I grew up &quot;we don&#x27;t have money for Christmas presents&quot; poor, but not &quot;we don&#x27;t have money for food&quot; poor.<p>It&#x27;s not even about that. It&#x27;s that being poor is expensive. So, here&#x27;s an example: when I would buy shoes, which were usually boots (I lived on a farm), you could get a pair at a place like Sears. They were maybe, I dunno, $20-$30 at the time. They would fall apart within a year. Every year, let&#x27;s say, $30-$60, just on replacing my shoes. Then, one year, I decided to save up _all_ of my money, including gifts, and bought a pair of Doc Martens for $120. Those shoes lasted me for almost a decade, because they were significantly higher quality. $12&#x2F;year, actually cheaper than the poorer quality boots. But that wouldn&#x27;t help if I couldn&#x27;t put the $120 together to actually buy them, which was true most of the time.<p>A lot of being poor is like this. You can only afford cheap stuff, and cheap stuff breaks a lot and needs to be replaced often. It&#x27;s expensive to be poor.