rich vs poor

[Sarlon]

I've picked my topic for my compare/contrast essay, and since we had a rather lively debate on it in class over the week, I thought I'd pick a subject I know can get a few opinions on...

topic "Growing up Rich vs Growing up poor"

anyone have revelant stories they'd like to share?

this is NOT for a published paper, its being turned in for a grade in my college level writing class and if people would consent to let me use them as references for the paper I'd be happy.

Only myself, my teacher, and my tutor will be seeing this final paper.

[Kheldarson]

So no middle class then? ;p

[Sarlon]

with the huge gap between wealthy and middle class....is there even a true middle class anymore?

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

with the huge gap between wealthy and middle class....is there even a true middle class anymore?

I would consider that to be people who have enough to live comfortably, but not enough to live extravagantly.

Despite the politicians' best efforts, there are still very many people like that around.

[Sarlon]

true....and lets not let this get into fratching...I'm tryin to get view points

[Kheldarson]

Well that depends on how you define rich and poor. Because there's as much of a gap between the lower upper class to the richest of rich as from the upper middle to the lowest end of poor.

I'd consider my family growing up as solidly middle class. My folks could afford a decent house mortgage (100k+), we could go on trips regularly (at least twice a year cross country to see family. The traveling increased when we moved closer to the grands), my brothers and I were involved in rec league sports, and that was with mom staying at home. We didn't want for things (even if we thought we did ).

Comparatively, my husband and I are probably lower middle/upper poor. We barely qualified for WIC and Medicare with our son, both of us work, and we're trying to get enough together for a low mortgage (40k). But we still have a little that we can set aside to pay off bills faster and indulge our hobbies occasionally (we're gamers so it's understandably expensive).

But that's by my perception and definition.

[Titi]

This is a hard subject because there are different types of poor. My mother grew up poor in the inner city and my father grew up poor on a semi farm of 3 acres on the outskirts of a city. They both had very different experiences growing up.

[DeltaSierra]

This isn't my story, but my friend's - her Grandfather was a multi-millionare (had an agriculture business) and she showed me home videos from when she was a kid - on Christmas day, Grandpa would sit on the couch with a wad of $100 bills thick enough to choke a horse, and all the grandkids would take turns telling jokes, doing skits, telling Grandpa their achievements in school/sports/etc and each time they'd get a c-note. This went on through the entire day.

Friend said it wasn't unusual for her to end up with $5000 in cash by bedtime.

[Seshat]

If there was ice-cream in the freezer, I knew I could ask for something I needed (like a replacement for a bra that was falling apart).

If there wasn't, I knew not to bother. It would only worry and upset whichever parent I asked.

[Teefies2]

I grew up rich, well at least once my dad took a job overseas. From the time I was 11 (in the 1960's), we had no worries, money-wise. College funds were fully funded, life insurance was 1/4 million on each parent, trips through Europe every year, boarding school in Switzerland, etc.

Then I became an adult.

Through a series of unforeseen circumstances and, yes, some poor decisions on my part, I am now poor. Living paycheck to paycheck. My mom, who is still alive and living off that 1/4 million policy from when my dad died, doesn't understand why I just can't "pay off those bills that your husband ran up" and get back to living well. I haven't the heart to tell her that it's food stamps and food bank handouts that keep us eating. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to have a job, but it's the only one I could get at the time and it's in retail, so doesn't pay great.

It kills me to know what I am missing, having grown up with all that I could want. I wasn't spoiled, we had to earn our allowance, etc., but that makes it worse. I KNOW what I could have had and HATE that my life has turned out this way. I have been caught in two recessions in my life, the first of which ended with me losing the job I thought I would have for life. And the downhill spiral began there, then I made some decisions that kept me on the "poor" side of things, and I've never recovered.

Anyway, good luck with your paper, and let me know if I can give you anything further.

[ADeMartino]

I know, these are not original thoughts, but they bear repeating.

Assuming that we're sticking strictly to the 'material' definitions of wealth and poverty, they are still relative terms. 'Poor' in many parts of the world means you literally have nothing, while in developed countries, many people who are considered 'poor' still have a car, a television, a microwave oven, and a cell phone. Even within a specific country, growing up 'poor' in a rural setting is often very different than growing up poor in a city or suburb.

It isn't limited to geography, either. "Poor" meant something totally different during the Great Depression than what it means today. Most people, even in middle-class America, feel that they grew up 'poor' because they had very little in comparison to what they have now - even to the point of ignoring the fact that many of the things they have today DID NOT EXIST when they were growing up. Yet, as they were growing up, they had food, shelter, an education, clothes, etc.

