Savings Go Down When Debt Goes Up: Of 'Urban Poor', and Other Trending PF Articles

Credit: Hugh Kretschmer

Buzzfeed released an article on Thursday that got social media talking, with a lot of spoofs and jabs thrown at and around the phrase "Urban Poor". You can also read the article by Gayatri Jayaraman which is essentially about broke millennials who are trying to keep up with the Joneses. And it has been read over 3.5 million times already.

Like I have stated on this blog, the secret to being financially comfortable and secure in life is to spend far less than you earn. Or put the other way round, Earn far more than you can ever spend, even if you wanted to spend it all! 

While many were angered by Jarayaman's misuse of the term poor in her 'Urban poor' article, saying that it distracts from the real people living in poverty, some authors correctly explained that she only meant poor as a poverty-inducing lifestyle decision by urban millennials, as they were not really poor at all. 


Others were just catching their fun- see some of the twitters pics people posted to make the term trend. You can check out more here.

lol.

Neal Gabler says "Nearly half of Americans will have trouble paying $400 for an emergency, and he is one of them".
I like the term "Financial Impotence" as coined by Neal Gabler of The Atlantic in his article 'The secret shame of middle-class Americans'. He says that he prefers using it instead of other terms such as financial insecurity, financial distress, or financial instability because according to him, "financial instability....has many of the characteristics of sexual impotence, not least of which is the desperate need to mask it and pretend everything is going swimmingly."

And just like the Buzzfeed 'Urban Poor' article, Gabler's article too went viral with about 1,700 comments on the Atlantic website and a lot of other popular personal finance sites also writing rejoinders. He gave a lot of data and studies to make his points. It is a good read.

So poverty is not limited to India, and 'poor countries' like Nigeria, Afghanistan
It is a global phenomenon that fact that people (especially low and middle-income earners) everywhere, in every economy- whether developed or developing- always feel poor due to not being able to break from the rat race of living from paycheck to paycheck.

It is official that poverty cuts across economies. Credit card debt and poor financial decisions have made many in developed economies 'poor' while bad leadership in developing economies has left many of their citizens really poor in the true sense of that word.

The thousands of personal finance blogs like this exists online to help people navigate their way out of poor financial decisions into financial liberation and success. However, Sijinius.com believes that for countries such as Nigeria, financial aid (distributed directly to citizens) is what can really bring millions out of poverty- not just asking them to save, and make 'smart financial decisions'.

May we have enough to eat, spend and left over to save and also donate to charity.

Cheers to your success!