Studies show you can only truly comprehend the income classes directly above and below you. Meaning if someone makes more money than the person who is already making more money than you, then their lifestyle makes ZERO sense. Money can make things tricky and marrying someone from a different income bracket can make things trickier.
Reddit user, u/knakworst36, wanted people living the life to help us understand when they asked:
Rich people of reddit who married someone significantly poorer, what surprised you about their (previous) way of life?
When You Don't Know What A Vacation Is
I fell in love with my uni best friend who really didn't have any money.
When I got a job, for my birthday I decided to plan a holiday and offered to bring him along. It didn't even occur to me that this was his first ever holiday he'd ever taken. His family could never afford it growing up, and he'd never really thought to do it as an adult.
"I like to look at everything I could have."
GiphyMy husband grew up in a family where they were comfortable but on a strict budget. Six kids and mom on disability. My family had no budget.
One day we were at the grocery store and he always insists on walking up and down every aisle. I finally lost it because he was taking so long and asked him why he did it.
"Growing up we could only spend $100 a week on groceries for all of us. I always had to put what I wanted back because we couldn't afford it. Now I can afford whatever I want so I like to look at everything I could have."
Took him 10 years to tell me this. I felt like a terrible person.
This Isn't A Subway
Sandwiches.
When I made him a sandwich I only put one thin slice of meat in it. He couldn't believe that was how I had sandwiches growing up.
My wife grew up not poor, but not very well off, and a good snack for her was a spoon of just peanut butter. I had never used peanut butter as anything but in combination with at least SOMETHING else, ie bread. It's little things like that.
You Can Do Almost Everything
My experience is from the opposite perspective, I was the poor one. It absolutely floored me how my wife acts when something broke like a car, appliances, clothes, etc.
As a child living below the poverty line, replacing a tire or other necessities was a disaster, requiring tricky trade offs in the budget or just plain acceptance of just how boned you were.
When my wife's phone broke, I went into full panic mode while she shrugged and said: "we can just [get] a new one this afternoon". And then we did.
Sometimes It Can Be Better
I'm from the poorer family (not super poor, but my in-laws have a stupid amount of money so by comparison I'm very poor), but I think I can answer for her.
We have two young kids, and my wife was shocked when I said we should look for clothes and toys for them at local flea markets and garage sales. The idea never occurred to her that we could save money by getting some gently-used items, she had never even been to a garage sale in her life.
She has grown to love them and now questions whether it is worth it to buy any item "new" or not before running to Amazon or a store. Her parents think it's disgusting we make our kids wear clothes that another child had before, but they don't pay my bills.
There's A Reason She Doesn't Like Camping
Honestly, food insecurity.
When we were first married she would get visibly uneasy if the food in the house was running low. She never overate or anything, she was just always concerned about it. A lot of times when she was younger, she went hungry.
On the humorous side though, she hates camping. Her answer is always the same: I [never] camped because it was fun, she camped because they couldn't afford hotels.
When A Meal Reminds You
Hamburger Helper. She hates it because it would be her meal 5x a week growing up.
I had never even seen HH before I went to college and love that stuff. 10 for $10 deals are awesome.
Bouncing Between Too Much To No Control
She grew up in a middle class family where snacks were very rarely bought and foods were often hidden/locked under key for 'important' events/guests.
She is earning excellent money now, extremely passionate (and successfully following a fitness path as a lifestyle) and constantly building a strong, healthy body :)
She is however struggling with food binge. She has periods of times when she is very rational with her intakes and follows her goals. But every few days/weeks she goes completely irrational on snacks and sabotaging all her fitness work.
She also always buys too much food of the same kind on the weekly food shopping and we think it's because of the lack of food availability in her childhood.
When You Just Want To Show Them A Good Time
My wife comes from a very poor family ( no running water, outhouse etc )
My parent's kitchen furniture costs more than their house.
In any case, my wife has never been to a cinema... never been to a mall, never went to a restaurant, only had 1 pair of pants.. it was pretty damn bad.
In the 1st month of me meeting her we must've gone to every damn Patisserie place in the city, always getting their cakes which my then girlfriend loved. I spent over $1200 that month just on deserts, it was absurd but i was in love and didn't care lol.
Amazingly enough she is VERY well balanced now and barely spends money, i spend more than her to the point that i feel guilty. She still asks for permission when she wants to spend a few $... even though i spend huge amounts on hobbies and cars.
( also, her parents are poor by choice pretty much, least amount of effort humanly possible to survive)
"We could have used it in a pasta!"
My husband was/is from a significantly poorer background than I am.
He gets genuinely anxious about food waste to the point that if i throw away milk past its used by date he says "we could have used it in a pasta!" because his mother used to repurpose spoiled milk into a sort of chunky white sauce for their pasta. We both have very successful careers and make plenty of money but he is still stuck in the old ways of his family.