[Geek King]

We were poor when I was a kid, but we never really knew it since there was nothing to compare it to. Dad worked six days a week, and Mom five. My sister and I spent many Saturdays at one grandparent's or the other while the folks worked. We made copious use of the library, and this was when libraries were just books and some music cassettes. We rarely had the latest toys, but just figured it was part of being a kid. I learned how to cook so I could fix breakfast and lunch for my sister and myself when both parents were working. I could make a decent omelet by age 8.

There weren't many kids my age where we lived, so I spent a lot of time amusing myself. To many modern-day parent's horror, we played Jarts for hours, unsupervised.

[ADeMartino]

There weren't many kids my age where we lived, so I spent a lot of time amusing myself. To many modern-day parent's horror, we played Jarts for hours, unsupervised.

You know, this could be a topic all its own. "What things did you do (that at the time would be considered 'normal') as a kid that would be considered unthinkable today?"

But I don't want to 'jack this thread. Look for this topic elsewhere in 'Off Topic'.

[bhskittykatt]

We grew up in a sort of perfect middle-class nuclear family. Dad worked, Mom stayed at home, two kids. We were thrifty -- Mom made a lot of clothes when we were smaller and as we got bigger they often came from Mart of Wal or Village of Values. We only ate fast food maybe once a week. Toys came from garage sales or Village of Values. (I had knock-off Legos, and believe me, I was aware they were not legit.)

But we lived comfortably. We owned our home. We went on vacations. We had bicycles and computers and stuff. When it came time for car shopping we bought new cars instead of used. We were right there, economically in the middle. It was good.

Hubs grew up poor. Sometimes they'd have to skip meals because there was just no food. They'd sort through boxes from the food bank like they were treasure chests. He said they had a lot of grilled onions because onions were cheap. They lived in tiny cramped rentals and moved around a lot. Quoth Hubs, "We were poor; it sucked."

Currently I'd peg us at lower-middle-class. We live in a shitty cheap apartment below heroine dealers (literally, DEA has surrounded and swarmed the building before). We live almost paycheck-to-paycheck it seems sometimes, but we do have a little we can squirrel away in savings. We can afford food without any assistance. We don't have cable TV, but we splurge on gym memberships instead. New clothes, new furniture, and new cars are out, but we can buy used. We get by with enough left for a few small luxuries.

[Chromatix]

My dad's job didn't pay particularly well - being the "tame engineer" for an academic research department. Nevertheless, it was steady and he had a lot of ways to make the money go further. Indeed, one of the reasons they liked him was that he was very good at improvising to reduce costs.

He drove a car that had been second-hand to begin with, and ended up about twice as old as most other cars of it's type (or even make) before it had to go to the scrapyard. Usually the bodywork goes first on 1970s Renaults, but he made it last until the electrics in the engine went bad. Not an unfixable problem even then, I think, but he'd finally had enough of it and bought another second-hand car that was nearly a decade younger. For some time, however, we had to push the Renault down the hill to get it started, and even that was not always successful since the electrical problems were systemic rather than localised (probably decayed insulation).

Our house had been bought cheaply, as it had been neglected by its previous owner. Money was then spent gradually, when it was available, to spruce it up. There was a *lot* of DIY involved. They have since repeated the process at least twice, buying houses that were borderline uninhabitable and therefore very cheap - and in one case, they had to have one of them declared uninhabitable for insurance reasons, after a pipe burst before they were able to move into it, causing damage to a neighbour's house.

Holidays abroad were rare. Exotic, tropical locations were completely unheard of. Going to visit relatives or family friends (such as, on at least one occasion, the Swiss au-pairs that my grandmother had hired) was far more likely than anything involving a hotel. A bed-and-breakfast or a self-catering cottage was, however, sometimes within the budget for travelling within the country.

We still had a black-and-white TV and a twin-tub washing machine - both hopelessly obsolete even in the 1980s. With a twin-tub, you had to manually move clothes from the washing part to the rinsing part. Eventually they both wore out, so only then did we get a colour TV and a front-loading washing machine.

We were nowhere near being the poorest family in the city, though. For reasons which *still* elude me, I was sent to a school miles away, on the edge of Toxteth - an area which became notoriously deprived in the late 1970s since it was home to a lot of former dockworkers. I saw a lot of burned-out buildings there, left over from the infamous riots, and which simply became a familiar part of the scenery - some have been rebuilt in recent years (notice how the original gateposts don't access anything on the new building), but some are still derelict 30 years later. Many of the houses there *look* grand, but in fact they are divided into flats and poorly heated, and those are just the ones facing the main streets.