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One of the things that suck most about being poor is that you need to have money in order to save money. You need to have enough money to buy a certain level of

One of the things that suck most about being poor is that you need to have money in order to save money. You need to have enough money to buy a certain level of quality, and if you don't have it, you're forced to buy cheap stuff that breaks more easily (thus spending more money in total). I found this aspect hard to understand for others, the attitude often seems to be: "you don't have to be poor, you simply need to invest wisely!" This is true if you are free to choose to buy a new shirt now or save a bit and buy it later. But if you are running out of shirts now, you don't have that choice.

kjellsbells 4y ago
Terry Pratchett wrote about this, and apparently the concept has its own economic theory named for it now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
- fbdab103 4y ago
  Might as well quote the relevant blurb, > The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
roflyear 4y ago
Isn't just that either. When you're poor you don't have the proper clothes. You ruin good clothes doing hard work.
- Mezzie 4y ago
  And good luck getting a better job without nice clothes, a decent haircut, and some makeup (if you're female). But if you buy those things, you're being 'wasteful'.
bparsons 4y ago
Being poor is really expensive. This is something rich and middle upper class people never can really grasp. The cost of credit, unstable housing situations, having a car that breaks down all the time etc. all conspires to keep you poor. As the OP points out, when you are below the threshold needed for "basics", the interest on your debt is always higher than any return on any hypothetical investment you might make with savings (which you can never justify allocating). American society is great at convincing people that this is their personal moral failing, rather than a system designed to keep the maximum number of people as debt slaves.
- ReactiveJelly 4y ago
  I think this is part of why buying a house is cheaper than renting - The credit check and down payment just filters out poor people.
- klenwell 4y ago
  Good example of that here: https://www.cnn.com/2015/03/06/us/ferguson-missouri-racism-tickets-fines https://www.cnn.com/2015/03/06/us/ferguson-missouri-racism-t... So began an odyssey with Ferguson police, municipal court and city hall that left her with $1,200 in fines that to this day she still doesn’t fully understand. She paid the sum because endless court hearings about the car wore her down. “I don’t have a lawyer. I’m not a lawyer. It’s me going up against the city of Ferguson when the attorneys won’t help,” Hoskin said this week. From a NPR story: Earlier this year, in the series Guilty and Charged, NPR's investigations unit found that the practices in Ferguson are common across the country. The series reported that nationwide, the costs of the justice system are billed increasingly to defendants and offenders, and that this creates harsher treatment of the poor. Because people with money can pay their hundreds or thousands of dollars in fines and fees right away, they are usually done with the court system. https://www.npr.org/2014/08/25/343143937/in-ferguson-court-fines-and-fees-fuel-anger https://www.npr.org/2014/08/25/343143937/in-ferguson-court-f... It's one of things that boiled over with a lot of the civil rights protests.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  "the interest on your debt is always higher than any return on any hypothetical investment you might make with savings (which you can never justify allocating)." This wouldn't necessarily be the case if poor people had access to 401(k)s with matching contributions. But even when they do have "access" to investment accounts it's really rare to have matching contributions of any kind. And yeah, even if they had it they still couldn't necessarily afford to pay into it. When I finally had excess income I got a guaranteed ~10% rate of return by paying off my credit card debt. And that's what I did instead of investing. (That, and buying a new mattress.)
