Happiness through not having no money

[andrewducker]

I remember having no money. Living on Jobseeker's Allowance, and basically never having any spare money.

I remember the first time that I could afford to buy a can of Coke without thinking "But can I afford this?" And it felt like such a relief.

I remember being able to pay off the overdraft and loans I'd built up, and hit zero. I didn't have any spare cash, but I didn't have debts either. And that felt like a massive victory.

And now I have enough spare cash that I can actually buy things cheaper than most other people I know. And it's ridiculous, because I got a bonus at the end of the year that meant I paid £5000 in tax. And that seems ridiculous to me. Not because I'm paying lots of tax (I earn enough that I _should_ pay lots of tax), but because I didn't expect to reach this position.

And I particularly didn't expect that because I work at a big company I would suddenly be offered cheap deals all the time. That I can buy cinema tickets for 1/3 off. Or that I can get Sainsbury's gift cards for 10% off, which feels obscene to me. I've got spare cash, therefore I get to buy my groceries for cheaper than people that don't.

And it's just such a relief that I can buy a bus pass each month and just not have to think about how much travel costs. I can get a phone contract that means I don't have to think about how much data costs. I can spend a little more to cut out the stress of worrying about money.

And getting rid of that stress is one of the major reasons I'd want a Basic Income - because living in the horrible stress that poverty places on people is so harmful. Not that I have any answers here. I just saw one of my friends talking about how not being poor makes things cheaper, and I wish that there was something I could do about it.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

Comments

[dalglir]

The Vimes 'boots theory' sounds like a retelling of an article/study where higher earners didn't understand or blamed lower earners for their own predicament in the context of buying a car. A lower earner needed a car to work, to earn, but only ever earned enough to buy a cheap second hand car which would frequently break down, turn into a money pit and need to be replaced with _another_ cheap second hand car - getting stuck in an expensive cycle.

The higher earners solution was just to buy a brand new car at the outset which didn't break down, avoiding maintenance costs and, if it did break down, was covered by warrantee anyway. 'How,' they said, 'could low earners be so silly?'

And the blunt fact is that you have to have the capital to make that initial investment but when you're poor you're too busy just _surviving_ day to day and tracking every penny in case you can't afford food, rent, electricity, heck: school uniforms because you might be poor but you have some pride and there's no way you're going let your kids be labelled and detrimented in school despite the fact they all know where you live and you'd only be living there if you were poor.

I'd turn up in uniform on non-school uniform days because 'I'd forgotten' whereas there was a nominal 'donation' to be made for the privilege and I simply hadn't asked for the coin because I knew, as a child, what an impact it would have to my parents finances. It also avoided the social shame of wearing jumble sale clothes, two sizes too small and a decade out of fashion :)

And I fucking love that I don't have to worry about that shit for me or for my kids. As a kid who grew up in an area where you were 'posh' (and not in a good way but in that self limiting, crab-bucket, 'too good for us?' kind of way) if one of your parents had a job at all, I earn more than I could have ever have dreamed of. And the perks, as you point out, are incredible. My kids go to a fee paying school and their uniforms are astronomically expensive but we can just pay for that without thinking or worrying. I get my car basically for free because it's covered by a company car allowance which automatically buys me a brand new family sized car of my choice every 3 years AND pays the leftovers into my salary.

Whereas my mum had to work HARD to get her first second hand car which, of course, turned into a money pit. And she was regarded as 'rich' because of that (and not in a good way) amongst the fellow denizens of the crab bucket.

The difference for me? Grammar schools, the 11+, a socialist headmaster at my primary school and parents who saw and supported an opportunity for their child to escape the crab bucket.

And that's a long rambling, chippy rant so I'll stop there.

[andrewducker]

Yeah. You were lucky to have the right support. And I am very glad you did! And that you are now in a great situation, and passing it on to your own kids.

I hope they feel grateful, eventually :-)

[matgb]

It is daft the way things work out. Scalzi's Being Poor essay is brilliant, and is clearly written by someone who's been there, including really hoping the local library got something new in that was interesting at some point, etc.

Now he's an incredibly rich successful author with Holywood options. So people send him their books for free in the hope he'll like it. H's father is now so rich he's getting free stuff all the time.

Read a study recently on toilet rolls (might've been you that linked to it) and how you can study how poor people can't afford to buy things on offer so always get things more expensively. Week later I've got a free Amazon Prime trial and there's an offer for a wholesale pack of the brand we normally buy. When we were skint we'd buy the £2 4 packs when we were almost out. Now we're not I have several months supply for £20 total.

(and yes, I got the pair of £80-then boots my Mum bought me when I was 15 repaired last month for less than £5, still going strong, lesser boots have perished on the Yorkshire cobbles already)