Learning To Be Poor: The Beginning of the end?

So do you learn to be poor, are you born poor? Can you become poor? A myriad of questions ensue with each of these questions. In our case, we "chose" to live as if we were poor because quite frankly the stress of dealing with even having a little money was a bit more than I could handle. I feel no shame in saying that at all. I won't go into all the whys and where's but it was largely by choice before it became necessity. Enough said on that.
So, the bigger question is.. exactly how does one learn to be poor and still have a quality life? Can it be done? Should it be done willingly?  Let's face it with the economy the way it is more and more folks are being forced to learn how to live on far less than they are used to. They don't have a choice, if I'm going to I'd rather make that choice and how I approach things myself. Not be forced in to it kicking and screaming.
I won't tell you it is a pretty process nor is it easy. It is what it is and we are figuring things out as we go.
"     The nation's official poverty rate in 2009 was 14.3 percent, up from 13.2 percent in 2008 — the second statistically significant annual increase in the poverty rate since 2004. There were 43.6 million people in poverty in 2009, up from 39.8 million in 2008 — the third consecutive annual increase." (US Census Bureau ,1/2012).  That's a hell of a lot of people scraping and scrambling and not even really making it by in this day in age.  Let's go one step further, let's define poverty shall we;

"pov·er·ty

 [pov-er-tee] Show IPA

noun

1.

the state or condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of support; condition of being poor. Synonyms: privation, neediness, destitution, indigence, pauperism, penury. Antonyms: riches, wealth, plenty.

2.

deficiency of necessary or desirable ingredients, qualities, etc.: poverty of the soil. Synonyms: thinness, poorness, insufficiency.

3.

scantiness; insufficiency: Their efforts to stamp out disease were hampered by a poverty of medical supplies. Synonyms: meagerness, inadequacy, sparseness, shortage, paucity, dearth. Antonyms: abundance, surfeit, sufficiency, bounty, glut." this from reference.com.

I don't necessarily like this definition it brings a light of shame to being poor and really there is no or should not be any shame to it. It is a fact of life some people have some people do not. We all do the best we can.  I am a firm believer that a word's force largely comes from the user. It  may have a set "meaning" but how that meaning is taken or feels to other people depends largely on how we use it.. make sense? I hope so.

I started this as I said because I wanted to choose when I was in this position and if things had kept going we would of been forced here one way or the other.

 In future posts I'll go more in depth on the decisions we as a family had to make and some of the good and the bad. So stayed tuned it promises to be an interesting ride to say the least and hey..may be we will all learn a little something along the way...

 

Peace out.