brendan halpin

Being Broke

Because I was a broke kid who went to rich people’s schools, I wound up with a kind of complicated class identity. There have been times when I’ve had money and there have been times where I was broke. And it’s become apparent to me recently that a lot of people who are not broke have no idea what this reality is like and how it affects people. So I’m writing this not because all of it is my experience (though some if it definitely is) but because I really don’t think middle class people with money who hang out with other middle class people with money have any idea of what being broke is like.

Your parents can’t help you. Let’s start with that. There is no familial safety net. There are no assets which will pass to you on their deaths and there is no pile of money earmarked to get you out of trouble. Hell, there may not even be a bedroom for you in their house if it comes to that. You are completely on your own.

When you wake up in the morning, you think about money. You think about money all day long. Sometimes you can’t fall asleep or stay asleep because you’re thinking about money. You feel like you’re constantly on a precipice about to topple into the abyss. You work full time and you work hard, and so does your spouse or partner, and you still can’t cover the bills every month.

As the Wu-Tang Clan said, cash rules everything around you. You cannot stop thinking about money. Not ever. It makes every setback worse, because not only do you have to, for example, get a root canal, but you have to find a way to pay two thousand dollars for it. If you’re lucky enough to have dental insurance. Otherwise it’ll be more. Should you just have the tooth pulled? It would be much, much cheaper. But will having a big gap in your smile mean you have even fewer prospects for employment and promotion?

Money taints every moment of joy in your life. Christmas becomes a nightmare. You want to give things to your children, give experiences to your children, but you can’t really afford to do that. But how can you send your children back to school to listen to everyone else talking about what they got? If you’re lucky, you can get a credit card and borrow the money you need to buy Christmas presents at 22% interest. You’ll love to see their faces light up at Christmas, but there will be a sour stone of dread lodged in your stomach as you realize what this is going to mean for your finances. Maybe you can get your tax refund soon enough to pay it back. Assuming nothing goes wrong for the next three months.

But something always goes wrong. Because it’s life. And so paying the bills then becomes not a routine chore but an incredibly stressful juggling act. The water and sewer bill came in a red envelope this month, so you have to pay that. Electric bill is overdue, but they’re not threatening to cut you off yet, so you can let that slide. Of course, paying the past due amount on the water bill means that you won’t have enough money to do preventative maintenance on the car that one of you uses to get to work. So every time you get in the car, that little red maintenance light on the dashboard will be reminding you that you’re not taking proper care of the car. Which means eventually something expensive is going to break and you’re going to have to come up with thousands of dollars to fix it. Or maybe it will break while your kids are in the car and then something horrible will happen to you and it will be all your fault.

Well, that’s a problem for future you. You’ve got enough to worry about getting through your work day, where you work very hard for far less money than people you know do less work than you. Maybe you can pick up a second job to make some more money, just until the current crisis passes. You think this to yourself because it’s the only way to get through because you know that crisis mode never ends. You simply move from one crisis to the next.

And if you have children, who’s going to take care of them while you’re working a second job? Who’s going to parent them when you’re too exhausted to move after 12 to 16 hours of work every day? Better pass on that second job.

But that means there’s no hope of getting out of this, of getting ahead. All you can do is hope to slow the pace at which you’re falling behind. So yeah, you spend two bucks on a lottery ticket every week. You know the odds. You know you’d be better off doing almost anything else with that money, but it’s literally the only thing you can buy that gives you hope. In the moments before the numbers are pulled, you can have hope that your life will change.

And it can change, but only for the worse. You get injured in an accident—not your fault, but you’ve got to spend 6 months out of work. You’re one of the lucky few who has long-term disability insurance...but that only pays half your salary. You think about this a lot. That we live in a country that punishes you for the crime of getting injured.

But maybe you’ll find a way through that crisis. Maybe friends or family can pull some money they don’t really have together to help out. Or maybe you’ve got a teenage kid who will have to quit the extracurricular activity they love, the thing that keeps them invested in school, because you need them to bring in money. You think about being an adult depending on financial support from your teenage child, and you feel ashamed. None of this is your fault, but you feel ashamed anyway.

You have to keep most of this stuff to yourself because there is nothing Americans hate as much as a poor person. They’ll have a lot of reasons why this is your fault: why didn’t you learn to code? Why did you get coffee from a coffee shop? Why didn’t you take time and money you don’t have to go back and get an additional credential?

You know they blame you because if it’s not your fault, then it must be at least partly theirs. It must be that a system that allows them to have hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings while you have 74 dollars and 37 cents is fair, and you deserve what you have, because otherwise it’s unfair, which means they don’t deserve what they have.

This is what it’s like to be broke. Some people have it better than this, and some have it worse, but this is the experience of tens of millions of people in this country. I’m not suggesting that broke people who shot themselves in the junk by voting for a fascist government that will only increase their misery made a defensible decision. But I guess I would say this: if your whole pitch is that we need to save the system, you can see how a person who lives like this might ask, “why?”