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I'll just go ahead and preface this thread by saying this isn't the place for hating on poor people, nor is it for making up obviously fake stores (walking uphill 10 miles to school barefoot in 3 feet of snow? That's chump change... I walked 20). We all know poor people have big SUVs on shiny chrome wheels and iPhones, so there's no need to bring that into this thread, ok? Also, If you haven't taken the time to do so yet, please make yourself acquainted with the rules and guidelines for PYF by clicking HERE. Got it? Great! Now let's move on. Almost all of us have been broke or poor at one point in our lives. When you're monetarily challenged, life is tough. I remember when I was about 10 years old; my younger brother and I would often get pancakes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We didn't realize it at the time, but my parents were extremely broke. I remember when Christmas would roll around and there would be no presents under the tree. Why? Well, we just couldn't afford anything. School was tough too, being poor. I was on the free lunch program for low-income kids. As a teenager this was pretty embarrassing. I could never really afford to buy that big beautiful slice of pizza I always had my eye on. No, instead I was stuck shoveling some kind of grey mystery meat down my throat and chasing it with a little box of 2% milk that would barely quench my thirst. So lets share your stories of being broke and/or poor, fellow Goons!
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| # ? Jan 27, 2013 22:41 |
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| # ? May 24, 2013 18:21 |
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We couldn't afford a Christmas tree, so I painted one in watercolors and hung it on the wall. My one apartment had no heat or air and during the winter, it got so cold it would freeze drinks left on the coffee table. I used to scratch notes for my husband out of the ice that froze on the inside of the windows.
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| # ? Jan 27, 2013 23:24 |
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I couldn't afford to do laundry for a few weeks once, so I started handwashing my clothes in the bathtub and hanging them to dry. It was in winter, and I had a very, very limited supply of hot water in my apartment.
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| # ? Jan 27, 2013 23:30 |
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I mixed coffee creamers from the diner into my chocolate milk because I couldn't have refills.
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| # ? Jan 27, 2013 23:37 |
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Homeless for four years or so, street-camping for the better part of two of those. More or less completely blew the idea of "the Great Outdoors" for me. I associate sleeping bags with being awakened by the cops EDIT: On the positive side, having to carry around everything I owned put me in the best physical shape of my life.
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| # ? Jan 27, 2013 23:41 |
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Just this past year, after graduating I was unemployed for a while and was right at the cusp of giving up and phoning my parents in shame to ask them if I could move back home, when I finally found a job. But for the first couple of weeks I had absolutely no money for food or public transit, so I was walking 6 and a half kilometers to work and back every day, and surviving on plain rice that I had rationed out to last until I got paid - about 800 calories a day. After I cashed my first paycheque (of which 90% went towards overdue rent) I bought myself some shawarma at a crappy little restaurant next to the bank. It was the best meal I've ever tasted. Man, once you've experienced poor, even for such a short time, you never again complain about taxes that go towards a social safety net.
