Living 'poor' and loving it

By Donna Freedman

I don't consider myself deprived, although I can see why some people might think so. I don't own a laptop computer, television, DVD player, stereo, iPod, video-game system, BlackBerry or many of the other things marketed as necessities.

But I have food, shelter, family, friends, a radio, a bus pass, a library card and the chance to attend a respected university. How could I consider myself "poor" when so many people have nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep and no chance to improve their situations?

Yet there is another reason I hesitate to call myself poor -- the cultural baggage associated with the word: Poor people are lazy, stupid, immoral, shameless and incapable of making smart decisions. Poor people are losers; our country loves winners. We want poor people to trade their rags for riches. We want them to embody the American dream.

Most of all, we want to believe that poor people are shiftless and depraved and always to blame for their poverty. Otherwise, we'd have to face the possibility that someday we, too, could wind up on the business end of the bread line.

Blaming the victims?

I'm not naive enough to think that some people don't make bad choices. But I'm not mean-spirited enough to believe that poor people are poor only because they're pathologically incapable of wealth. Lots of them are where they are because of sickness, unemployment, a lack of education, a dearth of opportunities. More than a few of my relatives are among them. I joked to a cousin that our family has been practicing "how to be poor" all our lives. She agreed. "Poor just is," she said, "and you don't question, 'How?' You just do it."

I grew up fairly broke and stayed that way until my early 20s. Marriage and a career kept me comfortably middle class for more than two decades. Now I'm a divorced student and broke again.

Scratch that. I'm not broke. I'm poor. I'm redefining the word so that it will lose its power to harm. Being poor is what my dad would call a "useful life skill." (He used this phrase when he wanted us to carry cinder blocks or weed the tomato patch.) And I happen to believe it's a life skill that plenty of Americans could use, saddled as they are with credit card debt, college loan debt and mortgage debt. Being "poor" for a while -- that is, making a conscious choice to manage money differently -- would be good for them.

Here, then, are the rules for How to Be Poor:

• Rule 1: Have very little money.
• Rule 2: Live on it.
• Rule 3: Rule 2 will change your life, if you let it.

Being poor means taking a hard look at your needs and getting ruthless about separating them from the wants. (I need food. I want steak.)

It means not behaving as though you still have money because you don't have money -- you have credit cards. Using them to live beyond your means is financial suicide.

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