Hello Aluxers! It’s already been a week, can you believe it?
Today we’re diving into a special title that we’ve been holding onto for a while.
There are many differences between rich and poor, in the way each class is brought up,
the environments that they grew in and how it affected their perception of reality.
In this one, we’ll be narrowing down on a couple of things some of you might remember from your childhood as completely normal,
but maybe only now will realize that’s not what everyone else is doing.
Growing up poor comes with a world of its own and most of the things that are completely acceptable in low-income communities
are beyond strange for the rich.
Here are 15 Things That Are Strange for the rich, but normal for poor people:
This is a straight-up difference between these two categories.
For the rich, this is mind-boggling.
Why would anyone drive 10-15 minutes to the gas station and only put in 5 or 10 dollars worth of gas in it?
For the rich, going to the gas station is something you do as little times as possible,
because nobody has time to keep coming back to drip a little more fuel every few days,
yet almost everyone growing up poor knows that when money is short, you need to prioritize.
Filling up the tank might mean you can’t afford food for that day & you’re not gonna need to full tank to get you through the week,
so you have to be smart with the little you have.
Something we need to mention: gas is incredibly cheap in the US compared to Europe - you know - because of all the War spoils.
Our US audience or even people in Asia might not realize that people in Europe are paying at least twice as much for gas.
When you read the title you were probably expecting to see this one didn’t you?! We had to include it.
Apart from maybe shitting yourself in public, having your credit card declined while in a long line at the grocery store
is probably one of the most embarrassing things that could happen to you.
The decline is usually followed up by a weird theatrical approach of digging through your purse
or wallet in the hopes to miraculously find some long-lost $20 bill & some spare change, but it never shows up.
Almost as worse is having to let the cashier know that you only have a limited amount of budget for your food so they can cut you off in time;
with you ending up playing game of thrones with your items thinking which one you’re gonna have to sacrifice next.
These are things rich people never consider. You simply pick anything you want, swipe the card and it’s all green.
Here’s a big difference between rich & poor people:
Poor people use Credit cards - which means they borrow money from the bank to pay for stuff, money which they have to pay back in the near future.
While rch people use Debit Cars - which means that the account is already filled up with their own money.
If you buy things on credit, you need to pay interest. That’s why being poor is more expensive than being rich.
For us this is the fundamental example of something that goes even deeper than teeth.
It’s something that you can witness in every poor community.
If you’re sick, you get quarantined in your room until your body figures it out, maybe drink some homemade tea or have potato slices around your neck or feet.
- if you know about potato slices, you grew up poor didn’t you. Of course, you did.
Y’all think rich people gargle salt water to cure a throat ache? No!
They buy cough syrup like you should.
But all these “fixes” come with a long term price.
You see, while you're here saving money on a cavity that you ignore,
the damage is growing and soon you’ll have to have your root canal fixed or worse, pay for an implant.
Once again, being poor ends up being more expensive than simply taking care of the problem when it arises.
We know some of you are laughing at this because you know exactly what we’re talking about.
Everyone rich is tilting their heads like a golden retriever seeing a squirrel on tv, because how can anyone have “sleep” for dinner?!
Now, we’re not saying this happens all the time in poor communities, but sometimes there simply isn’t enough money for food, so what do people do?
The quicker you go to sleep, the faster tomorrow comes.
Take a moment to think about how deep this concept goes and what the ramifications of this type of thinking are.
When you’re poor, you don’t have money but you have time, so you’re willing to trade what you have for even a temporary solution.
Why pay a professional to come fix the roof, when you can spend the whole week with your kids trying to figure out how to stop the rain from leaking in.
This results in makeshift contraptions that are definitely not gonna last, but at least solve the problem for a little while.
Some times, doing it yourself is a smart way to save some money
especially if you’re good with your hands and have the time to watch all the youtube tutorials showing you how to do it,
but be careful because sometimes specialized advice is worth the money.
For example: a tax advisor can save you thousands of dollars per year while costing just a couple of hundred.
This is one of those arbitrages poor people are not aware of
and so they end up paying more just because they were trying to save a little money and doing it themselves.
Here’s a gold nugget for you aluxers out there who are still trying to do everything yourself today.
