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It may seem counterintuitive, but being able to cut your bills down like that is often a privilege. Poverty is a trap and it is hard to move somewhere cheaper w

It may seem counterintuitive, but being able to cut your bills down like that is often a privilege. Poverty is a trap and it is hard to move somewhere cheaper when you don’t have enough money to buy a car. You can say “don’t spend your money” all you want but when money is tight you make concessions on things, and it usually leads to higher costs down the road. Cheaper products have to be bought more frequently. Bad cars bought break down sooner. This leads to debt trouble as you borrow from your future to pay for expensive costs now, leading to more fees later. The best money management still can’t predict the unexpected and when you’re barely making it month to month even the slightest setback can have rippling consequences that roll you deeper into debt. It’s really easy to say “just move and stop spending your money lol” but it really is often more complicated than that.

betwixthewires 6y ago
It does seem counterintuitive. Would you be able to elaborate on that? What mechanism exists that makes it hard for me to live cheaply but someone else to not? I've lived very poor in my life and this argument that for some people there's no way out doesn't compute, at least not if you live in the west. I've never met a person that cannot pull themselves out of those traps that wasn't caused by discretionary spending and bad impulse control, not in the west. Ive met legitimately poor people in third world countries that are actually stuck due to societal systemic problems. But every person I've met in the US that can't seem to make their lives better, there is always some mismatched priority that keeps them that way.