What Can I Afford?
Poor girl here who dated a guy who's family was pretty well off. Went to a restaurant once that they said was casual. In my mind 20$ and up for a meal is in no way casual and I went into full panic mode when I couldn't find a meal under ten bucks.
They bought me like a 30$ steak like it was nothing. It felt weird
Sushi Is Poor
Kinda different but I had a friend who thought that sushi constituted as "poor people food" because that's what her mom taught her and she'd be like "oh I'm slumming it today I'm just going to get sushi". Me, being the youngest of 6 children and part of a lower middle class family, immediately invited her over for some good 'ol off brand ramen noodle.
She took one bite and said "this tastes like being broke". This was also the day she found out that I only have one oven in my house, clean my own bedroom, have never been to a yacht club, and only have 5 pairs of jeans. She was disgusted.
Selling What You Love
I'm late, but this is me and my wife. The biggest thing is just that there are some things that you can so easily take for granted coming from money vs not. My wife had to sell her vinyl collection for gas money in college. I never once experienced that level of need.
It helps keep both of us balanced though and we have our heads on straight for the value of a dollar and not going above our means.
Now a lot of times the conversation turns to time vs money and if someone in her family hits us up for a relatively small amount of money being able to give happily without worrying about ever getting it back. Both of these things have been a huge psychological shift for her.
Just Be As Safe As Possible
The prevailing mindset in his community growing up that insurance was something only rich people had. Not health insurance, mind you (well, not just health insurance). Auto insurance.
Going without it was a way of life for most everyone he knew.
When What Should Be Common Is A Rarity...
GiphyMy SO said "Today I made rent" meaning "today I've earned enough/accumulated enough to pay the rent" and I realized that this is a monthly accomplishment to someone with no fixed income/salary.
They See A World In A Different, Better Way
I can answer this one! I did not grow up rich by any means but I would say my family was upper middle class. My husband was born in Nicaragua and eventually moved to Texas where his mother barely scraped by supporting him and his brother. Some of the things that surprised me:
1. He never eats snacks. Ever. They didn't have food in their kitchen and he would go hungry sometimes. He said once they had an egg in the kitchen and he scrambled it and split it with his brother while his mom hungrly looked on. Now as an adult he doesn't understand "snacking". If we eat a banana he thinks that is our next meal.
2. He is very impressed with smaller things in life. He had 1 toy as a kid (truck) and now, anything I get him he thinks is the most amazing thing in the world. He saves everything.
3. He is the hardest worker I know. He never wants to be where he was.
4. He is the most grateful, optimistic person I know. We've been having some problems (family drama, trying to sell our house, work stuff etc.). He is not afflicted by any of it, he is cool as a cucumber. He always says, "did you eat today?", "do you have a place to sleep??", "does someone love you?"..... "then you are better than most people".
I dearly love him. He makes me see the world in a different, better way.
Companies are typically in business for profit, and very few have the goal of keeping the customer's interests in mind.
But some corporations go even further to get more out of their customer in exchange for their "quality services" and as a result, the line between general business and scam becomes blurred.
Redditor jwwin asked:
"What is a predatory business that shouldn't be legal, but is?"
Students paying an exorbitant amount in tuition in order to seek higher learning should be warned there are additional expenses to cover for.
A Textbook Example
"College textbooks, they will release an 'updated' edition every semester but the information doesn't change. And then after you spent a fortune on the books the places that buy textbooks will give you like 5% of what you paid for the book."
– teethalarm
A "Double Whammy"
"Former Prof here. I talked with a book rep about this once and learned a lot. It is a bit complicated but worth understanding. Book publishers rely on large quantity sales to make any money on a book because the cost of production is so high up front (author, editors, printing, etc.). So, for a book to be profitable, it has to sell a lot of copies to spread the cost of production across all the books. A paperback in the fiction section might sell 100,000 or more. A textbook might sell as few as 1,000. So, the publisher needs everyone to buy the book to break even."
"Now add colleges into the mix. Somewhere in the 1980s (give or take), colleges saw publishers selling books and making larger profits on them than the college bookstore was making per book. So they got the bright idea to start buying used texts and reselling them. Before that, a text would come out and 97% (making the number up but it was close to that) of the students would buy the book in year one, 85% in year two, 75% in year three, 60% in year four and 50% in year five. A $50 dollar book would cost $25 to make (again, making the numbers up), sell to the bookstore for $40 ($15 publisher profit), and be sold to the student for $50 ($10 bookstore profit). Across the five years, the producer would make a profit."
