Reply to Why is "money management" always brought up and used against the poor?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I grew up poor and what I don't think gets emphasized enough in conversations like this is the extent to which "money management" is not something that children who grow up in poverty are taught at home. The idea of "saving money" every month was totally foreign to me until I was in my 20s because that was the first point in my life that I ever experienced having anything left over to save at the end of the month.

Budgeting when you are living in poverty looks a lot different than when you're not living in poverty. A lot of things that people on this board consider essential budget categories (e.g., retirement funds, college funds, emergency funds) are simply not things that people living close to the edge are able to prioritize. When you are poor and your car needs $200 in repairs, sometimes what that means is that you don't have a working car for a few weeks, which then also means you have to figure out somehow to get from point A to point B.

I also think that most upper middle class people have a fairly skewed sense of value. You may see a person taking a SNAP card out of a MK purse at the grocery store, or a person with a fresh manicure and an iPhone, and what you maybe are not seeing is the church donation bin that the purse came out of, the cousin/sister/auntie who works as a manicurist, and the reality that the iPhone provides a home phone line as well as an internet connection, both of which are basically essential in 2017. Similarly, a poor person looking at an UMC person will see things like your nice car and your nice clothes and your house that you own and not see things like student loan debt or high mortgage payments. [/quote]

But does it really have to be an iphone?[/quote]

You're comment is really worthless. What was the point of posting it? [/quote]

The point is that iPhones are very expensive and the same "essentials" could be obtained with a significantly cheaper android phone.[/quote]

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