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| # ? Jan 27, 2013 23:58 |
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Lived in a single parent household and I'd eat scrambled eggs and Top Ramen for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Every now and again there'd be pan fried bits of bologna in the eggs, and on those days I feasted like a king. I just started a new job and I'm kinda broke now, so I've been living off tacos made from canned roast beef and lovely beer.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 00:02 |
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My parents were very, very poor when they first married. They both worked 2 jobs and took on a 3rd gig delivering flyers just to keep my brother in KD and hot dogs. They would have lost their house if not for a bank error in their favour. One particularly hard month, shortly after they'd made a few changes to their mortgage payments, they didn't have enough money in the account for their monthly payment, so they were just waiting for the phone call from the bank telling them they were being foreclosed upon, but it never came. The bank never took the automatic payment out of their account that month- they'd taken it the month before, after they'd changed their payment structure, so they knew the bank had their paperwork in order, they just.. didn't get charged for that month. The next month thankfully they had enough for 2 months worth of mortgage payments and successfully argued against having to pay a late fee since the bank hosed up, not them. Had it not been for that weird banking error, my dad, pregnant mom and brother would have been out on the street, and my life would probably have ended up a lot different. We eventually made it out of the poorhouse but my mom still freaks out about scrimping and saving after being so desperately broke for so long.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 00:12 |
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A friend of a friend was so poor that his entire diet consisted of sink water, the occasional Gatorade, and Top Ramen day in and day out. Eventually he was hospitalized because he had more sodium in one month than any human should have in several years. A great poor person food is the Aldi's brand instant oatmeal. It's 10 bags of oatmeal mix for like $1.50, and I've spread that poo poo out for weeks, just eating that and mixing it in a cup of milk for breakfast.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 00:12 |
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I ended up with an unpleasant cash flow problem in college. I didn't know how to even cook Ramen at that point, so I had some frozen, breaded flounder in my freezer that I ate. It was like a year old, and I microwaved it because I didn't know how to competently use a pan. It was the most awful thing ever, but I needed the fuel. It wasn't quite greasy, but it was somehow soggy. edit: I'm now a financially stable adult, but I still keep a box of spaghetti in my kitchen in case poo poo gets ugly.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 00:15 |
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particle409 posted:edit: My boyfriend's very middle class mother heard that I water down some of my (non-alcoholic) drinks, so whenever we visit her, she dilutes mine because she thinks I prefer the taste of diluted stuff. We haven't ever told her that it's really because I got used to doing that to make them last longer. I'm also cheap as poo poo when I'm shopping, or even on a date. My boyfriend says he likes living with me because I keep him from extravagant buying.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 00:37 |
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When I was a teenager my mom was working contract jobs as an agricultural quality assurance auditor, which basically meant going out and watching companies spray poo poo on vegetables and then going through all the paperwork to make sure it all matched up, so winters and early springs were typically really rocky, financially. I think my lowest point, though, was trying to make soup out of dehydrated onion flakes and dried apricots. I distinctly remember staring at it and feeling really, really sad. A little less rock-bottom but between second and third grade we moved and I wound up going to the really wealthy elementary school and we went on a field trip to the local Sunmaid raisin factory, which consisted of about fifteen minutes of factory tour and an hour of everyone else buying poo poo at the gift shop. That's the earliest memory I have of feeling self-conscious about having less money than other people (my horrible teacher turning to me and saying "What do you mean you're not buying anything!?" didn't help, either).
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 01:39 |
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My mom raised us kids by herself. Every Wednesday, she would bring us to McDonald's and buy my brother and me one Happy Meal each. Whatever we didn't eat she would eat for herself so she didn't have to spend money on her own food. On a lighter note, now my brother and I are successful and have plenty of money! 
Hirudo fucked around with this message at Jan 28, 2013 around 02:10 |
| # ? Jan 28, 2013 02:05 |
