How Poor Were You Growing Up? (r/AskReddit)

how poor were you growing up I learned not to ask for things because I knew I wouldn't get it I was the only kid in the seventh grade that couldn't go on the field trip the fee was five dollars growing up with a mom who was addicted to drugs was pretty rough mostly she could never keep up a job and sold all our food stamps and gifts my dad sent us four pills and cigarettes I remember eating sultanan crackers and ramen noodles for dinner a lot around birthdays and Christmas my sister and I would get nice gifts but my mom always sold them not long after for her habits I'm guessing the only reason we had food most times and clothes that weren't donated to the church was because my grandpa stepped in I live with him now and still every time we go out to eat and I see something that costs more than five dollars I wonder how anyone can afford it even though my grandpa has a good job and we don't struggle anymore I still worry about money hang in there work hard make good choices and you can make yourself a better life in the future just like I did we have a similar background I'm glad you have a supportive grandpa my mom and dad were high school dropouts and my mom had me when she was 17 I grew up in a three-room shack with no electricity and a wood stove it barely had running water for the one toilet and one sink to run a light at night my dad would pull the battery out of the beat-up piece of crap Ford Fairlane last night and hook wires to a light bulb my birthday money from family members was my new pair of shoes every year and clothes were hand-me-downs from anyone my mom could make friends with rice and beans every dang night of the week even reduced lunch was too expensive so my mom made PB&J and I ate cracked fricking weed every morning for breakfast that crap disgusts me now on my birthday one year my dad and I walked to the starvin Marvin gas station on Rodgers Thorpe Ave in Athens GA and he bought me a 50 cent coke on the way back home I tripped and he fell out of my hand hit a rock and exploded my dad really couldn't afford another 50 Cent's but he walked all the way back and bought me another one but then everything changed my dad was working in a machine shop for a bunch of engineers he made the items that they designed well he started finding ways to make their designs better so they let him go to the design meetings then they showed him how to use CAD and he was drawing up blueprints then all of the engineers got laid off one of those engineers got a new job at a place called Seba vision and he told the managers there about this really exceptional engineer he knew it sir my dad with no high school diploma was hired as an engineer based on word of mouth of other engineers our lives changed overnight we had new clothes a new car bought a house and for my next birthday I got a freaking Nintendo with one game holy crap that was like heaven opening up and raining miracles on me now he's the vice president of R&D for a small company in Atlanta and he has put every single one of his five sons through four - six years of college the part about your dad buying you another coke even though you guys couldn't afford it made me tear up he sounds like a really great guy and I'm happy everything has worked out in the end I honestly didn't realize that we were poor until I was in my teens me and my sister always got new clothes before the new school year always had pretty good Christmas and never went hungry we lived in a pretty rural area surrounded by woods we always had a big garden and grew everything from greens to hot peppers I spent many a summer having pee picking competitions with my dad and helping him make his own hot sauce spent a lot of time on the buy and fishing and during hunting season every free minute was spent in the woods hunting it wasn't until I was about 16 that I realized what my parents had to go through to provide I learned that we had a garden to have vegetables I always thought that hunting and fishing was just a hobby for me and my dad but it was what provided meat for us if we didn't bring anything home we didn't eat they always managed to trick me into thinking everything was a game I remember my dad buying me my actual rod and reel he would tie old nuts and bolts on the string and challenge me to casting competitions who could get closest to that tree or whatever not knowing that he was trying to increase my accuracy to avoid having to replace baits I remember when my grandfather gave me his old melon point2 to when I was about 10 I would spend my $5 a week allowance on bullets and just target shoot every day my dad and grandfather would always set up new challenges and whatnot I became a real good shot by the next hunting season and I was then a squirrel and rabbit hunting machine I think this is such a good example of how living off the land is completely different from being poor in the city urban incomes might be higher than rural incomes but so is the cost of living and the quality of life is often far worse as a very young child my mom was a single mother raising two girls on what the government offered poor parents in the 90s and some help from family we didn't live on our own until I was nearly six and we often had pizza which consisted of slices of bread ketchup stolen from fast-food places and American cheese I loved it and our meager existence literally I have no bad memories of that time at all and remember it as just this adventure part of my life when mom and me and my sis spent a lot of time together doing weird stuff then mom finished a nursing degree met the man who raised us from age five one stroke to on and started earning enough to make a living we were never upper-middle class and we were often lower middle class but we always had food to eat and clothes to wear after that my mom worked her butt off for me and my sis and my dad came with two more kids of his own I've never met two hard-working people and their efforts really helped me grow into a person who appreciates hard work and self-made success our house is older than dirt and falling apart at the seams in some places but we love it and all the memories made