to think that some people just don't get poverty?

[Ohsoworried]

I've seen a few posts recently where people earning a fair bit of money (think around 100k a year) are complaining that they're struggling with money, don't have enough etc. I DO understand that it is all relative but equally, for people like me on a low low wage, in insecure housing, wondering how I'm going to pay rent, having to stop paying in to my pension for the extra £30 a month etc it does make me cringe a little. Things are a little better for me at the moment but it has been hard and my secondment is up soon so back down to low pay. When I left my abusive ex I was living in poverty. And when I mean poverty I mean in a refuge, no job because I had to relocate, no money for a deposit to rent etc. It's the choice between being able to downsize your house, not go on holiday for a couple of years, make sacrifices but still live comfortably etc, compared with not knowing if you'll be able to afford your bills. Of course I'm generalising and I'm sure there are people out there who are genuinely on high wages but have high mortgage payments etc who are struggling. I do sympathise. But I don't always think this is the case...

I think you making assumptions about people and how they became wealthy.
It's a journey, some stories are fascinating.
I'll give you a brief example one of my dear customers was very, very high up in a company owned by one of America's elite families (Top 10). He has pictures in his house socializing with some very famous Hollywood A-listers. However, his background and his early life with his wife was one of living in what we would call squalor, in a glorified bedsit.
I think people forget how unluxurious life was way back when society began on its capitalist journey. One never knows what opportunities life will present to you.

But they were there. A couple of investment properties meant that they would never let you starve or be homeless. The main thing about me owning my own home is that my children will never be homeless, they can always stay under my roof. Too many don't have that and live on pasta and fishfingers permanently.

That was my point. Everyone has their blind spots due to their position in life.

We do live in a consumerist society

Doesn't matter if you got no food though

I can totally see how if you've been comfortable all your life, but not wealthy you would think you understood poverty.

We went from poverty to comfortable through an inheritance and luck. It's been a few years since we were poor and every now and then I find myself at the end of the month trying to stretch what I have left to manage groceries and a little day out with the kids and feel a bit hard done by. Which is ridiculous, obviously. But if I'd never had that period of poverty in my life, I probably would be moaning to friends about feeling skint.

I really don't think you can get it if you haven't been through it. The boredom, the constant level of stress. The amount of time everything takes because there's no shortcuts you can afford. Checking every single supermarket before you buy anything. The fear as you watch your children grow and you don't know how you'll clothe them. Constant mental arithmetic as you try to manage your utilities. The panic when post arrives or the door knocks. The lack of self worth. If you haven't felt the pressure of poverty 24/7 for months or years on end then you cannot know how it destroys you.

Jack Monroe is working on a #vimesbootsindex

Check out her twitter feed

Her week on food poverty is impressive

work not week

It's strange how DP can arrive here with nothing, just a bag, and make a life that isn't it.
I just think a lot of Brits are moaning bastards, my brother and his wife for one are just financially inept.

well i guess the people moaning about not being able to afford holidays have mixed up the definition, they are not in poverty,they are the squeezed middle.

The thing is middle class (whether in UK/US definition) encompasses quite a wide class from a family on 40k to a family on 150k. Also cost of living can differ quite a bit. i.e. DH and I are average in London but top 9-15% in the country according to income (for a couple). i am talking about the economic definition, which is unrelated to the UK definition of class which is based on background/education.

I understand that its quite grating for the truly poor to hear about the grouses of the middle income, but they are the majority of the population, though with the heating bills, the poor will probably be about 30% of the population (up from 20%)

The other thing that makes a difference is if you have someone to back you up. I was poor in the 70s. Two young children, high mortgage (for a two up two down Coronation St type house) and inflation running riot. But and it is a big but I knew if I was destitute I could go to my mum and get help. I didn't do it but it was good to know. I never thought was a difference this made until I was talking to someone from a single parent home and their mother died when she was a teenager. No extended family, no parents to turn to. It must have made it so much harder

I think you're right, in some ways. But I also think that it's unrealistic to expect people to exhibit bottomless capacity for empathy over things that they haven't personally experienced.

Whatever the disadvantage or struggle is - whether it's poverty, ill health, bereavement, social exclusion, estrangement from family, infertility - I feel it's important to remember that not having personally experienced it doesn't make someone a bad person.

Yes I agree, from experience at the other end of the spectrum. I mean if you dont go abroad for five years, another year is insignifcant, you get use to shopping from Aldi, not Waitrose, it becomes usual to never go out for dinner but batch cook etc. Its depressing but its normalised that you live on next to nothing.

I am no longer a single mum anymore (DD left home) and I have recently inherited. It still feels odd that I have money left over at the end of the month, for the first time in over a decade I have actually had a disposable income to spend. I recently splurged on fine dining with DD and have paid for a trip abroad for us, for us its a lot when every penny you spend for years goes on the necessities.

@ancientgran right now someone with a big mortgage would generally be someone who is at least of middle income due to affordability criteria. I mean a lot of the people with huge mortgages on million pound houses have at least £70k per annum salaries as they can often borrow 5 X of income which is basically 10X if it is a couple.

I mean a 2 up 2 down in my area is £600k-700k so someone who bought that recently would be at least middle income even in a London context.

