It’s early in the morning and I haven’t had my coffee yet. The phone makes a buzz with a message from my sis telling me we need to split the living costs for our folks. I gave a sigh and accepted that it has come to this. My folks are being funded by their pensions but due to the recent changes in the amount that they were getting and living costs, it was bound to happen that they are going to use plan B.
Years of raising us both have prepared me for this day. I look at the old bookmarked case reports around financial literacy again. I do this once in a while out of habit to remind myself why I drag my feet to work and reorient why I should be thinking long term.
The common explanations why the poor keeps getting poor are out of their laziness, attitude towards luck and work, and lack of financial planning. It’s plausible to explain all of these things to why people are poor but to limit the discussion to that is shutting down other problems that perpetuate the problem.
I firmly believe that poverty is both a systemic and individual problem. Generalizing a group for being poor because they’re lazy, have no initiative to better themselves, and lack financial planning creates more obstacles to understanding where the problem starts. It’s a multifactorial problem.
You take a walk and ask a street vendor how much do they earn, how early they wake up and late they sleep just to sell their goods, and how much do they take home as profit then compute if all the trouble was worth their time. You’ll get different answers but my bias from experience, these vendors wake up early, retire late, and aren’t shy from manual labor in exchange for cents. And people who are still in a privileged position in life can have the audacity to call them lazy (some anyway).
Philippine financial literacy levels are low and this is why it’s alien to talk about financial health and planning to a layperson in the middle or lower socioeconomic class. I came upon a market vendor doing well on their business and over some small talk I learned they are actually loaded on the bank. I asked what they’re investing into and they simply said they don’t and just put it on savings. Some have the resources but don’t trust or not have the financial IQ to risk their hard earned money. They’re going to be in trouble once they realized how inflation is going to screw their savings up.
I came upon a compilation of Case Reports regarding the poverty mindset years back and to this day I still revisit the study to reorient myself why I struggle so much when I’m relatively well off. It’s a good read and if you can access the article, around 32 pages of summary. And by well off, I mean if I’m living for myself, I’m already rich by my society’s standards but it’s not that simple.
A thrifty lifestyle drilled into the subconscious just helped me avoid unnecessary luxuries. Going into a convenience store picking out what chips or drinks to buy is probably one of the weirdest source of anxiety. There's that internal resistance at the back of my head in committing to purchasing something I can afford which my brain classifies as non-immediate need. Even with all those benefits of being single I am chained down to a moral responsibility of taking care of my folks as their backup retirement plan.
This is something the Western culture may have trouble understanding that family holds a lot of weight on this side of the world. You don’t abandon family even if they are objectively chaining you down from taking opportunities for growth. And I don’t mean it like it’s a burden I am not willing to bear, it’s just is ingrained into the culture I was brought up. While I still have a good chunk of my income placed on emergency funds and investments, there’s that void in the budget plan to ensure your folks get to eat three square meals a day. I haven’t gotten to the part where I may have to address chronic disease a decade or two for now.
Being in poverty is like being stuck in a positive feedback loop where the poor only gets poorer. You can’t access better financial opportunities because you’re poor, and you’re poor because you can’t access better financial opportunities. I think I’ve already mentioned how to gauge someone’s values using money as a subject. Ask what they do with their money and you’ll get a good idea about how they view life because money is a symbolic item for value. It’s not necessarily grounded on physical object you can exchange.
How they earn it, where they spend it, their plans towards the future, how they feel about it and etc. If you think this is a superficial way to judge someone, I respect your views but I insist on using the term gauging on what they value most. Do they use the money to spend more time with their loved ones or just being a plain frivolous spender?
While objectively, it is dragging to know that I’m being a retirement plan for my folks and this is hindering me from my own growth, it’s not something I would really bite them for. It’s a drag but recalling a time when I was also their financial burden to carry kind of makes the relationship calling it even. I understand that they should’ve prepared for this during their own time when they were capable but it’s too late now.
This brings me back to the point I wanted to drive across for people financially struggling and raised being used to lacking in resources. Whatever financial situation you are born into, it’s the result of your ancestor’s choices and only you can break the chain that’s keeping your blood line having the shortest end of the stick. Given that poverty is also caused by a poor cultural mindset handed down for generations, the change has to start with knowing about your situation and have a positive attitude to change it. Having despair and lose of hope is one of the reasons of poverty mentioned by the case report above.
In a digital age where most useful information can be Googled, it’s an irresponsibility of someone’s part to not find the means to better themselves. While formal schooling may not be an option most can afford, there are still content shared freely on multiple social media platforms and free ebooks about finance people can educate themselves with.
Now I need to schedule when I should send my folks their monthly allowance and amount. It’s funny that more than a decade ago, I was the one on the receiving end. While I do find it frustrating at times, it’s still the only means I know to pay them back when we’re not physically in contact with each other.
If you made it this far reading, thank you for your time.
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