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Many of the kids in my school district drive nicer cars than the teachers and even some administrators.

A principal in my state makes about $50k-$60k per year and teachers start at around $30 and cap at near $50k.

Police officers make about $40k and the CEOs of oil companies make 10s of millions, one of them paid off an ex-wife recently with several million. This is the land of milk and honey according to many conservative pundits as the state hands out tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations while state employees haven't gotten a legislated raise in about 8 years. Funny how they took the tax breaks and these supposed "job creators" cut thousands of jobs.

Priorities.

Personal finances and budgeting is one of those things where reasoned guesses just suck, almost every time. You have to actually live it, try and survive on a small amount every week, and learn what is and isn't absolutely needed to just get by. And even then most people have little idea where their money really goes. So getting college kids to estimate a hypothetical family's finances is just being mean to the kids, just setting them up to look foolish.

I suspect that these people actually subsist on ramen noodles and coca cola and their brains stopped working correctly due to malnutrition.

In my case, my nutrition needs are something like this per day:

-10 eggs a day (4 yolks a day for normal functioning without depression, 6 more to avoid anxiety, panic attacks and attacks of rage - yolks were proven to be very important for correct functioning of brain)
-A few cups of cocoa with cream (about 200 gram of 30% cream a day - I don't know why I feel noticeably worse without it)
-About 100g of meat.
-About 100g of cheese.
-About 400g of vegetables (to avoid stomach problems)
-About 4000 i.u. of Vitamin D to avoid depression from insufficient light.
-Generally, about 3000-3400kcal to maintain caloric balance. Delivered mostly in form of fat.

If I don't fulfil these requirements my mental state deteriorates quickly, same with physical state.
When I was a kid and was very poor and didn't get correct nutrition and supplementation, I developed scoliosis, had ADHD, anti-social tendencies, depression during autumns and winters, and severe neurosis.

 Peter Wiggin wrote:

 cincydooley wrote:

18 eggs - $4
6 lbs of Chicken - $15
1/2 lb lunch meat - $4
1/2 lb lunch cheese - $4
1 loaf wheat bread - $2
1 lb brocolli - $2
3 lbs sweet potatoes - $3
3 lbs apples - $4

Where you live at?

Those prices are at least 20% lower than basic foodstuff prices where I'm at, and I live in a high production agricultural and dairy region. The only thing on that list that I can find at those prices is the lunch meat. Even then it would be from the "end of its shelf life" store....which is a terrible idea when purchasing meat.

Ex: non-organic fresh chicken (meaning it hasn't been pumped full of saline and then frozen to sell at higher weight) runs at least $5.50 per pound here. Thats deboned thigh meat, not breast. A pound of mid grade cheese (on sale) is $12. A loaf of wheat bread is $4-$7. Non-organic broccoli is $4 or more per pound. Apples aren't even in the ball park of $1.33 per pound.

Besides the lunch meat, those prices seem fairly close to typical around here. Prepackaged stuff like lunch meat is on the expensive side typically as well, so if you're really on a tight budget you should be avoiding that stuff anyway.

You can also save a lot of money on poultry by buying whole birds, which are usually between $1-2 a pound, and butchering them yourself. Buying cuts individually drives the prices way up. If you only want to eat white meat, buying a whole bird, cutting off the breasts and throwing the rest away is cheaper than buying breasts individually. So you are essentially getting everything else effectively for free. A single chicken is usually around $5-6 and is enough meat for one person for 4ish meals, more if you make soup with the bones(or just soup in general).

Food is dirt dirt cheap if you are buying smartly. And you actually get some efficiency if you are feeding enough people to make bulk purchases more viable, as an example it cheapest to buy those giant bags of rice but you'd really need 3-4 people to fully capitalize on it.

I think one of the biggest issues is that lots of people just aren't educated enough to see or make those choices, or just don't bother with the little extra effort.

The people who came up with your example did miss the mark, but they're not as far off as many people here would have you think. Naturally this is a very complicated issue and no classwork example is going to be close to reality because poverty in one area is not the same as poverty in the area right next to it.

 Peter Wiggin wrote:


Where you live at?

Those prices are at least 20% lower than basic foodstuff prices where I'm at, and I live in a high production agricultural and dairy region. The only thing on that list that I can find at those prices is the lunch meat. Even then it would be from the "end of its shelf life" store....which is a terrible idea when purchasing meat.

Ex: non-organic fresh chicken (meaning it hasn't been pumped full of saline and then frozen to sell at higher weight) runs at least $5.50 per pound here. Thats deboned thigh meat, not breast. A pound of mid grade cheese (on sale) is $12. A loaf of wheat bread is $4-$7. Non-organic broccoli is $4 or more per pound. Apples aren't even in the ball park of $1.33 per pound.