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A few years ago I lived in Dallas for about six months with a friend who was nice enough not to charge me the whole time I was there (thanks RN029-ARIN!), this was mainly to get away from my controlling parents for a while. For the majority of this time, I had no job and was quickly running out of money, so I accepted pretty much any free food I could get. Well, his friend seemed to believe he had any even remote capability to cook, and would do poo poo like make macaroni and cheese using a ramen package and some week-old Velveeta that was sitting in the back of the fridge. He would also put vegetables into some dishes even though he had no idea how to properly prepare them, and dump assloads of garlic in to where I can't loving stand the stuff outside of dishes that require it. Things got bad to the point where I would go to bed starving so that I could use the period of Not Starving in the morning to go get the cheapest stuff possible from the nearby grocery store. On top of all this I had no car or license, so I had to walk long distances to most places. It's probably nothing compared to what most people in this thread have already mentioned, but it's easily the most difficult point of my life. The upside is that I lost some weight without even noticing (which I put back on pretty quickly), my parents realized they were wrong in their past decisions, and now I avoid throwing away food as much as possible.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 03:14 |
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This might be more of a homebrewing thread kinda thing, but in trying to make cheap beer my buddy and I have made some real terrible beers. For a long while, we were brewing 10 gallon batches because that way we could have 1/4th of the total grain be whole grain flour from the store (which costs ~$2/5lbs instead of ~$2/lb). A massive cost saving measure but holy poo poo! The flour would gum up the works so when we drained the sugar/liquid combination it would take a long time. So long that it would often start to spontaneously ferment! That gave our beers a slight sour twang. We actually liked the sour twang but it (obviously) prevented us from brewing certain styles of beer. Another thing we would do is add sugar. Sugar basically adds booze and nothing but booze. We were scaling up a 5 gallon recipe (so we could replace some basic malt with flour) but somehow the math got all mixed up and we added 8lbs of sugar, which really dried out the beer and made it super alcoholic. To make it palatable, we had to crush and add fresh hops to counteract the sheer booziness of it. When I was unemployed recently, I kinda repeated that experience. I would lightly toast some whole wheat flour and make a slurry and add ragi tapai starter so it would ferment. It was tart but there was alcohol in it. Especially if I spiked it with some sugar.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 04:05 |
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Riosan posted:A friend of a friend was so poor that his entire diet consisted of sink water, the occasional Gatorade, and Top Ramen day in and day out. Eventually he was hospitalized because he had more sodium in one month than any human should have in several years. I just buy Aldi's old fashion oats. It lasts 3 months for me, it's has more fiber and is more filling than the instant stuff. Grits are equally as cheap and a 5 pound bag lasts a hell of a long time. If you can't pay your gas bill during the winter or your heater is broken and you can't afford to fix it, just get the largest pot you can find and fill it water. Boil the big pot of water on a hot plate and enjoy a nice hot, but humid house. 
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 04:17 |
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I was laid off about a year and a half ago, the same time as my wife. We were already scraping bottom; she was laid off about nine months prior to me, and still never found a job. Long story short, after two months of unemployment, coupled with her being nine months on the dole, we were in a bad way. We lived in a resort town in a very expensive state, and things were not going our way. Having way less sense than dollars, we agreed to drive the 60 miles to hang with her (pretty wealthy) friend in Boston. We needed a night out from our apartment, away from our concerns, and away from cut-rate meat and dumpster-dived vegetables. I didn't eat "nothing but ramen." We stretched our budget, we foraged for still-good food, and wild greens. Still, despite me loving cooking, we needed a night away to forget our poverty, and to enjoy our selves. It turned out her friend didn't make the call for us to come down to enjoy a night out him, as she insisted (we could hardly afford the gas), it was his financial cry for help. His boyfriend left him, took back the car he bought him, and he was in a bad way. The three of us, oblivious of the other's misfortune, agreed to meet at a fairly high-end Italian place north of town. They would have cream sauces and seafood (you just DON'T dumpster dive for seafood and dairy), and we thought Sal would pick up the check. Sal, being Italian, wanted comfort food. The check came. Then poo poo hit the fan. We didn't dine and dash, we thought ourselves too classy even though my wife and I rarely visited the city, and Sal was obviously on his way out of town, probably to move back in with his mom. I thought "cleaning dishes" was literally a thing, but apparently, they just call the cops. That's what the manager said. Turns out when I turned over my ID to show we were "good for it," the guy in charge easily identified me as a guy of Irish decent. The Mc****** surname gave it away. Turns out, he hates "Micks." Long story short, he forgave our $120 tab if he could "Mash them 'taters." It was three hard smashes on my nuts, on the table, from a potato masher. We literally left New England three weeks later for a state 1500 miles away. Poverty can leave you black and blue. Eat This Glob fucked around with this message at Jan 28, 2013 around 04:25 |
| # ? Jan 28, 2013 04:22 |
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Eat This Glob posted:Long story short, he forgave our $120 tab if he could "Mash them 'taters." It was three hard smashes on my nuts, on the table, from a potato masher. Wait, what? 
