People who grew up poor but are now financially comfortable

Rae said:
My mother was very good at sewing, it was mostly dresses for me and my sister. That was when we were still in early grade school. We got compliments on our clothes. As we grew older, it was store bought clothes. We didn't have people making fun of us. Maybe we lived in a different time or place at that time of our lives.
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Yeah, that area was full of both "old money" (old San Francisco families who'd made their money back during the 1849 Gold Rush charging miners $25 for a loaf of bread and $100 for a shovel) and "new money" (all those engineers working in the defense contracting industry making more money than anybody in their families ever had). Don't know which was worse, the old money or the new money.
 

I've only been to a fancy expensive restaurant a handful of times in my life. I look at the prices on the menu and I don't care how good the food or the atomosphere or service is, or the fact that I can afford it now, I'm miserable. Yesterday I was at the grocery store and I looked at the rib eye steaks. Damn! $20 and change per pound! And this was at frickin Walmart! I do love me some ribeyes. And I can afford it. But I just can't bring myself to pay that much. So I picked up my usual package of hamburger.
 
I was the youngest child so my parents financial situation was better by the time I came along. However, my sister said they always lived in a decent home and always had enough to eat. She does remember having a limited amount of clothes and some were secondhand from other people.

Expectations were much lower for the average family when I was a kid. There were five of us and we lived in a 1200 square-foot home. Vacations meant that you either went to visit family or you drove up north a few hundred miles and rented a cabin for a week. Most people never could afford to fly anywhere.

As a child while my mom always had enough to eat, she only had two outfits to wear. One was for school and one was for home, and the school outfit had to be hand washed and hung to dry every night.

After we were all grown up and they had more money She had a very nice wardrobe. It was very important to her to have nice clothes, purses, and shoes. I’m sure that is left over from not having enough clothes as a child.

Having a big wardrobe is not important to me, but then I’ve never had a shortage of clothes either. Childhood wounds can really affect a person for their whole life.
 
I didn't grow up poor but my parents certainly did. My father was a Depression Baby. He lived in a boarding house in rural NC with his parents and two brothers. My mother grew up with no indoor plumbing and she gathered water from a stream. They had an outhouse.

My father was determined to better himself and went to college at age 15. He later became a success in his field and they moved into a nice neighborhood when I was 8 years old. My father had no hesitation spending money on my mother and me for essentials but he was always very frugal when it came to himself. He used to pick up spare change off the floor and out of pay phones until he passed away.

When he passed away in 2000, he and my mother had a nice house but the same furniture they'd had for 40 years. I bought my mother new furniture so she would have a fresh start. She loved it.

I've never "skated" in life. My father taught me if I wanted something I had to work for it. I mowed lawns and detailed cars when I was a teenager. I road a bus to school with Elementary and Secondary kids when I was in High School. I got my first car when I had earned it. My father's frugality taught me how to appreciate what I have.
 
Yes, I grew up in a very frugal environment. We lived on tight budget. Now I have the money to live comfortably. But I am not into fancy cars, designer outfit etc. I live alone, spend my time by myself, no friends or families, so I rarely eat out. But I buy organic food and go on trips. When I pass, whatever money left will go to charity.
 
Teacher Terry said:
I was the youngest child so my parents financial situation was better by the time I came along. However, my sister said they always lived in a decent home and always had enough to eat. She does remember having a limited amount of clothes and some were secondhand from other people.

Expectations were much lower for the average family when I was a kid. There were five of us and we lived in a 1200 square-foot home. Vacations meant that you either went to visit family or you drove up north a few hundred miles and rented a cabin for a week. Most people never could afford to fly anywhere.

As a child while my mom always had enough to eat, she only had two outfits to wear. One was for school and one was for home, and the school outfit had to be hand washed and hung to dry every night.

After we were all grown up and they had more money She had a very nice wardrobe. It was very important to her to have nice clothes, purses, and shoes. I’m sure that is left over from not having enough clothes as a child.

Having a big wardrobe is not important to me, but then I’ve never had a shortage of clothes either. Childhood wounds can really affect a person for their whole life.
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Our vacations when I was growing up were also typically "drive vacations" where we would drive from FL to NC to visit relatives. There were occasions when my father would fly somewhere for a convention and take my mother and I with him. Those were really special.

