This is what I want you to know about being “poor”.
When we got married at 21, I was still in college and my husband had just graduated from college.
When we were trying to decide if getting married so young and broke was the right decision, my Mom told me that we would for sure be “livin’ on love, because we wouldn’t have much else!”
She was so right.
Two years into marriage we were both working minimum wage jobs and still livin’ on love. We had student loan debt and barely enough income to pay our bills, let alone pay off debt.
To be honest, at that time, I didn’t even know we were “poor”.
We got pregnant with our first baby and decided that I would quit my job to stay home. Around this time my husband got a different job that made significantly more money (just above minimum wage). I thought we had it made.
The first clue I had that we were still considered poor was when I found out that we could qualify(easily) for WIC. I then learned that we could also qualify for Medicaid and Food Stamps.
Honestly, I had no idea we were that “poor”. We had two cars. A mortgage. Food on the table for three meals a day, plus snacks. We were able to put money each paycheck towards our student loan debt. We had heat in the winter. We had running water and curtains and sheets on our beds. I had grown up traveling overseas with my family, and I knew that what we had was more than 80% of the world had.
After living like this for so long, here are a few things I want you to know about living below the American poverty threshhold:
- I want you to know that qualifying for WIC, Medicaid and Food Stamps does not mean that we are lazy and sitting around just collecting on your tax dollars. We both have undergraduate degrees but have chosen jobs in fields that do not pay much.
- I want you to know that when you ask me to hang out, my first thought is that I would LOVE to. The second thought is, “what will we be doing and how much will I have to spend?”. We have had to turn down dinner outings, hangouts and even weekends away because we simply cannot fit it into the budget.
- I want you to know that when you talk about shopping garage sales and thrift stores to get an awesome score, I nod my head along with you. I shop at those places, too (and love them!). The only difference is that I shop at those places because that is all I can afford.
- I want you to know that we have bought both of our vehicles off of Craigslist. Oh, and most of our furniture, too. My decorating style might be “eclectic”, but that is because I have made do with what I already have at home, hand-me-downs, and second-hand finds.
But mostly I want you to know that I don’t hate this life that we live. In fact, I love it. Would I love to eat out more often? Yes. Would I love to book family vacations to warm, beachy location? Absolutely. Would I love to buy myself that desperately needed minivan? Of course.
However, we are so much richer than our income states. We have learned through the years that stuff isn’t everything. In fact, we have learned that stuff is worth nothing. We have learned that money doesn’t buy contentment or happiness. We have learned to find free things to do, and have had a blast doing it. We have learned that family vacations ARE possible, they just require a lot of scrimping and planning and saving, and sometimes staying with family instead of a hotel or packing groceries instead of eating out every night.
We have learned to hold loosely to our things, and instead to guard the things that are most important: time and relationships. We have learned that working hard and being responsible doesn’t always mean immediatly climbing the financial ladder of success.
We have learned that saying no sometimes just means saying yes to even better things. We have learned that driving clunkers from Craigslist make for some wild adventures. We have learned to cook things from scratch and shop at Aldi and find the best steals at garage sales. We have become regulars at our thrift stores and consignment sales because that’s where we can find anything we need. We are already able to teach our children budgeting and financial wisdom, along with the hard life-skills of contentment and saying no to immediate gratification.
So if you look at our income report, you can most certainly label us as “poor”. But if you look at our lives? Man, we are rich.
Livin’ on love and RICH.
**This post was originally written in 2017 and published on the Dayton Mom Collective. My family no longer lives under the poverty
Growing up, my family’s income was below the poverty line. We were definitely poor even though my parents were hard workers. I am not poor as an adult- I try very hard to not make assumptions about people living on welfare since I grew up on it. My husband and I both have law degrees and, despite us both taking out huge amounts of law school loans, were doing well financially with both of us having good paying jobs after law school. Then I unexpectedly quit my job less than four years after graduating from law school. My husband’s salary had to cover everything, including law school loan payments that were more than our mortgage payment each month. The frugal ways of my childhood helped us out quite a bit until my husband’s income increased. I never regretted quitting my job but it was hard to say no to activities that were too expensive, not going on vacations, etc.