there are good we used to have that exact pizza to warmed up in the toaster oven even in my 30s I still get a taste for it sometimes my family used to live in a squatters area in a third-world country my father only made less than $20 a day he was a driver for a public vehicle assumingly made $15 for eight hours this would be split between the vehicles owner and the gas expenses my mom stayed at home and started a few small businesses in five years or so we never had a bed just a sleeping mat a few pillows and a blanket that fit the three others on the floor we also didn't have a proper dining table it was a DIY small table from scrap wood that we placed on the floor the same floor where we would sleep when we were about to eat then had it leaned on the wall were not used my mom was smart enough to not give birth to another child realizing that raising one child alone was too much an expense it was my mom's business that saved us we eventually managed to afford a bed then a CRT TV then a fridge and then a phone by the time I got a computer I was already 13 and in a private high school something that a lot of families couldn't afford my mom passed away before I graduated from college but left behind quite a few some that kept me and my father alive for the next two years our house is still up in that area and my father lives there by choice I moved out because of work one time my stepdad was so excited he found a dollar in his jeans that he didn't even notice my brother falling down the steps what if every time you found money you just unknowingly made a deal with the devil like if you pick up this dollar your son will fall oh the stairs that crap would be cool as Frick though both of my grandpa's worked 45 years at a distillery while running a farm on the side we never ate out but we always ate well apple pear plum and persimmon trees blackberry raspberry grapes and boysenberry fish from four ponds cows pigs sheep chickens and wild game my other friends went on vacations and flew on planes I thought we didn't have all that much glad I'll lived long enough to know I didn't know that other seven-year-old chores didn't include catching killing and skinning squirrels for dinner for reference I live in Kansas City Missouri being afraid to ask for things because you know the answer will be no and getting used to not being able to afford things eventually you just throw out school flyers about school shirts field trips that cost money lunch money school supplies dances trips anything that costs anything you learn to accept what you haven't make at work and when you actually get something you understand that it actually means something and costs your parent s money they had to work for once I had my first job I actually wasted the money on things I just kinda wanted because I had the luxury of being able to it took a long time to learn to manage money wisely and it's still a process because when you never have it it's hard to understand how to hold on to it there is a mentality when you are Paul that you should spend the money quickly to buy things you want because if you don't it will be nickeled and dimed to death on things you need then you seemingly have nothing to show for it my mom was addicted to drugs and our life was completely unstable she worked as a bartender sometimes three jobs but was constantly being fired for various things and starting at a new bar but sometimes she wouldn't come home for days we were evicted from every house we ever lived in I can't even tell you how many different schools I've been to without thinking it through we were often homeless and had to live in seedy motels our car got repossessed electric water gas was shut off several times throughout my life I started life out with horrible credit even before I turned 16 because my name had been used to start electric water gas or whatever on various occasions and then went in paid to this day I have an aversion to meat eggs milk because I've had food poisoning so often from bad food we used to eat at school over summer break because they had a lunch program running for neighborhood kids so even though I didn't go to summer school I qualified and my brother and I would walk to the school to eat teachers used to give us hand-me-down clothes shoes cause ours would have holes in them or whatever we both got made fun of a lot for general clothing appearance issues relating to poverty once when I was in high school I was dating an older man who was abusive and we were evicted from our home and had to be out by midnight my mom was working a shift and afterwards I had no idea where she went because she suggested I move in with my boyfriend instead since we really had nowhere to go after a few days of getting beat up I caught her at work and found out she had been staying with my brother on the floor of one of her random customers apartments he let me go there that night but the three of us were sleeping on the floor and I remember it being so hot and I just felt totally defeated by life and really heartbroken over everything I was scheduled to take mice at the next day of school but missed it ended up getting a job at McDonald's and dropping out of school shortly after to work more staying with my abusive boyfriend on and off because it was better than nothing or just walking through the city all night sometimes because nothing was better than the boyfriend and eventually was able to rent a room and get more of a stable life going despite a general trend in young adulthood towards abusive relationships and other obstacles I faced largely in part due to leftover childhood poverty issues we were homeless at one point mum was swamped with debt because she could not afford to care for two children on NHS pay she did it though and me and my sis Val to never be in debt thanks to what she taught us about money also I bought her a car because that woman is the best my mum would specifically go to to ATMs across the street from each other and withdraw 20 run across the street to withdrawal another 20 before the bank realized Latvia count was negative from the first withdrawal growing up I remember multiple meals that were literally slices of spam and