There was an article on MSN Money written by a woman who is 52 years old and is now making $6.50 an hour. She has fallen from clinging to the edge of middle-class respectability to unoffical poverty. Because she's still hanging on valiantly to her 401k from her old job and she owns what sounds like a tiny house in Montana, she is still not officially poor.
The article first came out on December 28, 2006. Three weeks later, I'm still thinking about it and the responses she's gotten.
People have said she's obviously stupid because she has three dogs and she hasn't gotten rid of them. Well, I have twelve cats and I haven't gotten rid of them. There have been months when the cats have eaten a more balanced diet than I have. There have been months when the cats have gotten better medical care than I have. To me, that was part of the contract I made when I took them in, that they would not want, that they would be cared for, and that they would never, ever wind up again in the hellhole where I found them.
The woman tried to relocate for her a new job, but couldn't find housing that would accept her three dogs. She ended up losing the job and moving back to Montana.
People have accused her of being a new Barbara Ehrenreich. I read "Nickel and Dimed" and it steamed me more at her than at anyone else. Whenever Babs got tired of pretending like she was poor, she ran back home and soaked in the Jacuzzi.
The $6.50 chick and I lived it. We know what we need to do to survive.
Outside your house, you never eat or drink anything you haven't brought along with you. You make coffee at home (whatever's on sale at Big Lots). You make huge pots of minestrone. You eat a lot of pasta or rice. With careful planning, you can buy a week's worth of groceries for less than ten dollars.
You learn how to cut your own hair. You learn how to color it. You find the real factory outlets and buy a bottle of nail polish for fifty cents, hair color for less than three dollars a box. It may seem frivolous, but you work in an industry where appearances matter. You can't be seen as shabby or desperate. You faithfully polish your shoes and make sure your clothes are clean and ironed.
On the weekends, in the dark, you Dumpster dive. Carefully.
You walk or ride your bike or you don't go, except to work. There's a listing of free stuff in my Friday newspaper, but the irony was that I was afraid to use the gasoline to get there.
You give up cable. You give up high-speed Internet access. (True confessions time - I'd rather go without food than not have Internet access. Besides, I got some freelance writing gigs over the Internet.) You use the library for the Internet, checking out books, magazines, music, and videos.
You make it a game, seeing what kinds of meals you can come up with using whatever is in the pantry and freezer.
When you come into a windfall, you spend it on more stuff to stockpile in your pantry. Indian groceries are great for staples. And if a nation of a hundreds of millions of people can get by on legumes and rice, so can you.
Cell phone? Gone. Security system? What on earth do you need it for?
You sell books on half.com. You sell your jewelry on eBay. You are humbly grateful for gifts of food or gift cards that mean you can buy new underwear.
You buy any 'new' clothes at the Goodwill or Salvation Army. (For some unknown reason, I have a horror of buying used shoes. I wore all my shoes to pieces or bought them when Payless had a twofer sale.) Even poor people wouldn't want your old clothes, so you use them for rags.
You use kitchen towels instead of paper towels. You use cloth hankies instead of Kleenex. People think you are adorably quaint.
You start a pet sitting business.
You investigate any kind of programs you can get for job retraining. I didn't qualify for any of them, so I paid for the project management and technical writing certificates out of my own pocket. I used my last savings bonds to do that, but it was money well spent.
I did not borrow money from anyone. Regrettably, I did get into credit card debt. I'm working now on paying that off.
You get a roommate. Twice, I was not so lucky. Once, I could not have been any luckier.
You start a price book. If you don't know what that is, you go to the library and check out The Tightwad Gazette.
You hand-make gifts. Eventually, you start to wish other people would hand-make their gifts, too, because they mean something more than whatever bauble catches your eye at Macy's.
You never let anyone know exactly how close to the edge you are. Still, one or two guess and it terrifies them.
I know exactly where this woman has been.
I rejoice that I now have only one job. There were times when I had four. Possibly five, since I stopped counting at four.
What prompted all this was that fifteen minutes ago, the UPS guy came to my door with my order from Land's End. I have a new coat. I have a new pair of shoes. The coat is not elegant or beautiful. You would never mistake it for something Givenchy stitched together for Miss Hepburn. But to me, it's beautiful. It's warm and elegant. It isn't ripped or torn and the buttons aren't falling off. The shoes are black suede and very functional.
In a way, this coat and these shoes mean more to me than a Fender guitar. This means to me that it's done. That the horror and the fear are over for now.
I'm through it. I have kept not just my cats, but my house and my health. It was three very long years, but I lived through them and I'm not poor anymore.
For that matter, I don't know if I ever really was.