troupe 4y ago
It is a similar situation with buying a car for $500 that will require lots of repairs vs. a more expensive car that will give you a lower cost per mile. While this does add some drag, in most of the situations I've actually seen, it isn't the main barrier to getting out of poverty. The main barrier seems to be a culture or mindset that prioritizes short term benefit/feelings over long term benefits even when there are other options. For example, things like getting a dog, signing up for cable TV, getting an unnecessarily expensive new phone, spending money on going out to eat, etc. For many people in poverty, their experiences make these decisions feel very rational so it is hard to think any differently.
- bluedino 4y ago
  > For example, things like getting a dog, signing up for cable TV, getting an unnecessarily expensive new phone, spending money on going out to eat, etc. In a way, people without a lot of money need to "learn how to be poor" When you're low on money, you eat sandwiches and ramen and beans and potatoes. You don't eat McDonald's or get Starbucks.
  - notRobot 4y ago
    Ah yes. "If only these people would abstain from the joys of eating fucking McDonald's, they'd no longer be poor."
    - unethical_ban 4y ago
      A double quarter pounder meal is $11 with tax in Texas. I'm not poor but I'm realizing just how insane it is to eat out regularly now.
      - bluedino 4y ago
        I remember working retail years ago, and having co-workers that would get fast food for lunch. They're spending 3 hours (after-tax) of of their minimum wage pay on lunch. How much sense does that make?
jl6 4y ago
Ironic that hire-purchase / instalment plans are designed to solve this problem but end up making it worse because they're usually only available at predatory rates, due to the huge risk of default. Lenders and borrowers alike can’t rely on the borrower having a source of income at all. For most people on a low income, it could be better to be on an even lower income if in exchange that income could be made more reliable. The instability and stress of precarious employment is worse than the low pay.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  > they're usually only available at predatory rates, due to the huge risk of default. This seems contradictory: if rates are sky-high, but they need to be that high to avoid the lenders losing money due to the huge risk of default, then they're not predatory.
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    Predatory on those who pay, not predatory on those who default. What's predatory on those who default is the pay-to-play system of credit bureaus. Credit makes the modern economy run, but it churns out winners and losers. And some types of credit have more winners or more losers. At what point should society start banning such credit? Just once it crosses over into loan-sharking? Once it results in a net decrease of GDP? Have such analyses been done?
retrac 4y ago
The lack of reward for planning (by virtue of not having the resources since they're always insufficient and tied up in more immediate concerns) similarly promotes a very detached and immediate lifestyle. I have $50. $50 can mean I have fun tonight. $50 does nothing for me next week except maybe let me buy some food, which I can probably scrape together another way. So I'm going to have some fun tonight. The notion that they should save this and set it aside is unrealistic (it's going to go to some surprise expense that always exceed total income). The norm is always having insufficient resources to meet needs under constant anxiety. So check out from time to time when you have the means to briefly alleviate this by splurging and pretending for 6 hours that you're not in this circumstance. From that perspective, the alternative is being just as poor and not having the brief splurge. Living for the day is quite a sensible life philosophy in such circumstances, really.
- nescioquid 4y ago
