This all seems very hyperbolic to me. You're painting it as being a matter of judging rather than useful, lived advice.
For the first five years of my adult life I wouldn't have even considered spending $5 on a coffee, or a take out sandwich, or whatever. It felt like a ridiculous sum of money. When I visit parts of the UK that aren't awash with wealth, it still does.
I genuinely did think of it through the lens of - not doing that meant that I could quite rapidly save a month's rent, then a few months' rent, and so on.
Would it make me a millionaire? No. Certainly not in isolation. But it would break my fall if I were to become unemployed, temporarily ill, etc.
And that initial spark of starting to save, having a buffer, not going homeless if I lost my job for a month or two or six, was an essential ingredient in me becoming what you seem to call 'The Haves'.
$5 a day for 5 years is over $9K. Non-inflation adjusted. You could stick it under a mattress and that's still six months rent here in London or a _year_ if you share a flat. It's genuinely a large amount of money.
If I'd spent my whole life chucking money at everything that came my way I'd still be poor because I would never have been able to risk switching jobs, moving, I very well could have ended up homeless in periods when I left work for a while, etc. Living paycheck to paycheck is basically suicide. You have to make hay whilst the sun shines.
Until I had a decent amount saved I essentially did not have discretionary income. I felt it was frivolous. That has worked out for me and I see no reason why it wouldn't work out for others; as such I believe expressing my opinion to be useful advice, and it is rather odd to have that lived experience be painted as "moralizing".
Absolutely this. My wife and I both grew up very poor and even though we've worked up to being relatively well off in adulthood, we both still have a mindset in certain contexts that's very similar to this article.
It's very scavenger-like and I suppose we may lose it if we manage to stay well off long enough, but it definitely colours our decision making even in little things. Being poor definitely stretches beyond the literally financial.
You didn't learn much at all then. To think that being poor and having a tendency to make bad decisions, is just a matter of having developed negative personal habits throughout your life is just plain naive and ignorant.
Poor people are not just personally poor, they were raised by poor parents who taught them different values, albeit seemingly dumb ones (though I know a lot of poor people who are wayyy happier than a lot of wealthy people I know following the note card). They were taken to crappy schools, if their parents took them, or made them go at all. They were fed all sorts of unhealthy food their whole lives. They're lied to relentlessly by businesses saying things are healthy, will help them, or are good decisions (always campaigns run by wealthy people taken advantage of poor people).
They have everything around them working against them, and some dumb, naive, asshat, born to the middle class, thinks (s)he was poor for a little while and it was kind of enlightening and fun, ignorant guy telling them to put money in a 401k. Will it put rims on my car, because that would make me happy? When I'm 65? Fuck that.
Had a 'poor' friend I'd hang with at the University Library. He somehow would get fast food or restaurant food, he worked at a car wash and his uncles cleaning company.
Met him in 2014, and in 2017 he had a panic when he was kicked out of his house. He came over for a moment and asked for any spare change, gave him ~5-10$.
I was eating raw ramen and protein shakes, always cooked at home. Saved like crazy(and worked). No college debt. Graduated, life is good.
5$/day is enough to pay for many months of rent.
>pretending that saving $5 could make any kind of difference.
This is the difference between the wealthy and poor. The poor can't visualize that 5$/day-> thousands of dollars.
That's true. It may be that they grew up poor, or it may be that they're just "poor" psychologically. I dunno. I have a lot of these tendencies, but I got lucky (I now feel).
Poor are not staying poor by their "struggle to prosper".
Poor are staying poor by keeping doing things that keeping them poor, like getting further down in debt, not acquiring new skills, not being productive and not expressing their creativity.
And of course rich have their habits as well.
Give money to poor guy, take all the money from rich guy and see where they are in in 5 years. Chances are they'll be back to their original platoes.
I have a friend like this. She is successful, has an Ivy League degree in engineering and has very high income. But she grew up poor and makes terrible financial decisions. They largely seem outside of her control.
I speculate that growing up in poverty is not the cause of behavior; rather it's the reverse. Her family behaves in particular ways that make them poor and she has inherited those traits, either biologically or environmentally. From talking with her about how her family operates, this seems to be true. They have very low income but buy a new 4K HD TV every year along with trading up their vehicles to new models. They manage everything by an ever expanding debt load collateralized on their house/credit cards. I don't think these behaviors are 'breakable' because they aren't habits. It's almost like they are built into the default mode network.
In situations like this, when you can observe your behavior as something beyond your control, the best bet is to influence your environment rather than your behavior. Put your money beyond your easy reach (401k, IRA, pay down mortgage early etc.)
I personally struggle with eating behavior that is beyond my control. The only way I've been able to successfully control it is to put a lock on my kitchen cabinet that I don't have the combo to. This acts as a big moderator that gets me through the self destructive impulse periods.
>my first world poor friends...are all bad with money
This is a well documented phenomenon.[0][1] The state of being in poverty has a significant effect on your cognitive processes evaluating risk and reward and future planning. For people who grew up in poverty, those programmed biases can be extremely challenging to overcome and limit their upward mobility. There's also the aphorism that it's "expensive to be poor." The boots metaphor and all that.
As to building wealth at a good rate, doing that from a state of relative stability vs a state of relative poverty are two entirely different scopes. "Escaping poverty requires almost 20 years with nothing going wrong." When 5 years of savings can be wiped out by a car repair that means you can't get to your job, you can lose 5 years of progress in one bad event.[2] The problem with that statement is whether it "is possible to live within your means." It can be exceptionally challenging and complicated to live within your means while impoverished but still move upwards and respond to emergencies and disasters. And it's doubly much to ask that kind of complex planning from someone affected by the deleterious cognitive effects of poverty documented above.
more than that, what if you don't dislike who you are?
I grew up very poor, to the point of living in tents on the side of the river, living without electricity or water, etc (this is in the US).
fast forward 25+ years and I make more money than I could have ever fathomed. And yet, I still feel more comfortable living like I'm poor because the money is a security blanket. If left to my own devices could easily live off of 30k today, the only thing that stops me is my gf of 10+ years doesn't want to live like that. We've made compromises, one of them is we don't spend money willy-nilly without a strong justification.
You'll hear people talk about the tendencies of poor people who come into money and how they couldn't let it go, as if it's a negative thing. But you know what? fuck that, it's my strength.
I can't speak to your specific situation, I'm just commenting that I agree things that poor situations can sometimes give you strength and if not strength then maybe you as a person like who you are, don't feel the need to change because someone tells you to.
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