Playing Poor

I just finished a book called Two Dollars a Day.  It's part of the Prime reading library.  I highly recommend it.  Honestly, it wasn't what I was expecting it to be, but it was fairly eye-opening.  The book follows the experiences of a handful of families in the United States living on $2.00 per day per person.  For the record, that is the threshold that the World Bank uses to classify someone as living in "extreme poverty."  It’s the kind of poverty that you don't expect in the modern US, but exists in shadow economies in big cities and small towns and rural areas.

It kind of hit home for me because I’m only maybe two generations out from that kind of life.  My grandfather told stories of life as a boy on the farm during the Great Depression and how it didn’t matter because they were poor before the Depression, they were poor during it, and they were poor afterwards.  He did manage to work his way out of that and into a decent mid-century, middle-class life.  I wish I’d paid more attention to some of the skills that my grandparents tried to teach me instead of having to learn them from YouTube videos.  I live in one of the 10 poorest states in the country, so the kind of rural poverty that the book talks about is something that I’ve grown up seeing in the countryside.  

That got me thinking about how I'm handling my finances.  I've been following the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) movement for a while now.  I don't know that I'll ever have the RE part down, unless I am offered an early out, but the FI part intrigues me.  I think it’s a natural extension of budgeting, especially for a numbers geek that enjoys budgeting and playing with my money.  

If you only count what I spend on non-savings expenses (i.e. don't count what I save each month even though those are listed as expenses in my budget), I'm spending about 75% of what is considered average in my state and only a few hundred dollars a year beyond what the expanded Medicaid cutoff would be if my state had opted in.  All that is to say that I live quite a bit under my means.  I was a broke college kid for basically my entire 20s, and I never really grew out of it.

But I'm just playing poor.  What does that mean?  It means that while I often feel and live like I'm living paycheck to paycheck, an unexpected emergency is not going to send my life into a tailspin because my entire paycheck isn’t being eaten by the daily necessities.  It means that I don't have to sit up at night and worry about money, and when I do it's because I'm trying to squeeze another 1% into savings.  It means that my kid won't have to suffer because he's sick, but the only pediatrician in town that takes his insurance is closed and I can't afford to private pay anywhere else.  I will price compare everything to get the best deal, but he will have all the school supplies on his list.  His clothes might have been bought at thrift stores and consignment sales, but he will have an overabundance of them and they will be clean.  It means that I will have what is apparently a tiny grocery budget and eat out very, very little.  But there will be more than just ramen noodles and beans and rice.  For that matter, I'm able to do that because I can afford a working fridge and freezer and stove.  And if one of those goes out, we can buy a new one, but I can guarantee that we will do everything we can to fix the old one first.  

Privilege is a hell of a thing.  For some reason, a lot of people have an almost visceral reaction when it's pointed out that they benefited from it.  Like, we get it, you work hard, but so do plenty of other people who are simply trying to keep their head above water.  They might even be working harder than you are because being poor, truly poor, is HARD.  It's expensive.  Simply acknowledging that you have been lucky doesn't take away from your accomplishments.  I fully admit that I am lucky enough to have a ton of advantages that make FI, and maybe even RE, a realistic and achievable goal.  It's great that you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, but please acknowledge that you were lucky enough to have shoes to begin with.