Absolutely spot on. One of the things my wife taught me, and allowed me to escape from my poor environs was to simply stop trying to fulfill expectations of the

Absolutely spot on. One of the things my wife taught me, and allowed me to escape from my poor environs was to simply stop trying to fulfill expectations of the poor people I grew up with and re-purpose the skills I had for being poor into skills that I could use to generate wealth. "You don't get rich by spending money" she used to say. It helped that she grew up fairly wealthy, but her parents had pulled themselves out of abject poverty within their own lifetimes -- they still had the kinds of ingrained penny-minding skills they grew up with, but had used it towards positive effect. For the first two years of my marriage, we sat on the floor, ate off of a re-purposed used coffee table somebody gave to use for free. For the first year we slept on an old mattress on the floor until in the second year we finally bought a bedroom set that was ridiculously discounted and that allowed us to move our clothes into some kind of organization. It felt weird having friends over, since we couldn't offer them anyplace to sit but the floor, but you get over it.