Call it a "retro" house and the hipsters will flock to it.

rjp

It is cute. In a lot of places, yes. It is "retro"...but, in a relatively rural area, there are no hipsters and they just call it old or outdated. Anyone buying it would want to remodel but could not afford to do so or have the vision or cash. It would sell if the update was in the price of the home/loan.

"Free money sounds like easy street until you see that there are a few problems with living off the govt.
-You are at the mercy of Section 8 slumlords to have a place to live that will be older and not well cared for. Good luck trying to get something fixed when it breaks. If your neighborhood goes bad you don't have the option to move to a different section of town.
-Because you have no job, you have no credit. You will pay more for insurance because they rate you based on your credit score. If you want to buy a car, you will have to settle for the car the dealer is willing to finance for you and at a substantially higher interest rate. Some employers look at your credit rating as a condition of employment (because if you have a debt problem you may be a higher risk for fraud against the company).

From there, studies prove that people with no self-esteem (which happens from not having validation from the accomplishment of successfully working at a job) leads to riskier behavior like drugs, unprotected sex, poor nutrition...

What you started as liberating can cause you to end up being a slave to and are trapped.

And minutes ago I was reminded about another aspect of being poor and how it costs them more. It's just amazing that the poor folks who have bank accounts are so often victims of account hacking and ID theft. A customer just called in a panic, wanted to know if his Aug. 4th payment had cleared because someone hacked his Wells Fargo acct and took all his money. (Yeah, all $50 of it.). I suppose it could happen to anyone, but it's something I deal with a few times a month - a customer calls to give me to new banking info because their account got hacked and someone took all their money. How has this never happened to me in 25 yrs at one credit union and five years at another bank? I have plenty of bills on autopay. I only use my debit card for getting cash, usually while checking out at the grocery store, so as to avoid fees. I have never once had an issue with my accounts being hacked.

Systematic classism

Disorganized, lazy and always behind schedule. They are always a victim of something- always an incredible story of theft or bad luck.

They also have $hit credit which is why they get nailed with bad rates on lending, of course they can never see why it's their fault- it's always someone else.

rjp

Oh, these folks have zero credit. They'd be in a mountain of cc debt the second they were allowed.

A guy I met with a few mos. ago in a trailer park was the brother of another guy I had met a year or so earlier, same trailer park. Talk about poverty running in the family. Anyway I met "John" over at his brother's trailer. Couldn't close him, but wrote down the quote and told him it was good until his next b-day or health problem. I called a week later to check back, he said he had gone elsewhere, gotten a better deal. I asked him what he got. He told me and it was $25/mo more than I had quoted him. I said, "John, you gotta be kidding me. I wrote down $60/mo and you bought the same thing for $85/mo without calling me?" I heard his GF in the background say, "Damnit, I told you you should have checked back with Richard first." John then said, "Oh, gee, I don't know how I missed that. Can you come back tomorrow and fix this for me?" And I did. And I wrenched a little on his brother's pistol's stuck extractor. His brother, "Jim," was a helo mechanic in Vietnam. He's a chain smoker and had COPD when I first met him. I couldn't close him then, he said he'd get insurance eventually, but would be fine until then. Well, he has liver cancer now and was sprawled on the sofa, needing help to reach his cigarettes. Did I mention I love my job?

Poor guy can pay $50 for a boot that will last three years. Better off guy pays $100 for a boot that will last ten. Over the same span of time the poor guy is out $150.

The world in full of little things like this that aren’t their fault.



But I’ve been poor and lived surrounded by poor enough to know it’s mostly bad choices.

Having grown up very, very poor...I can say that the hardest thing was to realize that there were alternatives. My parents were poor, my relatives were poor, my neighbors and friends were poor.

As far as buying quality boots, etc...we never had anything of quality, so we assumed that here was no difference. They were not even sold anywhere we shopped. No market for them. They were just "rich people stuff" to us.

Everyone I knew was equally poor...other than a few that had inherited land that they could harvest timber or grow something to sell...and they really lived as lower middle class. Everyone worked very hard from daylight until dark. Many had day jobs and came home and worked in the fields every night and weekends. It never occurred to me that these seemingly smart people could all be victims of their own poor choices. Very few people I knew went to college and those that did usually did not finish nor have majors that would necessarily result in employment. All that I knew came home and worked the same minimum wage jobs as anyone else (that is all there were). From my perspective, our school teachers were the richest people because they had decent cars and dressed pretty well. The best thing that ever happened to me was joining the military and moving away...where I learned there was much opportunity for anyone willing to work as hard as I had become accustomed to doing...as long as I didn't ruin things with poor choices.

