If you're poor it's basically your own fault, isn't it?

[ReputableBiscuit]

I'm so sick of this attitude, in society in general and on MN specifically. Some people just don't seem to have the imagination to realise that poverty is a complex thing and fucking hard to escape. 'Why don't you try budgeting?', 'how can you call yourself poor when you have a big TV?', 'give up smoking then you won't be poor'. 'Cook from scratch.' It's just not as simple as that. Unemployment, disability, mental health problems, social disadvantage, debt, benefits stoppages... none of these are magically undone by somebody writing a list of their outgoings or learning to cook a hearty potato soup.

[BettySwollocksandaCrustyRack]

Like I said, sometimes being poor is their fault, sometimes it isn't. You simply cannot put them all in the same box.

I know about smoking, I gave up years ago. I am sorry but if there is a choice between feeding me and my kids and spending god knows what every day on a packet of fags which is eventually going to kill me then I know what I would choose! You cannot waste £60-70 a week on fags and then moan you are poor. Stop.smoking.then!

[Ubik1]

It's stressful being poor. Sometimes drink, drugs including nicotine are a normal response to an environment which destroys any hope you ever had.

There really are lots of people like this. Who have chaotic lives, raised by chaotic parents with addiction/mental physical health problems themselves. Who have dealt with more age 18 than most mumsnetters deal with in a lifetime.

I also hate this idea that people are poor because of some weakness , some fatal character flaw, some lack of moral fibre that the more wealthy possess.

[MintyChops]

I'm with Betty

[Sparklysilversequins]

Of course you can have an opinion fun but how about exploring the reasons behind our current need for the welfare state and not just fasten on the idea that ALL poor people are feckless and make bad choices (eg smoking ) before you express that opinion?

[expatinscotland]

Here we go . . .

[newbieman1978]

It's the flip side to the "you've been lucky to get where you are" argument.

Both are intertwined though, people who have worked really hard at school and then worked really hard a uni and then go out and work really hard and have put themselves in the position where they have a decent standard of living are ofter told they are "lucky"

To be called lucky suggests that you have what you do based on a freak event rather than all the hard work you have put. It is quite annoying to say the least to be called lucky.

Being poor is hard and yes there are things you can do to address the situation.

[vickibee]

I always think of the pulp song when this comes up, dance and drink and screw cos there's nothing else to do. Common people like you. Being poor can happen to anyone, illness, redundancy etc so we shouldn't judge.

[Dwerf]

To be honest, I consider it my own fault I am poor. Bad decisions when I was younger set me on a bad path. Dodgy mental health for the last 25 years certainly hasn't helped, that's not my fault but I don't think I can attribute all my current situation on that.

On the other hand, I do budget and try hard to live within my means. I don't have a massive flatscreen (when my tv blew up the other week, I bought another from a charity shop for a tenner), my laptop was second hand, my tablet the cheapest on the market and my phone is quite basic. So the debts I've got are quite low for someone my age. I never use payday lenders or buy things in places like brighthouse. But we do occasionally eat takeaways because quite frankly, what's life without a treat now and again? It's certainly not every night.

I smoke too, though I'm trying to vape instead. I'm not even getting into that debate, I don't have any defence to put forward for that. I'm an idiot for that. I know it.

[rookiemater]

YANBU - my parents think like this and I used to.

The reason they do is because it is easier for them to believe that their relative comfort is because they work hard, rather than acknowledging that their is a basic discrepancy in the distribution of the world's wealth.

Sure some people are poor at prioritisation (sp?) but our BIL is on benefits and would struggle to work f/t due to complex health issues, although cannot be signed as such by his doctor as they are cracking down on alleged benefit scroungers.

We have seen how he has to make the right decisions, every single time he makes a purchase, in order to balance his money. When he doesn't, he emails us to do a Tesco shop for him, which we are happy to do for him. He worked hard - had a good manual job until he lost it due to ill health, the company closed in the UK a couple of years later anyway. Also unscrupulous companies prey on him - he sold his council house for a ridiculously low amount, paid huge rent, then was kicked out a year later, he is still paying insurance on a car he no longer owns for complex reasons. Thankfully his credit rating is now so bad that he no longer is given credit cards to rack up debt.

Yes some of it is his own fault - if he gets a lump sum he squanders it, but a lot of it is down to a poor system and companies being allowed to do what they want to the underclass.

[vickibee]

Newbie it is not luck, success depends on the socio economic group you were born into usually, born poor stay poor is typical. Accident of birth determines your luck, limited social mobility

[Sparklysilversequins]

"luck"? Or being born into a background where those opportunities are available to you? Where your parents have already been in that kind of background for years and are able to support you in achieving?

[Rebecca2014]

We are poor, we can't afford to pay our rent and bills. Electricity been threatened to be cut...why? husband self employed and work has dried up. If he bothered to sit down and have an give me the hard facts I would have got a job but instead he left it. His fault.

He now starting a job next month but we have to survive till then, cash day loans are the norm in this household..so you get why we are in bad cycle of debt, bailiffs knocking etc.

Help is sh** out there, you got love the government. Citizen advice are overworked and useless.