Thats in urbanized & suburban Northern California. You don't even want to know how much basic stuff costs in a place like Alaska, where most things have to be flown in from elesewhere.


#Realtalk If you buy 6 lbs of chicken for $15 its probably going to cook down to less than 3 lbs due to being pumped full of weight adding saline.

Well there you go. You live in California. I live in Ohio.

When we buy lunch meat, it's almost exclusively Boar's Head. Chicken and turkey are typically $7.99 a lb.

We do our grocery shopping, nearly always, at Findlay Market, a local market with local farmers and small grocers.

We usually pay around $3.49 a lb for boneless skinless Amish chicken breast. I can get bone in for $2.29 a lb, which ends up really being around $3.00 a lb post bone.

Fruits and veggies are all from local farmers. Apples are usually $1.29-2.39 a lb, depending on how much I want organic. If they're for me I don't care. If they're going to my kid they're organic. We always get organic bananas at .49 a lb.

Yet another reason ill never move to California ;-)

If you aren't afraid of knives, you should never buy prepackaged chicken. Buy it whole and cut it apart yourself. You'll save an obscene amount of money.

Instead of paying ~$4 a pound for breasts you'll pay $1.50 a pound for two breasts, two tenders, and get some free thighs with it.

I couldn't live on $250/month for food on my own, never mind 4 people. I have ridiculous food requirements to keep my mass and to stay lean - I spend about $140/week on meat and vegetables alone.

You class room is full of dependents who have no idea how much living actually costs, so their viewpoints are inherently inaccurate at this point in their lives.

 Grey Templar wrote:
I think one of the biggest issues is that lots of people just aren't educated enough to see or make those choices, or just don't bother with the little extra effort.

Nah, the issue is that people like to second guess how other people's finances should work, and they almost always have no idea what they're talking about. I mean, you were talking about bulk buying rice. Rice. Buy the standard bags or the large ones, and while there's a saving it's utterly trivial to a family's finances. No family on earth has ever missed a rent payment because they paid too much for their rice.

That kind of failure to understand what are the significant budget items and what aren't is why people have such a poor idea about their own finances, let alone enough knowledge to tell someone else what they should be able to live on.

 sebster wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
I think one of the biggest issues is that lots of people just aren't educated enough to see or make those choices, or just don't bother with the little extra effort.

Nah, the issue is that people like to second guess how other people's finances should work, and they almost always have no idea what they're talking about. I mean, you were talking about bulk buying rice. Rice. Buy the standard bags or the large ones, and while there's a saving it's utterly trivial to a family's finances. No family on earth has ever missed a rent payment because they paid too much for their rice.

That kind of failure to understand what are the significant budget items and what aren't is why people have such a poor idea about their own finances, let alone enough knowledge to tell someone else what they should be able to live on.

To compound on this many urban or rural poor in america live in "Food Deserts" where there simply aren't any proper grocery stores selling proper produce and dry goods at reasonable prices, nearby. I take my fantastic grocery store with variety and good prices for granted, where the best some people have access to is a corner store filled with pre-packaged foods, maybe a couple bins of old bruised fruit and some frozen dinners.

 sebster wrote:
No family on earth has ever missed a rent payment because they paid too much for their rice.

It also doesn't do to buy things like rice and flour in too much bulk, as it can easily end up infested with weevil and other little varmints if it's shelved for too long. There is no saving if you end up having to throw half of it away.

I think I've been about as poor as it is possible to be in the UK, without being homeless. My mom died when I was very young, so I spent my early childhood living with her parents. They were very nice, and it was all very middle class. But when I was 10 I had to go an live with my dad in social housing. He wasn't a bad person, he'd been 12 years in the air force, but he was terrible with money, and had quite a severe drinking problem.

We basically lived in the ghetto. It was the most gakky depressing place this side of the soviet union, with stabbings, burned out cars etc... My next door neighbour was some weird crack dealer who owned a pit-bull (this place really hit all the clichés).

Clothes were one of the most expensive things, especially for someone growing. My early teens were pretty much just one long embarrassment, wearing hand-me-downs, and stuff that was too small. I had the same pair of trainers for about 3 years, which were falling apart, with my toes sticking out the front.

I don't remember food ever being an issue, but keeping food was. My dad had a fridge which was about 20 years old, eventually it broke. The government didn't consider a fridge to be an "essential", so we just had no fridge. It was really heartbreaking waking up and just wanting to have a bowl of cereal, but finding out yesterdays milk had gone off overnight. During the winter we would just keep food outside in a box to keep it cool.