  Had humans the life-span of a mayfly, it might be tolerable to have this discussion every season. Nearly 30 years ago, Clinton's "welfare as we know it" reforms were being normalized by the likes of the New Yorker/Atlantic/NPR smart set who were doing the heavy "interpretive labor" of explaining why poor trash waste hundreds of dollars (careful, those are 1990's dollars!) on crap like track suits and sneakers which ultimately reduced to so much status-quo-affirming "empathy". These discussions focused primarily on black people, not more generally on poor, disenfranchised people. The message was that you needn't worry about it because it was a "minority" problem. Since then, how has the conversation permuted? It has simply become more performative and more mired in the vocabulary of race. Now that it is a problem of race, not class, one merely needs to be "empathetic", which, incidentally, is free. During Clinton's reign, the discussion about the regression to a society with classes like the 30's (upstairs/downstairs) was handled more abstrusely than the easy pre-chewed treacle about racism/welfare (much easier to mouth platitudes or diatribes about black people or the villian du jour than address the fundamental unfairness between capital and labor). Whatever is systemic has to do with power, and power cares not a whit what you look like, how you talk, or what hole you prefer to fuck or be fucked in. People need to stop looking at the color or location of their fuck-hole and simply find solidarity in the fact they are fucked. But this, like the possibility of the public lending-library being invented today, is nil.
agumonkey 4y ago
Totally. And sadly it's a universal principle. Under a certain threshold everything becomes exponentially harder. Same goes the other way, having just enough capital gives you life altering contexts, you have time, multiple attempts, less risk/higher comfort, advice, network..
CobaltFire 4y ago
See “The Sam Vimes “Boots” Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness”: The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness. -Sir Terry Pratchett https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
- opportune 4y ago
- Aunche 4y ago
  It's easier to make economic theories that fit science fiction rather than real life. The Vimes boots problem has already been solved by financing. Services like Affirm would allow Sam Vimes to pay the $50 boots in 4 biweekly installments of $12.50. If the theory were correct, then buy-now-pay-later programs would help alleviate poverty, but what we see instead is that it worsens it by enabling consumerist purchases.
  - p0pcult 4y ago
    Who qualifies for zero interest financing?
    - king-geedorah 4y ago
      Exactly, the interest rate on affirm is pretty high starting at 10%
j7ake 4y ago
I remember reading an old Cracked article describing how expensive it was to be poor. Eg overdraft fees, bad quality goods, no access to proper healthcare…
eimrine 4y ago
> One of the things that suck most about being poor is that you need to have money in order to save money. > This is true if you are free to choose to buy a new shirt now or save a bit and buy it later. But if you are running out of shirts now, you don't have that choice. Do you have any better example? Shirts can be bought used. I do not consider myself as being in poverty but often I use to buy something used, especially if I know how to fix what is broken.
ianai 4y ago
“A warm man can never understand a cold man.” From “one day in the life of Ivan D.” Telling poor people to simply make better choices is downright shameful. Close though is the “effective altruism” crap when it goes so far that even holocausts can be excused. We should be trying to make the current moment sustainable and better for all. Aim for giving people enough stability to actually make decent decisions before worrying about petty things and far off futures.
edelans 4y ago
"It's expensive to be poor"
tomcam 4y ago
Closely related: people who say money can't buy happiness. Yeah fuck you. No one who was ever poor says that.
- blackgirldev 4y ago
  No, money doesn't buy happiness. A combination of hope, access, and money support happiness. Without those three ingredients, you have a serious handicap to a stable life. I make more money now than I ever did, and expected to be much happier. My pandemic "depression" has killed my hope and that money is not making me happy. Anecdote is not data: understood.

