[themarkn]

Money is still the biggest problem if you are poor. It blocks out all the others. You spend all your time thinking about staying ahead of financial ruin. Calling time and discipline the largest factors, to me, misses the point entirely. You can’t have time if you juggle multiple employers and have kids and are still scraping by. You can’t have “discipline” or willpower or whatever about this stuff if there are 20 more important things you don’t even get done thinking about before you fall asleep from exhaustion at the end of the day. Who’s doing organized meal prep when they have to decide whether to pay the water or the gas bill this month or take out a payday loan or what to do?

Sorry for the rant, if that tone is coming through. But no, the problem is not that poor people aren’t trying hard enough, which is what these kinds of responses seem to boil down too. The problem is people without wealth are exposed to way too much risk and hardship to ever have a chance (or even enough resources and time) to act strategically the way people. Everything is tactical, everything is about just staying upright.

[iflint]

Yes the tone is coming through, where did I say that poor people aren't trying hard enough? When you work long hours for low pay or have a family, time and discipline are difficult, I am not belittling the effort it takes.

Money is a huge problem if you are poor. My point is just that you can substitute frozen vegetables for whatever you are eating and it can be the same exact price. It does take more time to make, and is less convenient than unhealthy options. This is what I mean by time and discipline.

There are comments about vegetables having a high cost per calorie, but this misses the important point that many unhealthy, poor people are obese in the US. By swapping a meal at McDonalds or packaged snacks at the convenient store for some pasta with frozen vegetables, you may not be getting the same calorie/dollar value. But getting enough calories is not the issue for most poor Americans, getting enough vegetables is.

I'm not talking about fancy meal prep either. Roast some broccoli in the oven, boil some noodles. Add salt, pepper, butter. Done. Don't like broccoli? Swap it for something else.

[desc]

I don't see how this conflicts, exactly. Time is indeed a major factor, but money is not orthogonal: below a certain level of income (which depends on the person's circumstances) it impacts the amount of available time too, with cascading effects.

It doesn't matter how much food (discipline) you've got if your water supply (time, money) is dry for a month.

[mikekchar]

I've lived on incredibly small amounts of money before. At one time in my life (when I was young and travelling) I couldn't afford meat and became vegetarian. Throughout my life I've spent periods where I've chosen to spend incredibly small amounts of money (though out of choice rather than necessity). I'm talking the equivalent of less than $1K per month.

I think the biggest thing you need is to have the skill to understand where the time/money tradeoff pays off. If you have a low paycheck, it doesn't make any sense to work overtime and then not have time to cook a meal. If you have a family, you might be talking about making $20 and spending all of it at Mac D's. These kinds of things add up as well. If you need a car to maintain a hectic schedule, it can easily end up costing you as much as your entire food budget.

These things are super hard and I think people, whether poor or rich, get it wrong all the time. Prioritisation is also super hard. It's easy to get in your head "Oh, I should have a least X" and so you go out and get X, even though you don't actually need it. Then you get stuck in an inefficient part of the curve for all of the other things that you do need.

In that way, the stigma of poverty is often worse than the poverty itself. If you accept your poverty and cooly make the right choices all the time, then you can live on very, very low levels of money. You can even do so very comfortably and be happy. But if you fight against it, loose heart and try to be "like everyone else", then it's this terrible downward spiral that you can't get out of.

And it's kind of stupid because you can work out the math a million times over and say that people should be able to live on $X or make time for Y, but nobody teaches people how to be poor and happy. We collectively send the message that poor is bad and that only through increased money will your life get any better.

I honestly wish we taught more life skills in high school. Most of the academic stuff people ignore and forget anyway. I'm happy I know about ionic bonding, how titration of acid works, etc, etc because I have used it to make beer and cheese. But it's just not relevant to the vast majority of people on the planet. How we get away without teaching basic skills like managing a budget, shopping, finding a place to live that you can afford, finding and doing well at a job, etc, etc, etc I just don't understand.