Whole point of being rich is to have freedom to do whatever you want. Including fancy dress like poor and eat like them for personal marketing at times.
Poor people should properly budget and cook at home to avoid staying poor
If you can afford to eat McDonald's nobody cares (well it's not healthy either but that's a different matter that doesn't really have to do with being poor or not)
> Poor people should properly budget and cook at home to avoid staying poor
You can't budget your way out of being poor. Most actually poor people (as opposed to people who have a substance abuse problem) I know have a very good grasp of their budget as they are constantly shifting money around figuring out which bills they have to pay and which bills they can put off.
You get out of being poor by getting more money. Period. Nothing else works.
Yes, more money doesn't guarantee you get out of being poor, and we all know people who got a windfall and then were worse off than before.
However, insufficient money absolutely does guarantee that you will be poor indefinitely.
You can't budget your way out of a genuine lowest-quintile income without going to ridiculous lengths that are more difficult than getting a higher-paid job.
You can absolutely reconsolidate and budget your way out of debt, though. Or budget your way to having a savings account when you're earning the median income.
How much money you have depends on how much you make and how much you spend
While you can't budget your way out of being poor if you have a very low income you absolutely can keep yourself poor by not budgeting no matter how much you make
I don't know why you seem to take offense with a simple suggestion that will help reduce how much you spend
There are people who make six figures who are in debt because they overspend and food is often one of the biggest factors in that
> There are people who make six figures who are in debt because they overspend and food is often one of the biggest factors in that
Those people aren't "poor". They aren't worried about eating or staying warm.
"Poor" is when you are deciding between fixing the car you need for work and whether or not you will have electricity the last 4 days of the month. You don't fix that with "clever budgeting".
If you have a negative net worth then I consider you poor no matter how much money you make
But yes obviously there are levels to it however regardless if you are buying overpriced fast food when you could be cooking at home for much cheaper that's not good for anybody especially if you don't make a lot of money... So what's your point other than trying to argue over the definition of poor?
If you don't have an emergency fund and your car breaks down and then you have to get into debt to fix it and then you have to spend more paying interest on that debt and you get stuck in a cycle... Compare that to reducing your expenses by not buying fast food and building up an emergency fund and not getting stuck in that situation to begin with
I guess that distinction in poor matters some to me, because when I read your original comment (budgeting to avoid staying poor) the first thing that came to mind was someone I know who often says things like poor people should just work harder and variations of that. And then I'm thinking like food deserts or people dealing with more pressing issues where there's probably a general inability to do any long term planning. And in that context it comes across as out of touch or like a naive solution to a complex problem, but then I guess you also have broke college students and others who could certainly heed this advice, not just necessarily low income people.
Even if you live in a food desert you could make cheap unhealthy food at home and it will always be cheaper than McDonalds and with even just a little bit of creativity it will be much healthier too
> So what's your point other than trying to argue over the definition of poor?
Because people make political decisions about programs that support the "poor" and the definition matters.
In particular, if a program supports the "poor" and winds up handing money to someone who is making $100K, there are a lot of people who will scream about that and attempt to cut off all support for all poor people.
This was the whole the point behind the racist "welfare queens" dog whistles, for example.
You don’t have time to do those things if you are poor and working 2-3 jobs. Properly budgeting and analyzing costs takes a lot of time, and unexpected expenses and cost of living increases destroy your budget a lot more than McDonald’s.
Cooking at home saves you time if you do it right. A slow cooker, frozen meat, frozen veg, stock powder. Cook a batch and put into containers for the week. It’s not hard to develop a healthy, cheap, quick approach to eating. Most people find ways to keep justifying their existing opinions, that’s the real problem of poverty. It’s rare that people adopt an experimental approach to their problems to learn unexpected solutions. So to my mind, poor is more about being rigid, rather than a lack resources.
Oh no please broaden your mindset. This is not a healthy way to look at wealth inequality in 2025. Being poor can happen for arbitrary reasons, and the impact can vary greatly across countries and continents. E.g if you get and recover from cancer in Europe you will be OK financially, while being ruined in America.
This is an extreme example, but the point is not to weigh individual examples but rather to recognize that you as an individual don't understand the circumstances that create or alleviate poverty, because entire government branches are dedicated to doing this and haven't figured it out.
Bottom line poverty is bad news for everyone, there's money to be made solving poverty. It's not a trivial problem to solve.
Most poor humans managed to store food for the winter prior to the industrial revolution avoid overeating and draining their stores. I'm sure the poor 2-3 job worker can meal prep with cheap easy meals.
They also had a lot of time to do it. In much of Europe it seems subsistence farmers worked a lot fewer hours than one might expect. Especially in the winter
When people say undervalued in this context, they usually mean it has a low price to earnings ratio. Intel is definitely not that - although it could still be a good bet if you have reason to believe their fortunes will greatly improve in the future. But it wouldn’t be a Buffett target in its current state.
Actually, yes, half a year ago Intel was massively undervalued when you looked at metrics like Price to Book ratio. It still is actually, although not as much.