Around here poor usually goes with stupid or lazy.

One big problem I see around here, is that poor people spend a shyteload of $$ on expensive things to make themselves look like they have $$...


.

Just remembered another one from about 18 mos. ago. I should check back with him. In his defense, he was on SSDI due to a traumatic brain injury and he was a little slow. He smoked a pack a day, lived in a pretty ghetto apt. complex. He had just bought a policy from another agent, but set an appt with me to see if he could get a better deal. The policy he bought was one that has sort of a "teaser" rate for the first three years and you get to keep it if you can prove with a doctor's letter that you've been tobacco-free for a year by the end of year three. Otherwise, the coverage gets cut by about 40% or the premium skyrockets to keep the original coverage amount. I had probably five companies that were much cheaper if I wrote him as a smoker and he stayed a smoker. If he really was going to quit, some of those companies will let me rewrite him after he's tobacco-free for 12 mos. and it's then way, way cheaper. Anyway, he said that teaser rate was his incentive to quit smoking. I replied, "Well, it's good that you plan to quit. It will be much healthier and you'll save about $250/mo or $3000/yr by not buying cigarettes. But I can replace that policy with one that's $15/mo cheaper and they don't care if you quit smoking or continue." He couldn't get past that. He said he needed the threat of the other policy imploding on him if he didn't quit. I told him I could come back as soon as he was 12 mos. tobacco-free and rewrite him and save him even more. Nope, wouldn't do it. Then he said he was gonna call that other agent back and try to get him to write him a cheaper policy. I said, "I can do that right now for you. And if that other agent could have done so two weeks ago, why would you give him another chance to do it now?" This is why he's poor.

Back in the day when I fitted nicely into the poor and stupid category I couldn't figure out where all the money was coming from. I worked as a computer tech at a bank by day and worked as a waiter at night. But where was all this money coming from. It suddenly occurred to me it was because I was working nights and NOT going to bars. I'd saved enough in a year to make myself poor again by going to Europe for their summer :)

Bingo.

What I was referencing to sugar britches, above. You can easily tell- they're people who are up to the minute with cheap needless junk.

rjp

Around here it's the middle classes in certain neighbourhoods who do that. They tend to be middle managers in banks and corporations. They run themselves absolutely ragged financially buying new Merc's and BMWs to show the neighbours how well they are doing. Holidays in expensive places to impress the folks with how much "spare cash" they have. They are operating in the negatives and would be bankrupt in a week if they lost their little jobs.

Biden to Give Biggest Permanent Boost to Food-Stamp Benefits
By Mike Dorning

The Biden administration plans to announce the biggest long-term increase in food stamp benefits in the program’s history, giving Americans more money to buy groceries and adding billions of dollars in costs to the government.

Average benefits in October will go up by more than 25% from pre-pandemic levels for the 42 million people in the program, a U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity before an announcement planned for Monday.

The increase means that average monthly benefits will rise $36 per person from $121, according to the official. The New York Times reported the planned change earlier...

Read the rest: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-15/biden-to-increase-food-stamp-benefits-by-most-in-program-history

Today I had a doozie. Total ghetto apt neighborhood, though in the lady's defense, her place was spotless and well-decorated on the inside. She was 55 yrs old and in perfect health, had an old Prudential policy her mom took out on her when she was born ..... in 1965. She said it had a $35k face amount. Nope, called the company, it was $10k. She had taken over the $20/mo payments and already paid $13k into it. Her cash value was $7000. If this shows you how overpriced that policy was, I was able to get her the same price per thousand, even 55 years later. She was all set to cash out and start over, gave me everything I needed .... until it came to the banking info. She only used debit cards, nothing with a checking acct #. That raised the price by about $8/mo and she balked. I said, "You're walking away from a $7000 refund, another policy at the same price per thousand, all because you don't want an insurance company to auto-draft your account, so you'd rather keep overpaying into that policy AND paying for money orders for the privilege?"

That's why she's poor.

I pay my electricity on time, well the day the bill arrives so I don't forget it. this saves me about 10% or 15%. I've heard poor/dysfunctional people never pay it on time and hand over an extra twenty or thirty bucks each month LOL

Plenty of bills I pay offer a discount for automatic bank draft. It's almost like they're paying me to make my life a little easier. I'll take it. Again, why has my account never been hacked in 25 years?

I see waste in having a hot water heater, fintstone. Do you have two to heat it up a bit hotter?

I'm just jabbing at you. I'd love to have a house with more than one water heater.

Carry on.