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 04:38 |
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My mother used to collect carousel horses--you know, ceramic music boxes shaped like horses with ribbons in their manes? She loved them, and had a huge collection of them. People gave them to her as gifts. Right around the time my brother was born they started disapearing, and I found out she had started selling them to make ends meet. Another time we had so little in the house that my brother made a mayonaise sandwich. Mayo between whitebread. My mother literally looked like she was going to cry when she saw that. We went on WIC not long after. I've told this story before and I'll never stop telling it, but one Christmas I got what I'm 99% sure were used toys as gifts. They were dirty and seemed to have been chewed on, and weren't even wrapped.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 04:47 |
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ol qwerty bastard posted:Wait, what? It sucks being poor. And having your taters mashed.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 04:52 |
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I went to an ATM one night after work to see how much money I had and it said ~$60. OK, cool, that should be enough to buy groceries. I went out the next morning to buy groceries and my total came out to around ~$40. OK cool, let's just slide my card. Oh, it didn't work. Oh it's probably the strip; it's really old, let's try again. Nope, still didn't work. The cashier doesn't have KeyBank's number on hand and neither do I so I leave my cart of groceries behind and drive over to the KeyBank branch to see what's up. Turns out I read my ATM receipt wrong and that little dash before the amount wasn't a typing bullet but a negative sign. My account was actually ~$60 overdrawn and that's why my card wouldn't work. I went home and got into the shoebox where I keep rolled-up change and found about $35 worth of coins. I cashed those and went back to the grocery store. I had to put back the eggs, fabric softener, and the boneless pork chops but I managed to get the groceries I needed for about $20. By the time I got another paycheck, my account's total after another overdraft charge was -$90. The highest I've ever gotten my account in the negatives was -$275.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 05:06 |
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Nucleotide Oracle posted:I went to an ATM one night after work to see how much money I had and it said ~$60. OK, cool, that should be enough to buy groceries. I went out the next morning to buy groceries and my total came out to around ~$40. OK cool, let's just slide my card. Oh, it didn't work. Oh it's probably the strip; it's really old, let's try again. Nope, still didn't work. The cashier doesn't have KeyBank's number on hand and neither do I so I leave my cart of groceries behind and drive over to the KeyBank branch to see what's up. My brother did this last month! Banks should really make it clear that the tilda means you're overdrawn; I'd never heard of that before it happened to him.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 05:33 |
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I hadn't received any money from a freelance job yet so I hadn't gone grocery shopping. All I had in the fridge was some deli ham, cheese, and mayonnaise. For dinner that night, I ate a ham sandwich made entirely out of ham. My roommate won't let me live that one down.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 05:42 |
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I'm still pretty poor now, but I finally got approved for food stamps and can now buy real honest-to-God food. I never, ever want to look at a package of Top Ramen again.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 05:42 |
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When I was 8 we did not have an AC unit, but just a ceiling fan in the room my little sister and I shared. So one day in early summer it got unexpectedly hot and our fan was off. My mom's back was thrown out and we both decided not to bother her to turn on the fan because she needed rest. The problem is we were both under 5 feet tall and even with a chair we could not reach the cord that turn it on. Then my sister came up the smartest plan ever. "Hey, maybe we should pile some stuff on the chair to help reach it like they do in the Rugrats!" said my sister. "Yeah, that sounds good to me. I just climb the stuff because I'm the tallest," said I. And so we made a tower of anything that we could, pillows, blankets, our laundry basket and me being a big fat idiot climbed it and promptly fell with the chair clamping shut on my left arm. It was on of the worst pains I ever felt and I bawwwed on the floor like a baby while my sister freaked the gently caress out and ran into my mom's bedroom screaming "Mommy Lonley Virgil fell and hurt her arm really bad!  "My mom tried her best to get out of bed to come and inspect my arm which was now numb, completely purple and swelled twice it's size. My arm was broken and I got a sweet cast. So, that's how childhood poverty broke my arm in two places.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 06:14 |
