agoSeems increasingly the marginalised , feel it necessary to take it out on the not so marginalised, to police their language, to compel them to appreciate their lot, even to make them feel shitty, for wanting a pair of shoes, as if this would make their lot in life better, to make the world "more equitable". How about the old fashioned approach of targeting the rich and powerful? Or is that considered too difficult now. I couldn't give a damn about the difference between broke and poor. Changing their use isn't going to change a damn thing, just as changing how words are used has never changed a damn thing in the whole of history.
- stillbourne 8y agoI came up from poverty and its a trap. I grew up in a trailer park with parents that didn't care how well I did in school, who I hung out with, what I did away from home, where I was most of the time or when I came back. They treated me like a burden not a part of the family. At least not the TV families I saw growing up. Started smoking with the neighbor kids when I was 15, started drinking shortly after. There were no examples to me of life outside of that, I couldn't comprehend what life was outside of being a fuck up. Until I met my uncle. He was a former cop turned SysAdmin @ TCI he introduced me to a side of computers I didn't know existed. I envied what he had, I daresay I coveted his gear and his lab and his stuff. I had been a run-away about 4 or 5 times from the time I was 10 well when I saw that life could be different I decided to run away one last time. I moved in to his house and he taught me a lot of what I learned, not about computers specifically but about learning how to learn. How to teach myself. I eventually got fed up with him being a bit of a strict hardass about everything. I mean, dude was a cop. Everything I did had to be by the book in terms of life outside the house. I ended up just kind of traveling around the country with my gypsy blooded estranged mother, started a pretty serious drug habit for a bit. But all the time I kept thinking about computer stuff. I kept learning, and eventually I got fed up with my situation. I took a look at my mom's boyfriend and at the time I thought he was pretty cool but one day I was smoking pot with him and I looked at him, like really for the first time. I saw a dude that paid child support to 3 different women, who, if he wasn't dating my mom, basically lived on other peoples couches. He worked at a winery and made less than I made @ McD's. I looked at him and then I asked myself, do want to be this dude when I'm 45? I stopped all drug use except the occasional drink, spent all my free time learning the stuff that my uncle had been trying to teach me and moved back to my old home town. These days I'm actually a Developer which I never thought I could be. I'm content that I made it out, but I know that my case is unusual. I've driven through that trailer park occasionally and I still see familiar faces more than 20 years out. The truth is we're all poor. If your not making $300k a year you are no better than a generation away from trailer trash. I mean look, here they were, two brothers, grew up in the same house with the same opportunities and I was born to the crappy one. I made it out basically on accident. The difference between being rich and being poor these days is generational, not situational. I disagree with this article, its not that you are broke, it is that you are poor, unless you're filthy stinking rich, you are still one generation away from trailer trash.
- purplezooey 8y agoThe way this guy lives sounds extremely stressful.
- helsinki 8y agoI lost interest after she states that she donated to charity.
- FiddlyPack 8y agoBut why?
- ali-tny 8y agoWhy? If you disagree with giving to charity, does that invalidate the rest of the article? Or are you suggesting that it was financially irresponsible to give to charity? If the second, I think that this is wrong. She had a 6 month emergency fund - the (presumably) relatively little she gave to charity is unlikely to extend that runway very much. I think (some of) the point of the article is that true poverty is living a life in which your _needs_ are greater than your means. A little extra runway isn't going to help you in the long run there. Once you're in this position, often through no fault of your own, you become stuck in a cycle of poverty. Rhetoric about poverty that implies that the poor are financially irresponsible I think is very damaging. No amount of fiscal responsibility could have shielded her from not being able to earn once she became sick, and having her costs drastically increased due to having a disabled child. I don't think it should be possible to find yourself in a situation where you cannot provide for your families needs (ie, food, rent etc) and we should be working towards creating a society where this is the case, rather than labelling poor people as financially irresponsible.
- helsinki 8y agoNothing to do with charity, poverty, socioeconomics, etc. I simply lost interest in her article after it began to read as a self-serving 'look at me, I donated to charity!' post.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
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