kjellsbells 4y ago

Terry Pratchett wrote about this, and apparently the concept has its own economic theory named for it now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

fbdab103 4y ago
Might as well quote the relevant blurb, > The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

roflyear 4y ago

Isn't just that either. When you're poor you don't have the proper clothes. You ruin good clothes doing hard work.

Mezzie 4y ago
And good luck getting a better job without nice clothes, a decent haircut, and some makeup (if you're female). But if you buy those things, you're being 'wasteful'.

bparsons 4y ago

Being poor is really expensive. This is something rich and middle upper class people never can really grasp. The cost of credit, unstable housing situations, having a car that breaks down all the time etc. all conspires to keep you poor. As the OP points out, when you are below the threshold needed for "basics", the interest on your debt is always higher than any return on any hypothetical investment you might make with savings (which you can never justify allocating). American society is great at convincing people that this is their personal moral failing, rather than a system designed to keep the maximum number of people as debt slaves.

ReactiveJelly 4y ago
I think this is part of why buying a house is cheaper than renting - The credit check and down payment just filters out poor people.
klenwell 4y ago
Good example of that here: https://www.cnn.com/2015/03/06/us/ferguson-missouri-racism-tickets-fines https://www.cnn.com/2015/03/06/us/ferguson-missouri-racism-t... So began an odyssey with Ferguson police, municipal court and city hall that left her with $1,200 in fines that to this day she still doesn’t fully understand. She paid the sum because endless court hearings about the car wore her down. “I don’t have a lawyer. I’m not a lawyer. It’s me going up against the city of Ferguson when the attorneys won’t help,” Hoskin said this week. From a NPR story: Earlier this year, in the series Guilty and Charged, NPR's investigations unit found that the practices in Ferguson are common across the country. The series reported that nationwide, the costs of the justice system are billed increasingly to defendants and offenders, and that this creates harsher treatment of the poor. Because people with money can pay their hundreds or thousands of dollars in fines and fees right away, they are usually done with the court system. https://www.npr.org/2014/08/25/343143937/in-ferguson-court-fines-and-fees-fuel-anger https://www.npr.org/2014/08/25/343143937/in-ferguson-court-f... It's one of things that boiled over with a lot of the civil rights protests.
anonymouskimmer 4y ago
"the interest on your debt is always higher than any return on any hypothetical investment you might make with savings (which you can never justify allocating)." This wouldn't necessarily be the case if poor people had access to 401(k)s with matching contributions. But even when they do have "access" to investment accounts it's really rare to have matching contributions of any kind. And yeah, even if they had it they still couldn't necessarily afford to pay into it. When I finally had excess income I got a guaranteed ~10% rate of return by paying off my credit card debt. And that's what I did instead of investing. (That, and buying a new mattress.)

troupe 4y ago

It is a similar situation with buying a car for $500 that will require lots of repairs vs. a more expensive car that will give you a lower cost per mile. While this does add some drag, in most of the situations I've actually seen, it isn't the main barrier to getting out of poverty. The main barrier seems to be a culture or mindset that prioritizes short term benefit/feelings over long term benefits even when there are other options. For example, things like getting a dog, signing up for cable TV, getting an unnecessarily expensive new phone, spending money on going out to eat, etc. For many people in poverty, their experiences make these decisions feel very rational so it is hard to think any differently.

bluedino 4y ago
> For example, things like getting a dog, signing up for cable TV, getting an unnecessarily expensive new phone, spending money on going out to eat, etc. In a way, people without a lot of money need to "learn how to be poor" When you're low on money, you eat sandwiches and ramen and beans and potatoes. You don't eat McDonald's or get Starbucks.
- notRobot 4y ago
  Ah yes. "If only these people would abstain from the joys of eating fucking McDonald's, they'd no longer be poor."
  - unethical_ban 4y ago
    A double quarter pounder meal is $11 with tax in Texas. I'm not poor but I'm realizing just how insane it is to eat out regularly now.
    - bluedino 4y ago
      I remember working retail years ago, and having co-workers that would get fast food for lunch. They're spending 3 hours (after-tax) of of their minimum wage pay on lunch. How much sense does that make?

jl6 4y ago

Ironic that hire-purchase / instalment plans are designed to solve this problem but end up making it worse because they're usually only available at predatory rates, due to the huge risk of default. Lenders and borrowers alike can’t rely on the borrower having a source of income at all. For most people on a low income, it could be better to be on an even lower income if in exchange that income could be made more reliable. The instability and stress of precarious employment is worse than the low pay.

josephcsible 4y ago
> they're usually only available at predatory rates, due to the huge risk of default. This seems contradictory: if rates are sky-high, but they need to be that high to avoid the lenders losing money due to the huge risk of default, then they're not predatory.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  Predatory on those who pay, not predatory on those who default. What's predatory on those who default is the pay-to-play system of credit bureaus. Credit makes the modern economy run, but it churns out winners and losers. And some types of credit have more winners or more losers. At what point should society start banning such credit? Just once it crosses over into loan-sharking? Once it results in a net decrease of GDP? Have such analyses been done?

retrac 4y ago

The lack of reward for planning (by virtue of not having the resources since they're always insufficient and tied up in more immediate concerns) similarly promotes a very detached and immediate lifestyle. I have $50. $50 can mean I have fun tonight. $50 does nothing for me next week except maybe let me buy some food, which I can probably scrape together another way. So I'm going to have some fun tonight. The notion that they should save this and set it aside is unrealistic (it's going to go to some surprise expense that always exceed total income). The norm is always having insufficient resources to meet needs under constant anxiety. So check out from time to time when you have the means to briefly alleviate this by splurging and pretending for 6 hours that you're not in this circumstance. From that perspective, the alternative is being just as poor and not having the brief splurge. Living for the day is quite a sensible life philosophy in such circumstances, really.