I did without lots of things, didn't have a telephone in the house, didn't have any of the computer games my friends played, didn't have a car, didn't have carpets (I still walk on my tip toes to this day when in bare feet, because I was conditioned to avoid nails). Didn't have a washing machine, I could never get my dad to pay for things like haircuts either... It was just the most abysmal existence, and I couldn't wait to be old enough so I could leave.

One of the things people don't realise is just how much longer everything takes when you don't have any of life's luxuries, and how that can mount up. Having to go to the laundrette, living in a cheap area out of town, and having to wait to get the bus in all the time, having to walk down the street to make phone calls, or to top up the electricity meter, not having things like the internet to do homework, or to look things up (even to search for a job).

On their own, these little "inconveniences" don't seem like a big deal, and people get angry and throw around words like "lazy" when poor people complain about them, but the truth is, when you have lots of little inconveniences like that in your life because you are trying to spare money, it can make life just impossible. You have to work so much harder just to get the simplest things done. Anyone who says people on benefits don't have it hard enough can feth off!

 Smacks wrote:
On their own, these little "inconveniences" don't seem like a big deal, and people get angry and throw around words like "lazy" when poor people complain about them, but the truth is, when you have lots of little inconveniences like that in your life because you are trying to spare money, it can make life just impossible. You have to work so much harder just to get the simplest things done. Anyone who says people on benefits don't have it hard enough can feth off!

Thankyou for posting that. It was very enlightening.

 BrotherGecko wrote:

They agreed that food for 4 should only cost $250 a month at most. Rent and utilities should be only $500 a month. No other expenses were considered because poor people don't need them.

No other expenses were considered? that's incredibly stupid, medical is a huge expense it may not be a monthly regularity but anybody with kids is going to have some medical bills even if you get state coverage it doesn't cover 100% of everything and you still have small out of pocket expenses. Glasses or dental visits who needs those? them poor people can be blind as a bat while they gum them mac and cheese ramen because you don't need teeth to slurp noodles nor will those noodles provide enough nutrition to keep those teeth anyways.

Families with kids also have this thing called school which has all sorts of registration fees and text book costs and they demand stupid stuff like health screening and vacinations, what a crock. Keep those poor kids at home, only rich kids should be able to learn something and better themselves.

Clothes and shoes are clearly a luxury when you live in a warm So Cal climate, see how long that lasts anywhere that has weather below 70 degrees, it's also nice to not be arrested for walking around nude in public. Sure somebody shouldn't break bank on clothes but there's always some requirement for clothing expenses especially if you are part of the working world. Not much opportunity to get a job when you are wearing thread bare clothes ragged with holes. Oh wait poor people all get jobs at Mc D's and they can live 24/7 in their free wage slave uniforms. Pay to use a laundry mat? no need poor people and unwashed stank ass from living in filth is like peas in a pod.


Need water to drink or gas to heat your place during the winter? Nah never heard of it they can cuddle for warmth when it's 10 below outside or better yet sleep at the public library and bathe in the fountain out front.

Rent around here doesn't start for under $700 before utlities and that's a one room bare bones studio, might be able to rent a single room as a private sublease for $300-$400 but that's one person not a family of four. If it were $500 a month per person, meaning a budget of $2k for the whole family that's approaching a realistic figure, but no they are assuming $500 will cover the whole family which is absurd.


Grah, Get off my lawn you stupid kids!!!!

I've officially descended into grumpy old man mode.

One thing about students is that they tend to have seriously degenerate lifestyles. Everything about them is pathological. Drug use, loud partying, lack of proper nutrition, lack of proper sleep, nestling together like rats.
They believe that everyone should wallow in pathology like them.

I remember reading students in Poland exchanging tips on how to buy food for 5pln (that's how much 10 eggs cost here) per day. It was insane.

 Smacks wrote:
The government didn't consider a fridge to be an "essential", so we just had no fridge.

That's insane.

 Smacks wrote:
We basically lived in the ghetto. It was the most gakky depressing place this side of the soviet union, with stabbings, burned out cars etc... My next door neighbour was some weird crack dealer who owned a pit-bull (this place really hit all the clichés).

That's worse than soviet union.

 Smacks wrote:
One of the things people don't realise is just how much longer everything takes when you don't have any of life's luxuries, and how that can mount up. Having to go to the laundrette, living in a cheap area out of town, and having to wait to get the bus in all the time, having to walk down the street to make phone calls, or to top up the electricity meter, not having things like the internet to do homework, or to look things up (even to search for a job).