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In 2009, largely due to my own stupidity and drug addiction, I was living out of my car. I had gone through short periods of homelessness and "urban camping" before so having a car to sleep in was pretty cool relatively speaking. After about a month of that I finally decided I needed help to get off the dope and sought out some people who could assist me in getting clean. I stayed homeless for the first 30 days or so of getting clean and one night, a girl gave me a box of Fruit Roll-ups as a joke. Those drat Fruit Roll-ups were my dinner that night, and it was the best loving dinner I've ever had. Edit: Other meals during that time include sacks of old donuts from the dumpster behind Krispy Kreme, pickles and A1 and other condiments from this sketchy 24 hour diner, half-eaten orders of hash browns left behind on the table at Waffle House, and "throwing in" to share a fast food chicken sandwich with another homeless guy. Remicks fucked around with this message at Jan 28, 2013 around 06:27 |
| # ? Jan 28, 2013 06:24 |
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One of the things I would do to make Ramen more palatable is get some basic cooking oil and fry it after I've boiled it, then throw some water in the pan along with the flavor packet and fry that into the noodles. Gets rid of that really mushy texture and makes it taste more filling. God I wish schools in America still taught Home Ec so that people like me wouldn't have to come up with dumbass food solutions like that to get by.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 06:45 |
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When I was around 7 or 8 my mum had a falling out with the rest of the family and so we moved out of my grandparemt's place to a hellish little apartment. Now, this apartment was in a really bad place-one evening 3 kids were gunned down right in my backyard-and I have a slew of terrible stories, but one in particular still haunts me till today. Being a family of poor immigrants, we had to heavily ration our hot water. To cut down on any potential expenses my mum had me and my brother take baths together because, hey, we were both lovely, dirty kids and had the same downstairs parts. One evening my brother and I were loving around and somehow smashed a hole high up on the wall, over the tub. Immediately we knew we were in some deep poo poo, but we sunk deeper into that poo poo as a terrible swarm of roaches surged out of the hole, down the wall, and into the tub. Obviously my brother and I high tailed it out of there, my brother twisting his ankle in the process while I actually poo poo myself. My mum promptly burst into the bathroom after hearing the commotion, only to run back out screaming alongside her two wet, naked sons after she saw the roach pool party in our tub. My memory gets a bit fuzzy around here, I think we spent that night at a neighbors apartment (he would later turn out to be a con artist and would swindle my mum out of a substantial amount of cash). The next day my mum bought a roach bomb, we set it off in our apartment, and came back a day later. The roaches were dead. However we didn't have enough money to repair the hole in the wall. Our landlord was an evil gently caress and the less I remember about him the better. Needless to say he wasn't going to be of any help. My mum stuffed the hole with some of her clothes, which she didn't have much of in the first place (she was originally going to use me and my brothers clothes, but we cried and she relented). That seemed to work for a while, but sure enough a few days later the roaches came back. This cycle went on for a few weeks. The roaches would vomit out of the wall, we would get bug bombs and set them off, then fill the hole with whatever we could, but the roaches always came back. It got so bad that we effectively quarantined the bathroom and just did PTA baths by the kitchen sink. The roaches had seemingly won. My mum was absolutely miserable, thinking back on it, but she tried her hardest to keep my brother and I from realizing how crappy the situation actually was. She framed most of this as a 'survival game,' and my brother and I were cool with that because we didn't have many toy/most of our games were the imagination heavy ones anyway. Eventually, though, my mum broke down and it just so happens that she did this while we were at church. I was raised Mormon, my mum was converted while she was a teenager in Jamaica, and let me tell you, for all the crazy things Mormons believe and do, most of them are good people. poo poo, the Mormon church was what got my family through a lot of hard times. One of the church members was an exterminator, and after hearing/witnessing about my mum's breakdown about the whole thing he offered to do whatever he could free of charge. I'm not sure what kind of roach slaying magic he did, but after he stopped by a few times all suited up and armed to the teeth with chemicals the roaches didn't come back. We still couldn't afford to fix the wall, but hey, whatever Roachtopia that once thrived hidden in the wall/ceiling was gone so we were not going to complain. We were roach free for a few months, our bathroom was ours again! Though this victory was short lived. One night my brother and I woke up to my mum absolutely screaming her head off; imagine a banshee's wail, but with a Jamaican accent/curse words. We barrelled out of bed and burst into the bathroom, my mum was thrashing about trying to get something off of her arm. When she did, and it kind of flopped, kind of bounced onto the floor it turned out to be the largest, most horrifyingly long centipede/millipede/demonspawn that I have ever, and hopefully will ever, see. With astonishing speed for something that was violently thrown onto the floor, it dashed out of the bathroom to God knows where. By the end if that week we were living back at my grandma's house. Sorry for the wall of text. I can't help but be floored by how far my family has come, and I sit now typing this on a fancy ipad in my mum's rather large house. However, I'll always remember that terrible apartment, and I'll always be terrified of centipedes. Christ, just thinking about it makes me unsettled. tl;dr: Roaches had a pool party in my bathroom and a giant centipede broke my mother's will.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 07:18 |