Not really. The societal equivalents of the people you disparage here will also exist in your DPs home country, they just won't have been the ones with the skills, experiences and indeed luck to be able to emigrate and make a success of themselves. Healthy young people who have a lot of get up and go have always existed and there are always some people who beat the odds. Their existence doesn't add anything much to this discussion.

to be fair, these people are more likely to be tory voters so their anger is much more useful than someone who has been struggling since 2011 and who lives in a solid labour constituency (so the tories don't care about their votes).

I do enjoy their moaning much more, i hope they redirect their anger in a productive fashion!

I'm lucky enough not to have experienced poverty as an adult , low on money yes , unable to heat the house at all times , yes , but have always managed to feed and clothe our kids .
Poverty for me as a child meant no home phone , no car , no fire lit until the evening. As a small child in the winter / school holidays going to bed to read or try to sleep to keep warm in the afternoons . Having very cheap meals to fill us up like baked beans and boiled rice.

This brings two realisations to me, one, that poor people are always the architect of their own destiny, if they choose to work in a low skilled and paid job, if they choose to have low aspirations, if they choose to spend some of their limited income on a treat then they have only themselves to blame. They have not tried or worked hard enough. They lack responsibility, they lack something that makes them less able, less willing to change their destiny.

But if someone is earning more in a professional job, chooses a large mortgage, chooses a decent car, chooses two or 3 holidays abroad each year - they feel as though they deserve these things as well as having money in the bank, it then isn't about their choices it's then about things being unfair, being taxed too much, the cost of living being too high etc. They feel that they 'work hard' and always have and assume that anyone who doesn't have what they do just hasn't done the same.

My thought is that somehow, admitting that someone can work just as hard for little is worrying, because it may draw the conclusion that it's not all about the hard work element, it's about being valued, about your starting point in life and going deeper, about realising that as a society we need all levels of job for it to work, there is no one for a manager to manage, no matter how hard they work, if those beneath them are not there to be managed.
It's easier to write off people as irresponsible, lazy and uninspired to justify why they're poor, than to admit that actually they are very much a part of the whole chain that keeps society afloat and should have as much value as those earning more.

And two, a smaller but vocal and respected group actively use the lower paid people in society for their own gain, they are making money off the back of other people's hard work, and are celebrated for it, held up as examples of what hard work can do - but baulk at the idea that it's other people's hard work and their use of that, that gets them where they are.
As we're seeing in some industries now, when the people at the bottom of the ladder remove their contribution, the whole thing starts to collapse.

I think there are some situations where some people are so far removed that they just can't imagine themselves in the 'opposite' position.

I once had to advocate for someone because the company I worked for made a mistake with a number of salary payments and my boss proposed asking for the amount (about £500) back in one go because "it's not a lot of money". I pointed out that might be true for him (earning 6 figures a year) but for people like her (earning an average salary, single mother) it was a large sum of money to have to account for out of the blue.

A big mortgage is relative to what you earn.

We couldn't have afforded a shoebox in London but it was a big mortgage for us. Back then the standard for lending was 3 times annual earnings for the higher paid (normally the man) in a couple or 2.5 times the higher salary plus 1 time of the lower paid. The big difference was the interest rate so although in capital terms in would have seemed low compared to now (allowing for inflation) the repayments were very heavy. We bought at the time interest rates were high, we got offered a mortgage, the interest rate increased before we completed and we paid one month at that rate and then it went up again and again before the end of the year so we were in a position that what we could just afford became crippling in the space of six months.

You couldn't get a fixed rate at that time, alot of building societies had been burned by people getting a fixed rate for life in the 60s and rates were high and rising in the 70s. I worked with someone who was offered a decent lump sum by her building society to end her fixed rate deal.

I agree with everything you've just said.

I've often said that being wealthy is more about luck and connections than hard work.

I think most people work just as hard, if not harder, than wealthy people. They just get less (monetary) reward for their efforts.

A bit off topic but I found this chart interesting & a bit of an explanation as to why high income people are complaining about money worries.

This will be the first government in 50 years to have every income level see a reduction in their disposable income.

In 2005 when there was lots of 'squeezed middle' talk, people were seeing less growth in income but now it's actual decline.

Just had a look on rightmove and a 2 up 2 down in the area I was living in is now £185,000. The only difference is that is has double glazing, central heating and a lovely kitchen, I think they have extended the kitchen, plus a conservatory. We had rotten window frames, a gas fire and a sink unit and cooker in the kitchen.

House prices do vary across the country and always have.

The irony between places like the African continent is that THEY are in perpetual debt to US.

In other words, the global poor are paying back a lot of debt to the global rich which is our Western countries. Our countries, in turn, use this income to provide financial support to those in our society who need it.

In short, extreme poverty does NOT exist in the West.

But it does exist in places like the African continent. After all, they're in perpetual debt to our countries.

The point of the entire issue is that poverty IS relative.

Because for some people, the joke 'Enough of me talking all about me and how wonderful I am, let's hear what you've got to say... about how wonderful I am' is true and for them, they must centre every issue and experience about them. If they can't then they are uninterested.

I’ve been on benefits (both before and after being a single mum) and I’ve earned a six figure salary. I certainly know what it’s like to be poor but also to be reasonably well off. My experience of being poor though means I never feel comfortable spending. I’m always watching the cash.

i think some people will never understand being poor. But I do think too that just because you are better off doesn’t mean you can’t post your money worries on mn. Everyone’s problems are important to them and pretty much everyone can compare themselves favourably or negatively to someone else.

I have family in the developing world op. To some of them, the poor in the uk have great lives and opportunities. But ofc that’s not the reality when you’re living it.