My parents were still taking drive vacations after I moved out of the house. I joined through cruise industry and all of a sudden they were taking cruises all the time! They were able to go to Europe for the first time and that meant a lot to me.
 
After School & a degree in electricity & Mechanics I was offered a job in Material
Handling Maintenance. It included most all phases of install, mockup, cut - weld-
install stuff.

If it produced, handled, packaged, moved stuff, I installed and repaired it.
I had a good living for the rest of my working life.

I probably went to work too much, too many weekends. Haha.

Near retirement Robotic equipment mounted on very heavy Cement Blocks was the trend.
Equipment had temp monitoring sensors mounted and routed to Puters. Maintenance
scheduled around vibrations and heat came into a helpful daily / hourly thought too.

Changing Gear reducers that couldn't, Belt conveyers, augurs, any kind of handling device
including Fork Trucks of all types into ones that would fit the application became part of a lot!

I like being retired!
I will not say I'm In a Hurry anymore. I guess my ability to make poor cartoons came with drawing
up stuff needing planned repairs.
 
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MACKTEXAS said:
My family wasn't necessarily poor, but some years the family income was on the lower end of middle class. We were conservative, and yes, it carried forward into my adult life when I got out on my own. I don't feel bad about that. I've read of people who grew up financially comfortable, yet were very tight or careful with their money. Warren Buffett still lives in the same house he purchased in Omaha, Nebraska in 1958. He bought the five-bedroom, 6,570-square-foot home for $31,500.
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Not exactly. Inside Warren Buffett’s Homes: Where He Lives in 2025 ... Buying and selling at a profit some years later include real-estate.
Also, a private investment in $5 Billion in Private Jets over 30 years. Not the Home Boy, just whet,s is, saying. Not stupid and buying a $30 million Home on a Flood zone of course.

There are realtors near me who work for Berkshire subsidiaries.

A full-time staff to fix - clean - cater and take care of the 6570 Sq. Ft. place, you know just a simple lil old place, plus has the home next door for guests to stay.

Privacy is a chunk !
Our home is 1/2 its size. Cool !

Berkshire Hathaway owns $32 + billion in real estate and near 500,000 units, Buffet owns over 200,000 acres of farmland. Just a small operator.
Let's all never forget a simple lifestyle for a moment. ..... :ROFLMAO: .....
 
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We weren't destitute but there wasn't much extra money. My mother knew how to squeeze a nickel until the buffalo's nose bled, so we had everything we needed and a fair amount of what we needed.

I don't remember feeling particularly deprived because just about all of my friends and schoolmates had families in the same economic strata. Dads had come home from the war and went to work, moms stayed home and kept house and families were fairly large. Sure, there were always a few schoolmates who seemed to have all the new stuff, new shoes frequently, a new coat EVERY YEAR!, all the hottest toys at Christmas but I think the rest of us knew better than to be more than mildly envious because it just.wasn't.going.to.happen.at.our.houses.

When we came back to the U.S., we moved to a big city so that my husband could go back to school for his Ph.D. but we had to wait a year for him to start so that he could get the in-state tuition. He got a job teaching in a special school for high-schoolers who couldn't attend regular school because of behavior/drug/alcohol/etc problems. The problem was that it was partially-funded by several grants and the money wasn't showing up so he was only getting part of his paycheck. We knew he would get it eventually but in the meantime, we were depleting our savings.

I needed to go to work but had a sickly toddler that I couldn't get well enough to put in day care. We had a few months there where I would walk to the grocery store to buy food with the change I scraped out of my purse. Then I got a job and all was well. Not great, but well.

The experience left me frugal for the rest of my life. I'm financially comfortable, with social security and my late husband's pension and a decent amount of money in the bank, but I'm still a penny-pincher. I'll spend but IT HAS TO BE A BARGAIN, DAMMIT!
 
We were poor, although we didn't know it. We were given hand-me-downs by a lady who only had one child. When the clothes arrived
in a pillowcase, it was, see who got the best dresses. Me being the chubbiest always missed out. My husband was number 6 in a family of 10 children. Oh, dear did his poor mother struggle to feed and clothe them. His father was a policeman but the wages in the 1929 crash was appalling. His mother used to go door to door selling Kayser stockings with 4 children in tow. My husband used to collect sand from Bondi Beach and sell it to people in his street, who had caged birds. He also had homing pigeons and sold them at least 3 times because they kept coming back to his house. You did desperate things in those days
 
OldOld said:
Absolutely. I had been poor before, so I am not afraid of being poor again if that happens.
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Me too, for some reason being broke myself has never concerned me as much as seeing the people that I care about struggle.