Whenever possible, figure out a way to outsource this to someone willing to do it
If you are to move up in the financial hierarchy, you need for focus on doing more valuable work.
Why spend the whole day painting a fence when you could hire someone to do it for you and spend that time earning twice or 10 times what you’re paying the lad?!
A while back we made a super valuable video called 15 RULES of MONEY which you can check out by clicking in the top right corner.
It’s one of the most valuable videos we have on our channel and we strongly urge you to watch!
This is harsh and it’s a poor people problem.
3 things happen when you don’t have enough money in your bank account:
Generally speaking poor people have a way of pushing credit to the limit.
Very often you hear about people maxing out their credit cards with little to no plan of how they’re gonna manage to pay it back.
You mean I can buy the latest iPhone despite working a minimum wage job?
… they made it super easy, they even send the card to your home; all you have to do is swipe!
For most of you, this might sound completely normal, but it’s not the case for the rich.
They simply have enough space for each of the children to get their own room, with their own color palette.
It’s not rare in the case of poor to low income families where everyone is living in a small crowded area.
Many poor families still have their grandparents living with them resulting in interesting living arrangements.
Another thing that’s specific to the poor community is simply: Sitting on the front porch doing nothing.
To this day, if you go to poorer areas, you’ll still see groups of people just sitting on the front porch enjoying the weather and not doing a whole lot.
It’s actually one of the favorite past times.
Keeping up with the money situation, when you’re poor you tend to know exactly how much money you have at your disposal before going anywhere.
Going to the supermarket and intend on paying cash.
You better figure out how to get the most out of those 23 dollars and 50 cents.
In the rare cases where you go to the restaurant, you carefully go through the menu ending up buying hotdogs and water.
It is normal to know all the promotions and the items on the dollar menu at fast food restaurants because these are your go-to alternatives.
The rich are disconnected from this, because they do not have to worry about the little things.
If you’re familiar with the following:
and so on, you know what it’s like.
It’s something that people do out of necessity and the price difference justifies it when you have so many mouths to feed.
Food wise there are also plenty of other differences.
Eating canned food is considered completely normal in the lower and middle class, while the poor rarely touch it.
For some families, expiration dates are just recommendations, and probably not only once you’ve had food that’s expired and survived it.
Indian & Mexican members of our audience know this too well.
Lastly, you simply add water to make more of whatever you need.
This goes from drinks to shampoo.
There are even cultural drinks that developed from this.
In Eastern Europe there’s something called “ A Sprit”
It’s when you only have 1 bottle of wine, but there’s too many of you, so you mix it with sparkling water resulting in a lighter drink.
But, for most rich people, adding water to wine is a sacrilege.
Unfortunately, this is a harsh truth.
Poor people have on average more kids than the rich for the following reasons:
some families have kids in order to benefit from the financial aid the government gives out for each child
why spend a couple of bucks on condoms when your 4 children already confirm your pull-out game is weak, right?
or in some countries around the farm.
Historically people needed manpower to work the fields
now poor people have more kids in the hopes that one of them will make it and help everyone else out of poverty.
While, rich people would rather have on average only 1 or 2 children and focus all their resources and efforts into raising them properly,
while at the other end of the spectrum, the children basically raise themselves.
We did a deep dive into and broke everything down for you to understand in a video called:
15 Mistakes People Make When they’re young which you can check out by clicking in the right corner or description.
There’s this thing called the network of contacts poor people use whenever they need something done.
A simple example is having your car break down.
The average person would call a towing or insurance company, a vehicle shows up in 30 minutes,
the car gets taken to a service station and the problem is solved.
Poor people get creative with it.
They call a friend, that knows a friend whose uncle has a towing company.
The uncle might not be available right now, so they call a different family member to help them out.
3 hours later, the brother in law shows up and they literally pull the car with tow straps.
In some cases, you’ll see a bunch of people manually pushing a car down the road, in order to save a couple of bucks.
But hey, life’s complicated.
Spend enough time with the locals in a “developing” area and you’ll start to notice some interesting fixes around the house.
Starting with random wires coming out from the walls, with creative ways to connect to an outlet,
to makeshift heating systems that surprisingly haven’t killed anyone so far.
Growing up in a poor family, you get to learn a different type of skill set.
You know that randomly hitting things sometimes get the job done.