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The mystery fridge. In the summer of '09, my boyfriend at the time had just moved into a new place and I was spending a lot of time over there. The apartment was pretty nice, but it was obvious that its previous residents had been forced to move in a hurry. There was a good deal of household and camping poo poo strewn around the sizable common rooms, and a giant 'RON PAUL 08' banner turned up in the garage. There was also the garage fridge. From the outside, there was nothing obviously wrong with it. Like so many first impressions this proved to be dead wrong. I have not seen the pattern or thickness of the striations of the greasy ooze that occupied the main body of that thing before or since. However, it was still plugged in (and remained so out of fear), and there was a particularly dire month where the ex got fired and one of his roommates got arrested. Long story short, we reached an uneasy decision: the freezer of the mystery fridge was fair game. Right? Right? Unlabeled packages of paper-wrapped meat filled the little freezer about halfway. I live in a place where hunting is kind of a thing, so this was not as terrifying as it perhaps should have been. We ripped open the first one; it was definitely meat and that was all we could say. We told each other that once cooked it would be obvious what animal it came from. Pan-frying it produced unsettling smells and little in the way of answers. To this day I'm certain it was fish; the ex says it was definitely venison. Every package was like that. I remember sitting on the floor in front of the TV watching Mad Max with a greasy fork embedded in one of the mystery meats, an indescribable empathy for Mel Gibson filling my soul. The day we found one that was identifiably sausage was like God telling us it would be okay. For what it's worth no one got sick from the freezer meats and after they were gone we had enough cash for a potato based diet! Such luxuries. The day we found out that Little Caesars left its dumpster unlocked and threw out all their leftover pizzas at closing time was a truly momentous one.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 07:31 |
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Potatoes and rice. There's been quite a few times in my life where the pantry contained only those two things, because we couldn't afford anything else (like now.). For an actual story, though, back when I was 19, I was a dumb poo poo and ran away from home without a job or any money because I had abusive family members. Alone, scared, and really goddamn hungry, I ended up biting the bullet and just using sex to be able to crash at my then (lovely) boyfriend's house. So for a while I was basically squatting in the basement apartment he lived in. Anyway, what he'd do is either go get fast food for himself after work or just bring home a pizza from the little ceasar's he worked at. I never asked him to bring me anything and he never offered, so usually what I'd do is just wait until he'd finished eating and dropped whatever he didn't want on the end table to go play WoW, and then I'd devour it like some sort of lunatic chipmunk. To this day I cannot stand fast food.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 07:36 |
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Boyfriend and I were absolutely stony broke one summer, waiting for the next student loan to come through. Entirely self inflicted through stupidity. What I remember is, we ate pommes lyonnaise (potatoes and onions) every day. You scrape together £5 and buy a bottle of cheap oil, a sack of spuds, a sack of onions. Thinly slice onions and potatoes, shallow fry till golden, eat. Leave the potato skins on and you have vitamins. Feeds two for a week. If there's a cheaper cooked food I don't know what it is.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 08:05 |
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Astrofig posted:Another time we had so little in the house that my brother made a mayonaise sandwich. Mayo between whitebread. My mother literally looked like she was going to cry when she saw that. We went on WIC not long after. I did almost the same growing up except it was a ranch dressing and cabbage sandwich. Growing up poor was great.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 08:38 |
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Growing up, my mom would make halloween costumes for us. It would always been something neat, like Spider-Man or Batman and they still meant a lot for me. I mean sure, store bought costumes would look a little better, but to have someone make a costume for you, out of compassion and love will always trump that. When I got older (like 10 or 12), I began to make my own costumes and I found it to be a very fun way to get in the halloween spirit. Of course, I stopped around 15 or so, when halloween mostly became drinking and eggin' houses, but even then, I would make a lil' mask or two to goof off. Also, kool-aid or hi-c freezer pops!