Although I do have to admit that being old, poor, and alone is more intimidating to me than being young and broke with my whole life ahead of me.

Just put one foot in front of the other.
 
Aunt Bea said:
Me too, for some reason being broke myself has never concerned me as much as seeing the people that I care about struggle.

Although I do have to admit that being old, poor, and alone is more intimidating to me than being young and broke with my whole life ahead of me.

Just put one foot in front of the other.
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Not sure where you reside, but in most western countries, there is social welfare to keep you alive if you are in poverty. At my old age, I really don't mind getting on social welfare if I were poor.
 
Having a meeting of the minds on the topic of poverty is difficult. A rich person from a poor country, might be poor in a country of wealth.

The person that lives with very little but has no debts, is richer in my opinion that the one that has expensive houses and cars, but never owns anything because they seldom build any equity. Most of their money goes to paying interest. All it takes is one serious misfortune and they are without anything.

Debt is poverty. I use one credit card to pay everything and pay it off weekly, never spending more than I have coming in, usually a lot less resulting in having a saving account. By using the one credit card and never paying interest, I make $500 a year in kickbacks to spend at Costco.

A few years ago I got the old man to use my strategy of no cash and no debt. We keep separate accounts since we both went thru ugly finance draining divorces over 30 years ago. Once the hubs discovered that he had more free spending money using my plan, he became a fanatic about it.

One of his initial holdbacks about stopping using cash, was he liked to help the grandkids out at times. When one of the granddaughters told him she accepts his credit card and can take his money with a simple cell phone scan, he was convinced.
 
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papa tiger said:
Not exactly. Inside Warren Buffett’s Homes: Where He Lives in 2025 ... Buying and selling at a profit some years later include real-estate.
Also, a private investment in $5 Billion in Private Jets over 30 years. Not the Home Boy, just whet,s is, saying. Not stupid and buying a $30 million Home on a Flood zone of course.

There are realtors near me who work for Berkshire subsidiaries.

A full-time staff to fix - clean - cater and take care of the 6570 Sq. Ft. place, you know just a simple lil old place, plus has the home next door for guests to stay.

Privacy is a chunk !
Our home is 1/2 its size. Cool !

Berkshire Hathaway owns $32 + billion in real estate and near 500,000 units, Buffet owns over 200,000 acres of farmland. Just a small operator.
Let's all never forget a simple lifestyle for a moment. ..... :ROFLMAO: .....
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True, not a modest home, but then I already knew someone would post something similar. Cool.
 
There is the kind of poor where you buy your clothes only from thrift stores and don't eat fancy food, and then there's the kind of poor where you live in your old car or under a bridge because you literally have no money (and here in the U.S. it's usually because of medical bills). I don't think anybody would want to be the second kind of poor.
 
officerripley said:
There is the kind of poor where you buy your clothes only from thrift stores and don't eat fancy food, and then there's the kind of poor where you live in your old car or under a bridge because you literally have no money (and here in the U.S. it's usually because of medical bills). I don't think anybody would want to be the second kind of poor.
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NO I agree.. but the fact anyone has a car..it could be argued they're not THAT poor
 
I'll give you an example of my last post... I have watched many youtube videos of people my age.. as well as younger..but mostly women my age in America living in cars or vans ( it's almost unknown in the UK )... and I was astonished to learn that they get their state penson or social security whatever is the equivelent over in the US of the state pension here.. and almost every one of them who said it was impossible to rent anywhere and were saying how poor they were ... etc.. were being paid 3 times and in one case over 4 times more than I get paid from the State ..and more than just about everyone on state pension in the uk
 
When I retired from the state 13 years ago, we had people that were on SSI, which is a disability program where they don’t have enough credits to obtain SSDI. SSI is often for poor people that are also disabled. Some of them were only receiving $500-600/ per month. I know people on regular Social Security that only receive 1000 a month now. Are you saying @hollydolly that that’s much more than what they would get in the UK?
 

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