Poverty is a loaded word. I bite my tongue to say I grew up in poverty, but it is a fact. According to Britannica.com, poverty is “the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions… people lack the means to satisfy their basic needs.” Now, what those basic needs are become a matter of debate. I was raised in what I call ‘Third-World Brooklyn’, an area three left turns away from affluence. This is something common in New York City - subsidized poverty adorning the edges of abundance. Well, I guess the servant class needed somewhere to retire at the end of the day. So, there we were in brick cages just focused on the day-to-day rhythm of making a dollar out of fifteen cents so we could continue qualifying for our subsidies. Why function in such narrow financial confines? Many of our ancestors were from the abandoned economies of the Southern United States, Latin America and the Caribbean. The definition of poverty was even more applicable in those contexts. Survival made subsidized life feel much more secure, even though it came at great cost.
Nonetheless, our childhood often felt rich - asking my neighbor to pour milk in my cereal, splitting my twin-pop in half for a friend, letting a neighbor receive a long distance call on our house phone, carrying an older person’s groceries upstairs, wearing each other’s clothes… as children living in densely populated conditions, we were all circumstantially in the same boat which made it hard to feel poverty. Plus, we knew how to make due with what we had and we knew how to share. It was when we became teenagers and we left the confines of our neighborhood that we became aware of our lack, in a comparative way. The rich currency of having so many neighbors, the humorous stories, our resilience and our resourcefulness became shame and embarrassment in the workplace. We didn’t have what others had and we didn’t know what others knew and outside of our subsidized corner of the city, we were foreigners.
Still, I don’t believe being servant class or low income was poverty. I don’t believe being subsidized was poverty. I don’t believe having no bank account or having a lack of assets was poverty. I believe the actual poverty was in being uneducated. The true poverty was being unaware of the mechanisms and rules of the world around us. The true poverty was in having no awareness of our options which led to us having no hope. A man without hope is like a boat with no sail. Eventually the wind and the waves will cause it to be capsized or shipwrecked. Despondence, despair, detachment and depression hover over the hopeless like flies on a dead body. Some of us self-medicate, some of us self-harm. Yet, we are not dead, we are alive and as long as we are alive, there is hope! This reminds me of my cousin who thought he was drowning in the pool when all he had to do was lift his face up… just saying…
Now that I have convinced you that many contending with poverty are actually rich and never truly hopeless, what’s next? Let’s address the true poverty of not knowing. Utilize this website to gain information about how to make your money work for you. Allow yourself to be informed. Email us to ask embarrassing questions. Give yourself permission to hope. Today I am a homeowner. Today I have investments. Today I am educated in money and banking. Today I am debt free. The only thing I lack is all those people who didn’t leave poverty with me. Let’s lift our faces up out of the pool of our struggles and begin making these smart money moves, together!
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