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 09:10 |
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Growing up with just my mother, we both had to deal with not having much money and relying on welfare cheques and such. When we wouldn't have the money, we had to get creative on how we'd live, such as the following examples: If we didn't have toilet paper we had to use facial tissues. No facial tissues, we used bible or dictionary pages. If we had torn clothes we didn't want to use anymore, we'd just use that and hand-wash it afterwards. Most of the time though, we tried to always save going to the bathroom for when we go out in public, say at a friends' home. What I did was use the nearby McDonald's restroom and just leave because nobody really gave a poo poo (lol) if I bought anything there or not. Food would oftentimes be really scarce, but we'd always have this big bag of flour and a huge jar of baking soda/powder and other spices given to us by friends, so we would constantly bake/find any other way to make dough into something edible. Of course I, in my spare time, would go dumpster diving for recyclables. It was really worth the time because occasionally, we'd save up the money and buy something nice for the both of us like some club soda, or some variety of sparkling juices. The last thing I can remember is that we hardly ever went clothes shopping. The only time we would ever replace an article of clothing we wore was if it was literally falling off ourselves and was completely unwearable. And even then, stuff like shoes we would just tape together hoping we wouldn't have to spend any more of our money on expensive foot wear.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 12:08 |
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Oh God being broke. Anyone who ever bitches about using "entitlements" to support the needy can literally gently caress off and die. I was poor for many years due to having a husband (now ex) who went out of his way to lose jobs. The man was a plumber and would get a job, go into someone's home, and if he noticed any catholic items proceed to tell them that they would go to hell if they didn't accept "Yeshua Ha'Machiac" and become Messianic. Yeah. This is what I had to do to survive: I once got over 200 expired ketchup packets from Hardees' dumpster and made tomato soup with them. Ex husband complained that he didn't like tomatoes. Our gas got cut off, so for a whole year we had no hot water, heat, or stove. To keep me and my three kids warm I sealed off the living room doorway with blankets and we all slept on one bed with a space heater. I also made dinner for five using one small electric skillet and a microwave that took 10 minutes to heat a cup of water. My kids took sponge baths in winter with skillet water, and in the spring/summer I washed them by "playing" in the yard. I'd soap them up in their swimsuits and hose them down while they ran around. They actually really liked that one. I got a job at Domino's Pizza just so I could bring home leftovers. For six months we ate pizza for breakfast, lunch, and dinner until we hated pizza. Then the new manager stopped letting people bring food home. I ended up stealing several bags of frozen meats and veggies from there to make soup with (which I'm not ashamed for, I was feeding my kids.) The key to eating cheap is spices. I would buy spices from Dollar Tree and everything I made was spicy. Potatoes by themselves are boring, add spices and now it's Vegetarian Curry! Rice again? Nope, it's vegetarian fried rice! Sometimes I'd make "rice pudding" for the kids at breakfast by mixing cinnamon and rice with sugar packets and creamer pods the diner next to Domino's would give me. We also started a garden and grew some strawberries, potatoes, corn, and beans! The straw that broke the camel's back that led me to divorcing my ex-husband was the day I discovered that he'd been sneaking to his mom's house after work and eating there. His folks never gave me and their grandkids food because "people need to look after their own" but my ex could have a loving steak. The day I told him he could loving stay at his mom's house was the second best day of my life up to that point. The first best day up to that point was finding out two days later that as a single parent I could then qualify for food stamps. gently caress people who bitch about "entitlements".