"Then, college bookstores began offering students $25 for a used book and selling it for $40 ($15 profit - $5 higher than that of a new book). Students would then prefer the $40 used book over the $50 new book. But that cut the publisher's sales from 97% to 50% in the first year. Because they could not sell as many books they had to do two things: (1) raise the initial price of the text to cover the production cost in 1-2 years rather than 4-5 years, and (2) cut the cycle down from 4-5 years to 1-2 years to ensure that they got sales of the book. That is a double whammy. Texts that used to cost $50 now cost $300 or more. And they have a new version out every 18 months or so. Students refuse to pay that price and that cuts the sales numbers even further forcing the price up again. And, with new editions out so frequently, it is harder to sell them back to the bookstore."
"That's why you see so many 'course packs' now - where a professor will pick a few pages from a book to give to the students. I went from having nearly every student purchasing a text in my early career to having zero students with a text late in my career. Your professor probably dislikes the state of affairs as much as you do. I cut down what books I would select because I could not justify students paying that much for what they were getting. I would also recommend students look for older editions on Amazon and the like which got me in trouble with my administration because I was not supporting the bookstore. But, it was difficult to teach from a text that no one had or had access to. The University's desire to generate revenue from texts truly was killing the chicken because it was not producing enough eggs."
"So look for an older edition on Chegg, Amazon, or the like and match it up with what your professor is teaching from the new edition. You are right, it probably has not changed. Be careful for the problems at the end of the chapter - that is often where the changes are."
– BewnieBound
These businesses parade as services but they are notorious for taking more than what you're willing to pay for.
For A Future Owner
"Rent to Own (furniture, appliances, TVs, video game systems, etc.) The mark up on the interest over time ends up costing 4 times the purchase - or more."
– PartyAlarmed3796
"Well the trick is to not pay (seems to be what a lot of people do)."
– Expensive_Ad2695
"Which is why those places are so expensive and why they're actually kinda necessary for some people."
"They're taking a pretty big risk on people with no credit, and if a person with shi*ty credit needs a refrigerator or other necessary appliance, there's usually nobody else willing to work with them. Also, most of them report to credit agencies so you can build your credit through them."
"I'm not a fan by any means and I hate that people are buying video game systems and couches through them, but I still think they're filling a need."
– Pitiful-Pension-6535
Money Sucker
"Payday loan companies – they're like financial vampires, sucking the life out of people with high-interest rates."
– neonliolia
"And yet most of them are owned by major banks... hmmmm."
"Bank of America, Wells Fargo, US Bank, JP Morgan/Chase collectively all own the largest payday lender companies."
– Bramtyre
"In Canada, there is an effort to turn Canada Post into a kind of bank that offers basic banking services to the most vulnerable. Not sure what happened to that, but it was an alternative to check cashing and payday loan rackets."
– hobbitlover
Greedy Event Vendor
"Ticket Master."
– LTVOLT
"Agreed. We went to a preseason hockey game the other week. Tickets were $5 each but there was around $8 of Ticketmaster fees for each one and you had to use their app to get in the door because the barcodes change like every 30 seconds or something. It's ridiculous."
– darfus1895
Where can citizens turn to receive genuine care without drying up their financial resources?
Big Pharma
"Health Insurance and over priced perscription drugs."
"Wife is type 1 diabetic. Her pump is over $1000 a month WITH 50% coverage. $177 for just the sensor pack. We have the best coverage we can afford."
– Dukeboys_
"US pays the middle man for health care coverage. The middle man and the health care provider come up with "health packages" you can buy into, just in case you get sick. It's just sick how they funnel money from the middle class into this."
– dcoolidge
"Healthcare insurance industry. They can straight up reject claims you should be covered for and make you jump through near endless hoops to get them to pay for the service that is part of your plan."
– ColdHardPocketChange
All Out To Get Ya
"Homeopathic 'medicine' sellers."
"Psychics"
"Domain search engine registration scams (fake emails or physical mail that shows up saying 'your domain search registration is about to expire' and look exactly like warnings that your domain name is about to expire)"
"Fake homeowner warranty/car warranty scams loaded with so many limitations and exclusions they’ll basically never pay out."
"Multilevel marketing systems like Amway."
– 4wqrewtety
Losing Sight Of Kids' Well-Being
"From my experience working in group homes for youth are awful. The owners only want money and the more kids in care the more money."
– OddReputation3765
Going Nowhere Fast
"Car insurance."
"You get penalized for using it. Even just once in some cases."
– Effective_Sundae_839
"1000% agree. I was rear ended by a hit and run driver while i was stopped at a stop sign. Literally came to a stop for 3 seconds max and got destroyed. Car insurance wanted to give me 4k and shut me up. It’s called the nuisance fee. I eventually lawyered up and got 25k out of it. But like wtf. B*tch that’s what we PAY FOR, following renewal of my policy it increased hundreds of dollars a month and that was even after i switched to a different company. 'A claim is a claim regardless who is at fault.'”
– HitBackZach
Businesses taking advantage of their customers should be a crime, yet here we are.
What companies can you think of that legally continue to look after their own profitable interests above providing a decent service?
