Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America (10 page)

I knew a guy, single dad, who had two girls. One in particular decided to be a hell-raiser; she started fights at school, stole beer from the fridge and gave it to her friends (of course on school property), and generally made herself a giant pain in his ass. I don’t think anyone really blamed the girl; being motherless at thirteen can’t be easy, and her mom had died not too long previously. It was the sort of situation that, I imagine, wealthy kids get some extra consideration, maybe some therapy for. Instead, they sent the dad to jail for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Needless to say, he lost
his kids. He’s been spending every penny he’s got ever since, trying to regain custody.

Are these irresponsible parents who deserve to have their kids taken away—or to have even the threat of that held over their heads? No. They’re just poor people who love their kids and are doing the best that they can for them with limited resources. So let’s stop saying that poor people are irresponsible parents and start admitting that society doesn’t seem to believe that if you are poor you are entitled to be a parent at all.

Given how easy it is to lose our kids, it’s no wonder that many poor people avoid any brushes with authority. We’ve learned how truly defenseless we are, so we just stay away. And what’s the biggest authority in most children’s lives? School.

My kids are still little, but I am not looking forward to dealing with a school once they hit that age. I’m afraid my kid’s going to repeat something she heard at home between me and her dad. For example, our endless
South Park
references. What if someone hears her say something from the episode in which Cartman feeds a kid his own dead parents to make up for a pubic hair scam and assumes that we’re teaching our kid about the joys of revenge via forced cannibalism? Is a woman from social services going to show up at my door and start asking questions about my salary and employment? Will it matter that she hasn’t actually seen this happening, only heard us reference it in passing?

I’ve got it relatively easy here. I was well educated through much of my childhood. I don’t have to feel awkward going to a parent-teacher meeting for my kid. I don’t have to deal with a
language barrier. I don’t have to deal with getting the shaming that single parents so frequently come in for: Your child needs you home, you’re not doing enough, you have to find more hours in the day or you’re a bad parent.

When I was living in California, a Spanish-speaking neighbor asked me to read her a letter from her kids’ school. The letter was full of impressive words. Words like “responsibility” and “consequences” and “requirements.” She had been ducking the school for weeks because they’d required her son to participate in some fund-raising program and he owed the school money for not hitting his minimum sales. She didn’t have it, so she stopped answering their calls. When she got this letter, which was a wordy “what we’re up to” newsletter deal, she thought it was a collection notice. I tried to explain that he’d get to go to school regardless of a $20 debt, but I couldn’t convince her. She simply didn’t believe me. And the truth is, given how badly I’ve seen poor people treated by whatever system they’re forced to deal with, I didn’t really believe me either.

What it comes down to, then, is the idea that the
very same situations and behaviors
are treated completely differently depending on how nice your stuff is. Kid gets into a fight at school? If he’s black and poor, he’s going to jail. If he’s rich and white, he’s going to military school. Was your daughter busted with drugs? If she’s poor, she’s getting charged. If she’s rich, she’ll go to a nice rehab facility for however long propriety demands. The only reason it looks like our kids misbehave more is that we can’t afford to cover up for them when they do.

During World War II, we had government-sponsored day care facilities. It was generally acknowledged that single-parent households, which the families left behind by the soldiers were, needed extra support. Maybe, and this is just a thought, we could do that again. Child-care crisis solved. Plus, it’s another jobs program.

I’m not saying that poor kids have the same opportunities as rich kids. They don’t. And that’s bullshit. But that is not the same thing as saying that the poor are not capable of being decent, loving parents of decent people.

Besides. If we don’t keep having kids, who do you think is going to work in tomorrow’s restaurants?
Your
kids?

Poverty Is Fucking
Expensive

I
once lost a whole truck over a few hundred bucks. It had been towed, and when I called the company, they told me they’d need a few hundred dollars for the fee. I didn’t have a few hundred dollars. So I told them when I got paid next and that I’d call back then.

It was a huge pain in the ass for those days. It was the rainy season, and I wound up walking to work, adding another six miles or so a day to my imaginary pedometer. It was my own fault that I’d been towed, really, and I spent more than a couple of hours hating myself. I finally made it to payday, and when I went to get the truck, they told me that I now owed over a thousand dollars, nearly triple my paycheck. They charged a few hundred dollars a day in storage fees. I explained that I didn’t have that kind of money, couldn’t even get it. They told me that I had some few months to get it together,
including the storage fee for however long it took me to get it back, or that they’d simply sell it. They would, of course, give me any money above and beyond their fees if they recovered that much.

I was working two jobs at the time. Both were part-time. Neither paid a hundred bucks a day, much less two.

I wound up losing my jobs. So did my husband. We couldn’t get from point A to point B quickly enough, and we showed up to work late, either soaked to the skin or sweating like pigs, one too many times. And with no work, we wound up losing our apartment.

It’s amazing that the things which are absolute crises for me are simple annoyances for people with money. Anything can make you lose your apartment, because any unexpected problem that pops up, like they do, can set off that Rube Goldberg device.