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 13:18 |
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In one of the other threads someone was bitching about poor people eating smoked salmon with their government food money. It's part of a bunch of bullshit, of course. But when my husband was a kid and his family was poor as hell, they did in fact eat smoked salmon. My father-in-law was out of work for months on end. For a while they were doing the pancakes three times a day thing to keep their three kids from starving - my husband only started being able to eat pancakes again in his mid 30s. It was getting really dire. Then salmon fishing season came around. My husband's grandfather lived in Oregon and fished the salmon runs every year, and smoked and packaged his catches himself. He sent them a crate of smoked salmon. So now they had pancakes and smoked salmon at very meal. My husband never liked the stuff in the first place, but it was all the food they had, so of course he ate it. The man is almost 40 and still can't stand the smell of smoked salmon. I tried broiling him some fresh salmon with lots of nice lemon and dill, and he barely managed to gag it down without puking. He just can't handle salmon after eating so much of it. Thankfully my family never got to the pancakes and freebies level, but when I was a kid we did have our hard years. I remember my mom buying the cheapest grind of beef on the last day before they threw it out, the cheapest off-brand of canned tomatoes in the store, and the store-brand pasta to make spaghetti and it tasting like the best thing I'd ever eaten. You can actually eat pretty well for pretty darned cheap if you make spaghetti that way. I was too young to have really clear memories of the lean years, and my little sister doesn't remember them at all. I just remember a feeling of not having the things a lot of my friends did, but also knowing that some of my other friends had even less. My dad eventually found a new job making decent pay, and my mom went back to work after being a homemaker for six or seven years, and we pulled out of it. Their marriage didn't survive, but we didn't lose the house or go hungry, so I guess I can count myself fortunate.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 13:55 |
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Astrofig posted:My brother did this last month! Banks should really make it clear that the tilda means you're overdrawn; I'd never heard of that before it happened to him. Actually I used the tilde in my story to infer that I had around that amount in my checking account and spent that much on groceries; it's been a few months since the incident. For some paranoid reason that doesn't make sense to me now, I also didn't want to say how much I really had. But yeah, banks should really do that.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 13:57 |
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As a kid we lived on soup from elderberries for 3 months straight. They were just everywhere were we lived so you could spend a weekend picking and preparing them and then you'd be stocked for a drat long time. At least on me they're an effective laxative so not terribly convenient as your only food source.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 14:58 |
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Compared to these examples mine's pretty mild, but it's also really dumb. I was, once, completely out of money after paying for bills and food. Technically, that wasn't a big problem, since I had everything I needed to survive. I wanted to get drunk though, but couldn't afford it. So, I looked at the bottle of hand sanitizer I had bought in the flu season but never actually used. Yep, it had alcohol. No, it didn't have methanol. So I drank it. I did get drunk and didn't die but I felt like such a terrible person that I started keeping a budget and never went completely broke again.
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 15:17 |
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| # ? May 24, 2013 18:21 |
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Anosmoman posted:As a kid we lived on soup from elderberries for 3 months straight. They were just everywhere were we lived so you could spend a weekend picking and preparing them and then you'd be stocked for a drat long time. At least on me they're an effective laxative so not terribly convenient as your only food source. Was your mother a hamster?
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| # ? Jan 28, 2013 15:23 |
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