nescioquid 4y ago
Had humans the life-span of a mayfly, it might be tolerable to have this discussion every season. Nearly 30 years ago, Clinton's "welfare as we know it" reforms were being normalized by the likes of the New Yorker/Atlantic/NPR smart set who were doing the heavy "interpretive labor" of explaining why poor trash waste hundreds of dollars (careful, those are 1990's dollars!) on crap like track suits and sneakers which ultimately reduced to so much status-quo-affirming "empathy". These discussions focused primarily on black people, not more generally on poor, disenfranchised people. The message was that you needn't worry about it because it was a "minority" problem. Since then, how has the conversation permuted? It has simply become more performative and more mired in the vocabulary of race. Now that it is a problem of race, not class, one merely needs to be "empathetic", which, incidentally, is free. During Clinton's reign, the discussion about the regression to a society with classes like the 30's (upstairs/downstairs) was handled more abstrusely than the easy pre-chewed treacle about racism/welfare (much easier to mouth platitudes or diatribes about black people or the villian du jour than address the fundamental unfairness between capital and labor). Whatever is systemic has to do with power, and power cares not a whit what you look like, how you talk, or what hole you prefer to fuck or be fucked in. People need to stop looking at the color or location of their fuck-hole and simply find solidarity in the fact they are fucked. But this, like the possibility of the public lending-library being invented today, is nil.

agumonkey 4y ago

Totally. And sadly it's a universal principle. Under a certain threshold everything becomes exponentially harder. Same goes the other way, having just enough capital gives you life altering contexts, you have time, multiple attempts, less risk/higher comfort, advice, network..

CobaltFire 4y ago

See “The Sam Vimes “Boots” Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness”: The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness. -Sir Terry Pratchett https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

opportune 4y ago
Aunche 4y ago
It's easier to make economic theories that fit science fiction rather than real life. The Vimes boots problem has already been solved by financing. Services like Affirm would allow Sam Vimes to pay the $50 boots in 4 biweekly installments of $12.50. If the theory were correct, then buy-now-pay-later programs would help alleviate poverty, but what we see instead is that it worsens it by enabling consumerist purchases.
- p0pcult 4y ago
  Who qualifies for zero interest financing?
  - king-geedorah 4y ago
    Exactly, the interest rate on affirm is pretty high starting at 10%

j7ake 4y ago

I remember reading an old Cracked article describing how expensive it was to be poor. Eg overdraft fees, bad quality goods, no access to proper healthcare…

eimrine 4y ago

> One of the things that suck most about being poor is that you need to have money in order to save money. > This is true if you are free to choose to buy a new shirt now or save a bit and buy it later. But if you are running out of shirts now, you don't have that choice. Do you have any better example? Shirts can be bought used. I do not consider myself as being in poverty but often I use to buy something used, especially if I know how to fix what is broken.

ianai 4y ago

“A warm man can never understand a cold man.” From “one day in the life of Ivan D.” Telling poor people to simply make better choices is downright shameful. Close though is the “effective altruism” crap when it goes so far that even holocausts can be excused. We should be trying to make the current moment sustainable and better for all. Aim for giving people enough stability to actually make decent decisions before worrying about petty things and far off futures.

edelans 4y ago

"It's expensive to be poor"

tomcam 4y ago

Closely related: people who say money can't buy happiness. Yeah fuck you. No one who was ever poor says that.

blackgirldev 4y ago
No, money doesn't buy happiness. A combination of hope, access, and money support happiness. Without those three ingredients, you have a serious handicap to a stable life. I make more money now than I ever did, and expected to be much happier. My pandemic "depression" has killed my hope and that money is not making me happy. Anecdote is not data: understood.