Some think that being poor is simple. You don’t have enough money to buy a lot of stuff, so you’re forced to buy less stuff. But that’s not really how it works. When you’re broke, you can’t do all the little things that will improve your budget over the long run. It actually costs more to be poor.
When you’re poor, you can’t buy your food in bulk, buy high quality stuff that will last, or own your own tech instead of renting. It costs money up front to save money over the long run. Worse yet, being poor often comes with hidden, intangible costs that make digging yourself out of poverty even harder.
Food Can Be Cheap, But Eating Healthy Is Expensive
As any college student can tell you, getting food when you’re poor isn’t that hard. Ramen is under twenty cents a pack. The problem is getting healthy food. Ramen consists of 20% empty calories and 80% salt. If you only ate that for every meal for years, your long term health would be at serious risk (or so my doctor tells me).
This was the exact situation I found myself in when I was broke. Time was more valuable than my health, and fast food was easier than cooking at home. It wasn’t much more expensive, either. This lead to an unhealthy hierarchy of meals: on a good week, I could buy hot dogs from my local QuikTrip for $2. On a bad week, it was Ramen for days. Two liter bottles of store-brand soda cost less than orange juice or milk, so if I wanted something to drink besides water, that was what I got.
Now, a few years of that diet is already going to be pretty bad. The long-term consequences were worse. Even when I started earning more, the habits stuck. Soda is still a staple of my diet. It’s taken a long time to build the habit of making proper, home-cooked meals. It’s easy to think that you’ll just change your habits once you get more money, but you don’t realize just how many bad habits you build.
This is a difficult trap to escape. According to research from the Harvard School of Public Health, healthy meals cost an average of $1.50 more per day (or ~$45 per month) than unhealthy meals. When you have money, that’s not a huge deal. However, if you make the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour and you work 40 hours per week, that amounts to roughly 3.6% of your yearly salary. If you can only get the part time hours of 32 hours per week (which is more common for minimum wage jobs), it’s 4.5% of your yearly take home. Before taxes, by the way.
When $1.50 a day can account for nearly 5% of your yearly salary, it’s no surprise you choose the $1 soda over the $4 orange juice. Who the hell cares about “long-term health consequences” when you can barely pay rent? You know what has some serious “long-term health consequences”? Getting evicted. I’ll pay rent today and worry about heart disease later.
When you’re poor, you can’t afford to think about the “long run.” I knew that it was smart to buy some stuff from big membership stores, but I couldn’t even get past the membership fees. I knew that eating gas station hot dogs and ramen was going to kill me some day, but as long as that day wasn’t before rent was due, I had to live with it. I probably could’ve done marginally better if I planned to cook more meals ahead of time but I, like 6.8 million Americans according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, had to work multiple jobs to get by. I didn’t have enough time to be healthy, and I didn’t have enough money to save money.
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