if you can’t afford 5% you are so poor you should be living at home or in the streets. lmaoo go sell the computer you typed this on if you are really that poor off.
But if you are poor, you either don't have a computer, or you bought a $150 new laptop at Staples which you thought was a great deal, but is ridiculously slow, has a 5 minute battery, and gets destroyed by a 10 year old Thinkpad X230. Being poor requires you to buy lots of reasonably priced junk just to get by. Your daily life is just full of substandard things that wastes time and money, and increases stress.
And internet isn't free if you have outstanding payments with the sole internet provider in your area. (This is not hypothetical, by the way.)
Could you have possibly put less thought into this comment? If this guy needs 5k to stay afloat for the next month, then he must have been taking home at least that much. He's not poor by any means.
If you think a green bubble is the only thing that will mark you for that 5%, that people will judge, you've never been, or known anyone, that was poor.
You simply have no understanding of what it’s like to be poor in this country. In a lot of ways it’s more expensive to be poor than to be middle class— you get hit with higher interest rates, more fees, more things like inspection tickets for your car that you can barely keep on the road. A single emergency room visit is enough to bankrupt some people.
I’m making well into six figures now, but in my early 20s, I was living pay check to pay check and barely had enough to eat some weeks. If I managed to scrape up an extra $400, I had a hundred things to spend it on that weren’t a rainy day fund.
That's not poor, that's absolutely impoverished. Poor doesn't mean you can't afford the basic necessities to live like a human being - the guy in your picture doesn't live like a human being, he lives like trash. Living like a human being doesn't just mean having two arms, two legs and breathing, it means living like everyone else - apartment, tables, chairs, a toilet, fresh running water, electricity, fridge, TV, PC, internet (well maybe not in america with your internet prices).
Poor isn't when you're with one foot in the grave, poor is when you have little money and a low income. That doesn't immediately make you a background character in a Dickensian novel who dies of hunger on the streets of New York. That doesn't mean having a fridge to store your food in is some frivolous expense - fridges are a basic necessity. A PC is a basic necessity if you want to get anywhere. What else would you deny people just so you can label them poor and feel nice and fuzzy in your heart knowing you're giving a tuppence to a guy who'll die a poetic death on the street? Clothes? Beds? Houses?
At one point in my life the IRS estimated my income to be a whopping -$500. I could barely feed myself and my wife, who was constantly sick because we couldn't afford insurance or medicine. There weren't any simple things in life back then, because literally every day was a struggle to survive. I would walk to work and she would drive to work. We pulled in a combined $1000 a month and rent alone was well over half that. And we were not living in a luxurious house. It was a roach infested hell hole.
Being poor is about a lot more than just not being able to afford an iPhone. And it's extremely offensive for someone to suggest otherwise.
You don't even have to be rich to have trouble understanding the poor. I am middle to upper-middle class, and I once found myself in a delicate situation: my desktop's PSU had given up the ghost and I urgently needed a new one. My savings were illiquid at the moment and I had to pay a building contractor a few days before, almost emptying out my checking account, so I had to literally calculate how much I could spend on a PSU to afford groceries until my next paycheck without dipping into any form of credit.
That was a completely alien feeling, and I still can't imagine how taxing it must be to budget everything, to juggle expenses and loans, to knowingly miss due payments, to be one speeding ticket away from literally not having enough money to feed your family and to be in that state not just for one week or one month, but for years and years.
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