One time I lost an apartment because my roommate got a horrible flu that we suspected was maybe something worse because it lingered forever—she missed work, and I couldn’t cover her rent. Once it was because my car broke down and I missed work. Once it was because I got a week’s unpaid leave when the company wanted to cut payroll for the rest of the month. Once my fridge broke and I couldn’t get the landlord to fix it, so I just left. Same goes for the time that the gas bill wasn’t paid in a utilities-included apartment for a week, resulting in frigid showers and no stove. That’s why we move so much. Stuff like that happens.

Because our lives seem so unstable, poor people are often
seen as being basically incompetent at managing their lives. That is, it’s assumed that we’re not unstable because we’re poor, but rather that we’re poor because we’re unstable. So let’s talk about just how fucking impossible it is to keep your life from spiraling out of control when you have no financial cushion whatsoever. And let’s also talk about the ways in which money advice is geared only toward people who actually have money in the first place.

I once read a book for people in poverty, written by someone in the middle class, containing real-life tips for saving pennies and such. It’s all fantastic advice: Buy in bulk, buy a lot when there’s a sale, hand-wash everything you can, make sure you keep up on vehicle and indoor-filter maintenance.

Of course, very little of it was actually practicable. Bulk buying in general is cheaper, but you have to have a lot of money to spend on stuff you don’t actually need yet. Hand-washing saves on the utilities, but nobody actually has time for that. If I could afford to replace stuff before it was worn out, vehicle maintenance wouldn’t be much of an issue, but you really can’t rinse the cheap filters again and again—quality costs money up front. In the long term, it makes way more sense to buy a good toaster. But if the good toaster is thirty bucks right now, and the crappiest toaster of them all is ten, it doesn’t matter how many times I have to replace it. Ten bucks it is, because I don’t have any extra tens.

It actually costs money to save money.

And it even costs more to get to your money if you’re poor. One of the reasons that Wal-Mart is so popular among the
serving class is that it costs three bucks to cash your paycheck—flat fee. And they let you keep all of it but for that fee. Banks, on the other hand, are a giant pain in the ass. I loathe them, actually. Not fire-of-a-thousand-suns level, but I don’t enjoy being in them. They seem to me to exist only to take your money. I’ve heard that wealthy people don’t have to pay fees for everything, but if you’re poor and don’t have so much money to put in the bank, then you fall below their minimum balances and even accessing your money can cost you money.

Banks are useless to me. If you run low on cash, they take some more money just to punish you for not having enough money, and then they charge you $25 because, now that they’ve taken your money, you actually have negative money. That’s nearly 10 percent of your
next
paycheck already. Besides which, banks are generally across town because they don’t put banks in the places poor people live. They’re always closed by the time you make it there from work, and the tellers always start being that kind of superior polite when they see your account balance.

I don’t have a bank account for one reason: I am paranoid. I want my money, what I have of it, near me at all times. Otherwise, somebody might take it. I’ve had bank accounts just so that I could receive direct deposits from my employer. But since prepaid cards for payroll came out, I simply haven’t needed a bank. They charge you $10 up front to set up the card and $5 a month in fees. The end.

I know that banks are where you go to get a loan, and that if you put your money in the bank and it stays there forever,
you get good rates on things, but I don’t get large loans and I don’t have cash to just leave somewhere, so that doesn’t really help me. And I can’t get small loans there either.

That’s why poor people pay insane interest rates. No matter what sort of credit rating you have, if your car’s water pump goes out, you can’t get a $300 loan from a bank. When something like that happens, some small emergency that I can’t actually afford until the next paycheck, I’ve generally had three options: a payday loan, borrowing from friends, or doing without. My friends aren’t always exactly flush themselves, leaving me with two choices: make it to work or not. When I’ve lived in the country or cities without good public transportation, making it to work has generally meant payday loans.

I’m kind of torn about payday lenders—the storefront small lenders that everyone’s up in arms about. The way these places work is pretty simple: You give them some kind of collateral, like a postdated check, if you have a checking account, or a car title. In the nicer ones, you don’t need collateral, but you have to give them more paperwork about your income and a whole list of people you know. They call every one of them, and if all the references check, you get the loan.

Then you are allowed to borrow somewhere between $100 and $1,000 usually, and you pay an extortionate APR. Like, hundreds and hundreds of percentage points. But because the loan is so short, it’s a relatively small amount of money in practice. If you can just pay it back with your next check and make it, then you’re fine.

The reason people are up in arms, though, is that typically
that’s not the case. Most people can’t take that full hit the next pay period either, so they roll over the loan. Then they wind up getting stuck and basically paying rent for the use of the money until they can pay it off. Worse, if anything happens before they do, then they have to take out another loan to cover
that
,
and they can’t do that at the same place. So then they owe two of these places money.

And payday lenders are brutal about getting it back. If any one of my employees was in default, we’d dread answering the phone. They’d call constantly. And they call for years. Meanwhile, clearly it’s usury to charge 400 percent APR.