. If it doesn’t immediately work, hit it harder or try to take some parts out and put the back exactly as they were.
Don’t know why, but sometimes it works.
The problem with these “solutions” is that they don’t last long and expose you to a higher level of danger.
When you’re poor, to take on more risk in order to save a couple of bucks.
But, thousands of people die every year during winter because of alternative heating mechanisms.
It is completely normal to walk for 30 minutes or more to a destination.
In some geographies, people are accustomed to walking even longer than that just to get menial tasks done,
like getting food, water, getting to work or school.
Remember the stories your parents told you about how they had to walk for 3 moons in waist-high snow just to go to school?!
For the rich this is seen as completely Ludacris
This is one of the advantages you have being brought up in a normal or developed society.
There is infrastructure in place for you to get things done quicker.
There are roads, busses and bike lanes.
For example, Luxembourg made all public transport free for its citizens.
While some people can not afford to take the bus, the government in some states is working so well, that the population is reaping the benefits.
There’s a big distinction when it comes to the relationship with animals between social classes.
For the super-rich, animals are almost a sort of accessory.
They spend thousands of dollars on purebreds just so they can show it off.
Take any one of those ladies carrying around a chihuahua in their purse.
At the other end of the spectrum, for poor people, dogs have a utilitarian aspect: they protect the grounds or the family.
The herd sheep, they are meant to earn their keep through actual work.
Our position falls somewhere in the middle of these 2.
For most people, pets are seen as a member of the family, thus enjoying a similar lifestyle with the owners.
Depending on your lifestyle, the dog or cat may be more or less pampered, but you still have a deeper personal relationship.
Personally, we’re big dog people here at Alux, with almost everyone in our team owning a dog
and it breaks our hearts seeing people not care for these amazing beings as much as they should.
You wanna know what’s keeping some communities poor?
You’ve all heard it, you know it, but the ramifications of this concept drip throughout society.
The moment you allow any sort of crime to go unpunished,
This is one of those domino effects that start with the small things and chain people to misery their entire lives.
This culture of not cooperating with authorities in order to solve a crime and make YOUR area a safer place is keeping everyone down.
Poor people have sort of a separate code of justice that’s not working for them in the long run.
Yes, some people take it to extremes, like barbeque becky or that 1 lady calling the police on an 8-year old selling water..
But the issue is deeper than that.
This: I am no snitch - mentality comes from the notion that everyone has some skeletons in their closets
closets and teaches new generations to value community over the things that could actually make their lives better.
and in an effort to protect 1 or 2 people,
If you really think about it, it’s tragic how people are digging themselves deeper just because that’s what others convinced them to do.
While this is normal for poor people, the rich are perceived as uptight and arrogant when they demand a standard of quality and effectiveness,
but that’s what made them rich.
Knowing their rights and using the tools at their disposal to improve their reality.
We could keep going on this for days, but maybe it’s time we let you guys take the story from here on.
Add your insights to the comments. We can’t wait to hear what your experience has been!
As a thank you for watching this until the end you get a bonus piece:
Yep, the bonus point is to some degree about politics and we can already hear a bunch of you hitting the X button,
but this is important because it applies to everything else in your life, so hear us out.
Rich people understand the power of choices & that of the political machine, the idea that laws can be created and the impact they have on society.
Poor people ignore this completely.
Poor people vote considerably less because they feel like their vote doesn’t matter.
That they don’t get to choose.
But, here’s the deal.
For too long politics have become a different type of entertainment, some sort of a popularity contest.
Local politicians are meant to look out for your interests. Put them in power & change them if they don’t follow up.
In some parts of the world, we’re already seeing successful tests of direct democracy,
where people get to vote on specific issues in their communities through an app on their smartphone.
Municipalities and cities should give the people the power to select where -at least a portion of - the money they pay in taxes goes.
No matter where you live in the world,
stop voting for people that appeal to your humanistic side and start voting the ones that are pushing your people forward.
As long as you remember this you can begin to change how you do things.
You vote every day, with your money, with your time and your energy.
You chose the life you live right now & maybe starting today you can choose something better.
If you’ve watched up to this point and are considering an upgrade in your lifestyle, please write the word UPGRADE next to your answer to today’s question.
That way we know that the efforts we’re putting in are reaching the right people!