It's expensive to be poor

[firecat]

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-nobody-tells-you-about-being-poor/

I expected all the comments to be "you deserved it, you shithead," but only the first one was like that. The rest of the first page of comments were pretty sympathetic. I didn't continue past the first page.

ETA: Warning for rape jokes

ETA2: The gist of the 5 things:

5. You Get Charged for Using Your Own Money
(you need a banking account to function, and banks charge fees, especially if you overdraw your account, and it's easy to overdraw your account because you never know when charges are going to be taken out)

4. There is an Industry That Profits by Keeping You Poor
(you might have no choice but to use a payday loan business, which charges usurious interest rates)

3. No Credit Can be Just as Damaging as Bad Credit
(if you have no credit record, you are at risk of being turned down for rental housing, you might need to put down deposits for utilities, you might pay higher interest rates on auto loans or be turned down for auto loans)

2. Your Next Expensive Disaster is Always Around the Corner
(it's hard to save money because "bad shit happens like clockwork. Not because God hates you, but because you're poor and you're using cheap shit that breaks.")

1. You're Always in Survival Mode
(service jobs pay badly and don't offer benefits. it's difficult to make ends meet when you work service jobs)

Comments

[branewurms]

Jfc that article makes me want to dig a hole and crawl in and never come out. It's too inescapably true.

[amadi]

Gah, that depressed the hell out of me. So true, and I see it all around me.

[lilacsigil]

Makes me very happy to be Australian. Not that we don't have a lot of things in that article (the bank fees on small accounts was only abolished this year!) but at least we have public healthcare, workers' compensation, it's mandatory to provide sick leave (except to casual workers, and you can't keep people on casual for very long) and no fire-at-will unless you earn more than $100,000/year. Our system is still pretty poor compared to some European countries though - single parents and disabled people in particular are screwed over, and our housing market is horrendously expensive.

[firecat]

I'm glad it's not so crazy everywhere.

[originalpuck]

I'm so glad there were funny moments in the article, because otherwise I would've just raged the whole time I read it. These things are so very obvious that it infuriates me so much that privilege blinds so many people to them. I just - gargh! My wife posted this to her FB last night, and one of her friends started going on about bootstraps and how the article writer must not have TRIED HARD ENOUGH, and it was really rage inducing, and, and..... /ragequits

Ahem. The article is very true to my experience of poverty. I could handle less rape references, though.

[firecat]

bootstraps and how the article writer must not have TRIED HARD ENOUGH

Yeah, that's what I see in a lot of conversations about this. And I'm not quite sure why people get so vociferous about that. Maybe because they don't want to think about it happening to them?

I could handle less rape references, though.

Good point. I should have warned about that.

[branewurms]

Maybe because they don't want to think about it happening to them?

That, and because they don't want to acknowledge that there are uncontrollable factors, such as disability, that make it impossible to "try hard enough" (whatever that even means). This delusion provides the double-benefit of assuring the judgmental person that being poor is the poor person's own fault, and therefore the judgmental person is absolved of any guilt or distress at the poor person's plight, and also of assuring the judgmental person that this couldn't possibly happen to them, b/c they're responsible, unlike those people.

Acknowledging that there's actually very little control one has over one's own life, and many factors are up to sheer chance, is absolutely terrifying. Unfortunately, some of us don't have the option of pretending it isn't true, since we have to stare that fact in the face every day.

[firecat]

Acknowledging that there's actually very little control one has over one's own life, and many factors are up to sheer chance, is absolutely terrifying.

Yeah, I guess that's it.

After I crossed that line it became hard to remember what it was like on the other side.

[bibliofile]

Yeah, that part's quite difficult to arrive at forcibly, which is how it usually happens. And to live with after you figure it out, in some ways (mentally, mostly).

Thanks for summarizing so that clicking through's optional!

[sauscony]

I read this last week and I think it would have worked a lot better for me if it wasn't just one giant rape joke. And of course I found it very depressing because that was my life from the ages of 5 to 24.

[firecat]

Good point about the rape jokes.

[adrian_turtle]

I'd like to applaud the article because I agree with the main points...but I'm really uncomfortable with the framework of rape jokes. Somehow, "you're getting cheated by banks and big business" gets twisted to look like "you're getting raped by a bank teller [looks like a woman]" or "you're getting fucked over by a clerk [young man with a come-hither sneer]". The victims the reader is supposed to identify with are men. The article seems to be taking something true and important, and trying to use it to build resentment against the sexual power of women and gay men...I don't like it.

[firecat]

Very good points about the rape jokes, and the misogyny and homophobia of the metaphors the article uses.

[eggcrack]

Cracked.com will always make me feel a little (or a lot) uncomfortable, but their articles tend to make good points and share good info. This was one such article, and a depressing one. Still, thanks for sharing it!

[firecat]

Cracked.com will always make me feel a little (or a lot) uncomfortable

Yeah, I feel the same way.

[kshandra]

Having had to miss my not-quite-4-year-old niece's dance recital this past weekend because we couldn't afford the $5 tickets, I think I need to not read this right now.

[firecat]

*hugs*

[kshandra]

Thanks.

[dr-brat.livejournal.com]

I have a friend who has become very close since DWH died and watching his life has been a real eye-opener for me for exactly the five reasons above.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Thank you for including the summary. The original, while compelling, is decidedly not worksafe due to language.

[flarenut.livejournal.com]

There were a few more stupid comments, but not bad considering.

(And the piece doesn't even get into the non-disaster corrollaries to #2)

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

I experienced a tiny bit of that when I was unemployed. The default way to get your payments in Illinois is via a debit card. You get charged a fee for checking the balance on the thing, and have to jump through hoops to establish direct deposit to your checking account instead.

I had to drag in my State Representative to get direct deposit, and I wrote angry letters to the governor and attorney general.

Barbara Ehrenreich talks a lot about this in Nickel and Dimed. Poor folks pay a lot more renting "cheap" hotel rooms instead of apartments because they can't afford a down payment. (And down payments are higher because they don't have credit, and so on.)