So I should be wholeheartedly against them, right? But the thing is, I’m not. Because they do serve a purpose that no one else does for poor people. I don’t think in terms of annual APRs when I’m getting a payday loan. I think of it as a $15 poor tax. Every time we need to borrow $100 for a week, it costs $15. Are these places preying on the weak? Yep. Is it less moral than huge banks preying on the same demographic? Probably not, and those assholes have never bailed me out of a tight spot before. The payday places, evil empire though they are and all, actually do fill a niche where there’s a real need. I’ve used them in the aforementioned water pump scenario and once when I got the flu and missed three days’ work on a week I couldn’t afford a short paycheck. Once it was because my husband’s birthday was two days before payday and I’d put in extra shifts, so the expense was doable. I considered waiting until after, but his birthday was a day that we both had off, something nearly impossible to manage in an average week.
We’d both requested it off months in advance, and I hadn’t bothered to count ahead and remember which pay period to ask for extra hours. It was totally worth $15.

I figure that at some point it will occur to someone, somewhere, that the reason there are so many payday loan places is that there are so many people whose checks simply will not last a whole pay period unless everything goes perfectly, and that people who have things like perfect weeks aren’t the sorts of people who’ve ever cashed a check at Wal-Mart at three a.m. because they ran out of the napkins they’d been using as toilet paper for two days. Those people will find a less shitty way of doing business; perhaps someone can start a nonprofit bank that charges minimum fees or something. For now, we have our fees to pay.

I put furniture rental in the payday loan column because rental places are in the business of letting poor people have nice things for more than retail. The rental is simple; it’s just making twelve easy payments of $99.99 for something that might actually cost closer to $1,000 if you paid it all at once. You are renting to own, so there’s no risk; you just pay them when the bill’s due, and when you’re done, you own some furniture. In the meantime, you have some furniture, which is handier than the saving-up thing because sometimes you actually need a bed. Plus furniture rental places are pretty decent about you missing a week or two if you’re having a rough patch, provided you generally pay on time and it doesn’t happen too often. They get more interest that way.

Our economy seems to be run on credit, and it really
doesn’t serve poor people well. I get running credit checks on employees that will be working with cash or jewels or incredibly expensive bits of duck or something. But you can find job listings informing you that you’ll need a credit check to be a receptionist or lawn guy. I guess maybe you could theoretically bribe an indebted receptionist for company secrets, but what’s a gardener going to do? Not mow the lawn? I don’t understand what credit—which is purportedly to see whether you’re financially stable—has to do with whether you can mow grass. And I
really
don’t get what being poor has to do with being a good driver, but I know that if you’ve got good credit, you get cheaper car insurance. This basically ensures that rich people pay less for car insurance than poor people do. Which I hope we all can agree is both ironic and tragic.

This is the part where people say, “But credit isn’t
just
an indicator of finance! It’s an indicator of trustworthiness and character!”—which would be fine if so many people of perfectly wonderful character weren’t poor. Some of us are excited to do our very best every day. Lots of people who are lacking in resources are, you know, average people. Normal, with typical characters.

The real reason poor people have bad credit is that life is more expensive than we can tolerate. Again, see medical bills: not fucking likely we’re going to have the money for those anytime soon. The vast majority of the poor people I know have terrible credit, and this affects every aspect of our lives. Whether or not you’re currently doing okay, if you’ve got a poor credit score, you’re going to have trouble finding anyone to
rent to you. So poor people tend to be scraping the bottom of the barrel when they’re looking for a new place to live—they’re basically moving into the places that no one else wants.

It just adds insult to injury that for people who don’t have enough money to buy something, landlords require that you cough up the equivalent of three months’ rent—first, last, and security deposit—right at the outset. And that’s just to get the keys to the place. Then you have to pay deposits on all the utilities to get them turned on. You might see a new tenant with no electricity for a couple of weeks and no gas for another pay period after that. I’ve done it. I just stayed with friends for the first few weeks I had the apartment. Then I moved in when the power went on. It’s a last resort, when the schedules don’t match up and you need to move your stuff before you can cover the power bill.

All this really rocked me when I got out into the big wide world, actually; you’ve got to come up with $1,000 or more as a security deposit just to move into a different shitty apartment. And this is for a $400-a-month studio—in addition to the first and last months’ rent. And good luck getting that security deposit back when you move out. The landlord will argue that you put the cracks in the wall and that’s it. I’ve lived in buildings where residents would actually warn new renters about it, because no one could recall a single security deposit ever being refunded. Sure, if you have the benefit of parents who will co-sign the lease for you, then you can possibly avoid having to pay such a high deposit. But I didn’t have that option. Many of us don’t.

There are housing voucher programs, of course. There’s a subsidized housing program called Section 8, which seems to be pretty much the only game in town no matter where I’ve lived, excepting some religious charities. Basically, the government gives you a rent voucher if you qualify, and you get a list of approved apartments to pick from. I’ve sometimes wished I lived in Section 8 units, because the management company has to make sure that the doors and windows and all the appliances work properly in those apartments. I lived in a mixed building once, half Section 8 and half self-pay. Those of us paying cash found that we got less maintenance done on our apartments because the government wasn’t picking up the tab for part of the rent and therefore wasn’t insisting on regular inspections. The people who have the feds making sure their apartments are at least basically maintained live in . . . well, the places aren’t falling apart. It’s actually one of the things the government inspects for—visible cracks in the walls or ceilings.