nothing else a can would do between two and three days at a push at my poorest as an adult I ate even less than that my mom would count the pennies in my dad's jeans to see if we had enough to buy bread each week our fridge was hardly ever full and I remember we always had milk and dozens of boxes of Kraft Dinner we lived in Canada at a time but bread and peanut butter was a treat back then when my mom finally broke down and told my grandma grandma did her a solid and bought her a bread making machine it was the most delicious bread I ever tasted we saved enough money that I got three Christmas presents instead of just one a few years later my dad went from underpaid scientists to a cushy American government job and our living situation drastically improved my sister has forgotten those days but I remember and save all the change I can find in a jar just in case butter and bread equals lunch I always went with Mayo my mom used the butter for her English muffin so we weren't allowed to eat either gifts on Christmas and birthdays are things you need not fun things Christmas is usually when I got all my soap and shampoo for the next year clothes come from Goodwill Salvation Army savers etc if they weren't coming out of something's lost and found school yearbooks and pictures are unnecessary the best meals of the week would be the half-eaten food my mother brought home from her waitress job at the Country Club I always thought I grew up poor because my parents were always stressed about money but I always had food and I always had a roof over my head I just remember having our heat shut off in the winter and living in the Midwest where it gets really cold it was pretty bad we all slept in a room with a little electric heater and had to be up extra early to get ready for school because we had to heat our bathwater on the stove and dump it into the tub I remember thinking that was as bad as it gets but then I grew up and realized I had it easy electricity and phone getting cut off asking the neighbor to lend bread for school sandwiches poor never had enough undies or socks poor bored school shoes way too big and resold them until they fell apart poor but we were happy it wasn't until I was a teenager that I asked mom are we poor I was born in a family that worked in the crop fields of someone else when I turned 15 I was made to work in the fields I understood why and was happy to aid my poor family we had a small Hut and then everything changed when I finally got a job at an IT company I feel like you left out a detail or three here when I was born my parents were very poor ate ramen noodles and can beans a lot for my understand they had to share on old Eagle summit and could not afford rent without assistance from my grandparents they had to pick between putting gas in the car for my dad to get to work rent or whatever food we could get our hands on the government assistance was not an option from what my mom has since told me we made too high of an income to qualify for welfare but we were too poor to really get by what was fricked up to me was that my mother came from a blue-collar working poor family but my father's parents were very wealthy at the pool grandparents scrambled and sold for every coin they had to help my parents out the rich grandparents they hung up on my mom and dad when they would call them for help very poor my family lived in the boiler room basement of an old apartment I thought my family was poor because all the ate was ramen then I visited a friend and all she had was cat food in her cabinet I asked her weigh her cat was and she said she didn't have one this makes me sad every time I think of it we had to decide which utilities we were going to keep on each month I can remember a few months where the electric bill wasn't paid and we chilled our milk and frozen groceries in the snow remember my mom sitting my brother and I down to explain we couldn't afford to rent blockbuster movies anymore I remember asking my mom are we poor she said something along the lines of no but birthday and Christmas are going to be very small this year on the upside my parents started a soda company and made millions afterwards and are now happily retired all the other kids had backpacks and I stuck my arms through the holes of a plastic grocery bag to wear it like it was one I grew up in a single-wide trailer we ate actual government cheese and peanut butter which was awful because it was thin oily and contained whole peanut parts we only shopped in the generic aisles of the grocery store it's not like today with brightly colored great value products all the packaging was stark white with the product description simply declared in bold black cornflakes pitted pear halves mechanically separated chicken products I don't remember being conscious of the fact that we were poor I just thought TV movie families like the Keaton's family ties all the Griswolds were unusually wealthy immigrants living in Brooklyn when I was six our family of five was supported by my dad being an unlicensed cab driver we were all our new clothes are purchased in warehouses from bins with exploding ink stains pour all our vegetables come from cans pour we couldn't even afford name-brand ramen noodles you have been visited by the safety dog oh subscribe and he will L be safe from all danger for the next 24 hours if you are new to the channel you can subscribe I publish new videos every day until then check another video or don't either way have a great day you magnificent people

Channel: On Tap Studios

Views: 21,302

Rating: 4.9271069 out of 5

Keywords: #updootst, updoot, reddit, r/askreddit, askreddit, ask reddit, r/, \r, r\, best of reddit, reddit stories, reddit story, top posts, funniest posts, funny, funny posts, funny askreddit, reddit funny, askreddit funny, askreddit stories, sub, reddit cringe, memes, comment awards, dankify, toadfilms, updoot everything, updoot reddit, chill, story, stories, reddit on tap, reddit people share, reddit poor stories, reddit poor to rich, reddit poor food, askreddit poor, reddit growing up poor

Id: zofNL7FNSC0

Length: 18min 7sec (1087 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 10 2019