[roadwalker]

I don't think there is any real recognition just how disadvantaged some people really are
If you are unlucky and born into the wrong area and go to the wrong school it must be almost impossible to break out of it
You need to be taught the skills to cook/budget
I saw a thread on here about a 'girl called Jack'. The poster was disappointed that she had previously had a well paid job and I did desperately want her to be someone who had properly come from nothing and done good
I discussed this with a friend and she pointed out, rightly, that she had to have the skills to cook/communicate/blog/design etc
She was in terrible poverty but she had already gained such valuable skills

[RiverTam]

I'm ashamed to say it, but before I came on to MN I had very little - in fact no - experience of these kinds of levels of poverty, or indeed any real poverty at all, and my understanding of it was very limited and ill-informed. I had no concept of the multitude of issues that can get in the way of getting out of poverty, getting into work etc etc. The only thing I think I ever got right was that it's far worse to be poor in the country than the city (I'm a city girl).

[Thereishope]

I think extreme poverty is difficult to come out of. Your outlook on life is very bleak - no job, visiting the job centre every two weeks, shopping in the £1 shop and the corner shop, walking everywhere as you cannot afford the bus fare, spending time with friends who are in the same position as you, never leaving town.

A woman I met at my dd's school has a similar lifestyle. She is so young but stuck in a rut, no money, no social life, three dc and no support, living in a council flat in a grim area surrounded by others on benefits. She cannot see a way out and is constantly down.

Not smoking or drinking would definitely leave them with more disposable income but that is their vice. Life would present itself as even more depressing.

[ebwy]

I'm poor despite having a degree.

I'm too mentally ill to work, but not "disabled" enough for ATOS to agree (anyone want to employ someone who can't get anywhere further than the local school alone and will have panic attacks for the duration...? no?)

[tobiasfunke]

A lot of people like to think it's poor people's own fault because then they don't have to do anything about it or feel bad about it. They can dismiss them as scum. There is a general lack of compassion in society I think.

When I was a teenager in the 80's there was sympathy for the unemployed and those who claimed benefits- now they are all scrounging scum sitting at home on their lardy arses,in a fog of fag smoke, leading the high life with their giant tellys plotting how they can bleed the rest of us upright citizens dry.

Even if the poor people who smoked stopped they would just be marginally less poor. Giving up the fags isn't likely to suddenly make them well off.

This government's attitude to poor people and the welfare system in general is just making the idea of the undeserving poor even more ingrained. I despair.

[Smilesandpiles]

Oh goodie, just in time for the weekend.

[Pollycracker]

We don't have that much money but eat shitloads of takeaways. Sometimes the neighbours might think

BUT we rarely go out to bars/cinema/expensive restaurants etc (3 young DC!), we only have one car (which was a gift) and I barely spend anything on petrol, we don't have pets... It's relative isnt it?

[phantomnamechanger]

some poorer people do themselves no favours by being unable (deliberately or through sheer lack of common sense) to make the right choices. Too many see gadgets and the newest of everything as their "right" rather than a luxury. The number of sob stories/begging posts on freecycle asking for kids clothes or prams (in specific makes & colours, natch) or new TVs for the DCs bedroom etc, "sent from my iphone" beggars belief.

We are lucky - DH earns a very good wage. We don't have to worry about affording school uniforms or new shoes. Yet still we drive a very modest car (one car, not one each), and have one small TV - and its only an old style fat portable one! We drink less than one unit a week each. We have no x-box, PS or Wii - by choice - because we would rather spend that money on self catering uk holidays, music lessons and family days out to educational places. I'm sure we could not afford to smoke without making massive sacrifices. Likewise we would have loved to have one more child but realistically we decided for several reasons not to.

It really does annoy me though when people tar all "the poor" with the same brush - there is no comparing a singe mum who has fled abuse and is living in a hostel with her kids getting no maintenance for them, with the sorts who go on Jeremy Kyle with their copious tattoos and bling moaning about not affording fruit for their dozens of kids, and thinking they deserve the tax payer to keep them living in more luxury than many working families who struggle to make ends meet.

[defineme]

I think the channel 4 programme 'Secret Millionaire' was very clear about this.

Every single episode started with a millionaire that thought they'd become so through virtue of their uniquely hard work and cleverness.

Every single episode then showed the slow dawning of realisation that there were plenty of poor people working just as hard, being just as 'good' and just as clever as they were.

[expatinscotland]

Oh, pets! How could I leave that out? Staffies, of course.

[susyot]

"people who have worked really hard at school and then worked really hard a uni and then go out and work really hard and have put themselves in the position where they have a decent standard of living are ofter told they are "lucky""

The point is someone can do all that and still end up poor.

[SelectAUserName]

I grew up in the North-East during the systematic dismantling of the traditional industries (coal, steel, shipbuilding) and saw entire communities have the rug pulled from under them with nothing - no retraining, no investment - to replace what had gone before. How do you get a job when there are no jobs because your entire industry has disappeared on a national scale and you're now trained for nothing, and up against all the other thousands of people who were thrown on the scrapheap at the same time when a vacancy does arise? Those communities changed beyond all recognition; we're now onto the third generation of families who have grown up with no jobs, no hope, no male role models; having absorbed the message all too well that they're surplus to requirements and now being demonised for having become reliant on the welfare state that was all that was available to them when the plug was pulled. How can we blame them for having adapted to their circumstances, their environment?

There is also an increasing assumption that anyone 'poor'/on benefits has never "worked hard"; that they're lazy scroungers who have never done an honest day's work in their lives. That perception needs to change. Illness, disability, redundancy, fleeing a violent situation can all reduce someone who previously was just as much of a "taxpayer" as those sitting in judgement to vastly straitened circumstances.