An article was published recently in Slate about this; it’s an excerpt from Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America by Linda Tirado. Her point is that it’s hard to follow the good advice that exists about saving money when you have no money and no safety net. Thought-provoking. Check it out.
One time I lost an apartment because my roommate got a horrible flu that we suspected was maybe something worse because it stayed forever–she missed work, and I couldn’t cover her rent. Once it was because my car broke down and I missed work. Once it was because I got a week’s unpaid leave when the company wanted to cut payroll for the rest of the month. Once my fridge broke and I couldn’t get the landlord to fix it, so I just left. Same goes for the time that the gas bill wasn’t paid in a utilities-included apartment for a week, resulting in frigid showers and no stove. That’s why we move so much. Stuff like that happens.
Because our lives seem so unstable, poor people are often seen as being basically incompetent at managing their lives. That is, it’s assumed that we’re not unstable because we’re poor, we’re poor because we’re unstable. So let’s just talk about how impossible it is to keep your life from spiraling out of control when you have no financial cushion whatsoever. And let’s also talk about the ways in which money advice is geared only toward people who actually have money in the first place. [Read more.]
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