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

[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.)