I grew up relatively poor, but have managed to work my way out of it. The reasons behind being poor and staying poor are complex. But one of the common themes

I grew up relatively poor, but have managed to work my way out of it. The reasons behind being poor and staying poor are complex. But one of the common themes is basically poor impulse control, and growing up seeing more examples of this than examples of what good impulse control looks like can be profoundly influential. When my wife and I were first married we were among the poorest I've ever been. We had a very small, very spare apartment, and I wanted a couch...bad, because it seemed that we needed one. My wife (who grew up in a fairly wealthy family) simply put her foot down and we simply sat on the floor for the first two years. It kind of sucked, but there was at least one-time where the money we would have spent on a couch ended up keeping a roof over our heads and she was proven correct. The friends I grew up with, who remain poor, struggle to make rent, but have top of the line smart phones with expensive plans, buy new furniture constantly, have apartments full of sports memorabilia or expensive knife and sword collections and so on. Many of them have buried themselves into MMOs, often paying for multiple accounts and multiple computers to use them with. I know people who got into a local college, decided not to pay the tuition so they could instead outfit themselves in head-to-toe suits of armor so they could walk around the local Renaissance festivals, and then lost the entire suit when they couldn't pay the bill on the self-storage place they were storing it all in.