What It Means to be Poor

Billy all dressed up with his tie on! 

Hello everyone!

Last week it was 7 months since my transplant and I feel terrific! I have had no bouts of rejection and we have even been able to start lowering my meds, yay! I'm back at work full-steam and loving it. Brad and Billy are wonderful, I fall in love with my beautiful fiance a little more each day, he just amazes me with his ability to come through for me and make my life better just by being in it. So what's been on my mind lately?

Years ago I read a human interest article titled "What it Means to be Poor" where the author interviewed many people living below the poverty line in America and had them sum up in one to two sentences what it means to them to be poor. The answers were heart-wrenching and incredibly insightful for myself, someone whom has grown up poor but never actually did without anything I really needed and was certainly nowhere near the poverty line. One particular response in the article has always stuck with me: Being poor is still paying the price for your bad decisions, years later.

This recently came to my mind when Brad finished paying off a personal loan that he had been carrying around for years. I'm so proud of him; when we met he had several loans and a sizable credit card debt and in a few short years he has paid off the loans and now just has the credit cards to pay off. Now I am extremely cautious financially, growing up poor my mum instilled in me great budgeting skills and then my ex-husband and I never got into senseless debt; we drove old cars and budgeted strictly. Therefore being in debt with personal loans and credit cards is completely foreign to me, so when Brad told me how he had finally succeeded in paying off his last loan, I asked him what it was that made him get into such debt in the first place. His truthful answer really surprised me, when he was in his early 20's (he's now 31) he was in a long-term live-in relationship and his girlfriend was chronically unemployed. So Brad was going to college and working part-time to support himself and a lazy-assed girlfriend who just simply didn't want to work.

Because he was out of the house so much he would give her the cash to pay the bills and come home to find that she had spent the money on takeaway food and clothes. These were the days before EFT and the like, so a few months down the track they would get a final notice on unpaid bills, including rent, and he had no choice but to get a credit card to get the electricity reconnected. This went on for a couple of years and I incredulously asked him why he put up with it? His answer: She was hot. He knew that she was just lazy and using him, however he had low self-esteem and was willing to pay for everything to keep her.

So that brings me to the article on poverty: Brad was still paying the cost of his bad decisions years after the relationship ended. Isn't that incredible? The decisions he made as a young man with no self confidence literally took him years to pay off. Looking back on my life the main decision that I made as a young woman, or rather inaction on my part, was not looking after myself when I was younger that would possibly have put off the need for the transplant. Things may have worked out with the transplant, however the fact remains that I  now have more-or-less a time limit as to how long my new lungs will most probably last for (10 - 15 years on average) therefore each time I didn't exercise, I didn't do my physio or I didn't take my  meds when I just had cf, has literally taken years off my life. Hindsight it a wonderful thing, woulda-shoulda-coulda, but I can honestly say that this hindsight has given me a very strong determination to do everything within my power now, to preserve my new lungs and possibly prolong what lifespan I do have left.

Give some thought to what decisions you may be making in the present that could negatively impact your future.

Love

Kylie