He Discovered They Were Never Really Poor; His Parents Just Made Poor Financial Decisions. ‘They Still Have This Idea That They Were Blameless’

For much of his life, he believed his family was just another casualty of the Great Recession. They bounced between apartments, worked odd jobs, and eventually left Los Angeles for the more affordable High Desert. But as he got older and took a deeper look into his family’s financial past, he realized the truth: they weren’t truly poor; they just kept making bad financial decisions.

Poor Choices, Not Just Poor Circumstances

Now in his late 20s and living a comfortable, upper-middle-class life back in Los Angeles, he said he recently began helping his parents plan for retirement. That process revealed a troubling pattern. “So much of our struggles were just self-inflicted,” he wrote in a recent Reddit post on r/povertyfinance.

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His father bought a house in 2005 using an adjustable-rate mortgage he couldn’t afford. “He was basically the poster child of what went wrong,” the original poster said. When the rate was adjusted, they lost the house. Around the same time, his dad bought a new truck with a bonus from his construction job, which was quickly repossessed after he couldn’t make payments.

His mom, trying to contribute, took on $15,000 in student debt for a degree from a for-profit school. “The degree might have well been written in crayon for all it was worth,” he said. Meanwhile, an inheritance from his grandfather was lost in a failed family restaurant venture.

“There was a good choice and a bad choice, and they repeatedly made the bad choice, over and over again,” he said. What stings even more is that, to this day, his parents refuse to acknowledge their part. “They still have this idea that they were blameless, that they did what they had to do, and that everyone else either tricked them or took advantage of them.”

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A Flood Of Shared Realizations

Many chimed in with similar stories. One commenter recalled thinking their family was poor until they found out their father was spending $1,000 a month on alcohol during the 1980s and 1990s. “I can’t imagine how different my childhood would have been if rehab would have stuck,” they wrote.

Another said their dad spent $20 a day on beer and $50 a week on cigarettes while complaining about not having money for their kids’ activities. Others pointed to parents who funneled money into lottery tickets, multi-level marketing schemes, and impulse buys while ignoring rent, groceries, or medical bills.

Many connected the dots between financial dysfunction and mental illness. “My mom HAS to be mentally ill to let her 5-year-old kid be homeless multiple times because ‘someone is coming to get us,’” one person wrote. Another recalled their mother blowing $220,000 in two months, possibly due to an undiagnosed condition.

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Another said their parents racked up huge debts just to avoid looking poor. “They wasted ALL their money on making sure they didn’t look poor. Nice clothes, my mom’s designer makeup, shoes, a nice car, purebred dogs.”

As the original poster reflected, it wasn’t easy growing up in financial chaos, but it taught him two things: how to build independence, and how not to manage money.

“Honestly, I think being poor gave me a great sense of agency,” he wrote. “The YMCA gym was $5 a month and the library was free. I either went to the gym to lift or went to the library to read something. I also got a part-time job doing landscaping work over the summers so I could have some of my own money.”

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