Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor
I have both my father and my uncle who became dirt poor just by making terribly poor life choices so I&#x27;ve got a very different take on this. They had good jobs but couldn&#x27;t help screwing it up by: gambling, buying sportcars, overall trying to bite more than they could swallow (houses too big, with monthly mortgage too expensive), etc.<p>In both cases it ended up with foreclosures &#x2F; lawyers etc.  My brother and I are now sending monthly money to our father because of his bad lifechoices.<p>And by poor I mean: living in a rusty, broken, RV hidden behind trees, illegally hooked up to electricity (not paying for it) and dumpster diving to find food for his dogs (because of course he was dirt poor but he had to have dogs and rabbits).<p>I&#x27;ve got friends who have serious issues meeting month&#x27;s ends yet they buy 5x what I buy online. Every single time I arrive at their home they&#x27;ve got new pointless gadgets bought on Amazon.<p>There are people spending a fortune, compared to what they make, on packs of cigarettes and daily booze.<p>When you don&#x27;t have enough money you don&#x27;t have a ghetto dog, you don&#x27;t buy cheap gadgets on Amazon, you don&#x27;t drink your daily bottle of vodka&#x2F;whiskey&#x2F;packs of beer, you don&#x27;t smoke a pack a day. You don&#x27;t take a mortgage on a car from a category you can&#x27;t afford just to keep up with the Joneses when a smaller car would do.<p>Well, you can...  But there are choices and I refuse to accept that there are zero choices.  You&#x27;ll simply never convince me because I&#x27;ve seen it firsthand.<p>Now I don&#x27;t tell those around me how they should handle their personal finances but I cannot but think about the many poor decisions I see being made.<p>And I&#x27;m not saying everybody has lots of room: but there are many poor people out there who are poor simply because of their dumb life choices (like my father).