I have read posts of poor people struggling for $100

A huge percentage of available jobs are minimum wage jobs. Therefore, a huge percentage of people have to live on minimum wage. You might think those jobs are only for teenagers or whatever, but the truth is that many of them are 24/7 businesses and teens can’t legally work overnight shifts, so even if it was 100% teens for the other two shifts you still have 1/3 of the people at those jobs being fully grown adults trying to live off less than $100 a day. The reality is that teens are a small portion of the workforce and most people working minimum wage jobs are adults.

Their usual options are: work 2-4 jobs and sacrifice their physical and mental health; find a partner to split costs with, or hope to score a rich partner to help pull you out of poverty; live in your car to save 40-60% of your income which would’ve gone to rent. Oh, or rely on family members to help with bills.

Not everyone has family to help and not everyone gets to have a loving relationship with a safe partner who supports them, many people are dealing with poverty while also dealing with horrible family/relationship situations, and the statistics show that growing up poor will expose people to more dangerous situations, so more poor people are traumatized too. Not everyone of course, I’m not saying that being poor is a death sentence or that someone who’s born rich can’t have a bad life- everyone’s situation is unique. But there are proven stats that poverty increases things like drug use, risky behaviors, and being a victim of any type of abuse.

So you’ve got millions of traumatized, broke people in a world that needs them to stay broke in order for rich people’s money to remain as valuable as it is. You’ve got insane inflation over the past few years and most jobs offering a pittance to compensate for it, or no raises at all.

And you’ve got millions of disabled people. People that society should be able to take care of with all of our advancements, but we don’t really take care of them. Disability welfare payments (SSI) in the US are capped at around $900 and it was under $750 until just a couple months ago. Tell me how you would survive on your own with only $750 a month?

So these are some of the reasons why $100 is a lot of money to people. For me, I’m disabled and can’t work, but I also don’t get disability payments because I did not qualify for the strict guidelines, like millions of other disabled Americans. $100 is a lot but also nothing because I have debt and always have bills that need to be paid. $100 is money I never get to actually “spend” because it’s going to my car insurance or electric bill.

/r/venting Thread