Not to mention the therapeutic value of the Internet and ability to find decent people to talk to.

 Smacks wrote:
On their own, these little "inconveniences" don't seem like a big deal, and people get angry and throw around words like "lazy" when poor people complain about them, but the truth is, when you have lots of little inconveniences like that in your life because you are trying to spare money, it can make life just impossible. You have to work so much harder just to get the simplest things done. Anyone who says people on benefits don't have it hard enough can feth off!

That's disgusting. What's wrong with these people? Is it foetal alcohol syndrome? Malnutrition damaging the parts of their brains responsible for humanity? Lead in pipes?

In my school, there are tips on how to get into the dining hall for free.
Heck, when I go to get my one meal a day from the cafeteria, I bring tub aware with me so I can get food for me at night.
If you live on campus you are mandated a meal plan so you die of starvation.

Yeah, the freshies here are required to get a meal plan.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Yeah, the freshies here are required to get a meal plan.

here it is a requirement to live on campus. Im in an apartment now so I can cook. So I get the cheapest. One meal a day for 5 days a week.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

If you live on campus you are mandated a meal plan so you die of starvation.

Having lived off mealplans before, and dealt with Res services, I'm not sure if this is a typo.

 Aszubaruzah Surn wrote:
One thing about students is that they tend to have seriously degenerate lifestyles. Everything about them is pathological. Drug use, loud partying, lack of proper nutrition, lack of proper sleep, nestling together like rats.
They believe that everyone should wallow in pathology like them.

I remember reading students in Poland exchanging tips on how to buy food for 5pln (that's how much 10 eggs cost here) per day. It was insane.

 Smacks wrote:
The government didn't consider a fridge to be an "essential", so we just had no fridge.

That's insane.

 Smacks wrote:
We basically lived in the ghetto. It was the most gakky depressing place this side of the soviet union, with stabbings, burned out cars etc... My next door neighbour was some weird crack dealer who owned a pit-bull (this place really hit all the clichés).

That's worse than soviet union.

 Smacks wrote:
One of the things people don't realise is just how much longer everything takes when you don't have any of life's luxuries, and how that can mount up. Having to go to the laundrette, living in a cheap area out of town, and having to wait to get the bus in all the time, having to walk down the street to make phone calls, or to top up the electricity meter, not having things like the internet to do homework, or to look things up (even to search for a job).

Not to mention the therapeutic value of the Internet and ability to find decent people to talk to.

 Smacks wrote:

 sebster wrote:
On their own, these little "inconveniences" don't seem like a big deal, and people get angry and throw around words like "lazy" when poor people complain about them, but the truth is, when you have lots of little inconveniences like that in your life because you are trying to spare money, it can make life just impossible. You have to work so much harder just to get the simplest things done. Anyone who says people on benefits don't have it hard enough can feth off!

That's disgusting. What's wrong with these people? Is it foetal alcohol syndrome? Malnutrition damaging the parts of their brains responsible for humanity? Lead in pipes?

Well that was a nice load of vitriolic nonsense.

Congrats on that.

What strikes me is there's a lack of understanding that just because you can live like that for a month, doesn't mean you can continue living that way and stay healthy/capable of working.

There have been months that I've gone 2-3 weeks without eating more than one meal every second evening due to being cut off. Maybe once or at most twice a year. If I did that regularly I'd be extremely unwell. Long term, you just run out of energy.

At the time I had things like a phone line, a few gadgets mostly small luxuries like presents I'd been given in the past. I fought with the idea of whether or not I was truly poor when I balked at selling an old part broken Xbox 360 and leaving myself without any way of watching television. I could be hungry but still watch an old DVD, it was very hard to fathom.
It's very hard to put a pin in poor, or accepting you are poor, when things like Internet and phones are cheaper than food.

There's also the fact we are sentimental beings and just need to feel human now and then. I could raise a month's rent selling some of the things I've inherited. Yet I, and I know many others, would often let that rent lapse and never consider selling Grandma's favourite ornament, or old necklace. Where's the right or wrong there? Poor people don't need jewellery if we go off what those kids say.

Little things. When I was at rock bottom, I went out with my partner and we visited a bakery. I bought this tiny beautiful cake, went home alone after, and just stared at this thing that was 1/5 of my week's food budget. I had just wanted to feel normal. I wouldn't have bought a watch or a DVD, but it seemed so normal to buy nice food.
I'll admit I cried and went to bed feeling so stupid to have both bought it's, and let it bother me. Probably the tipping point of a larger situation.

 Aszubaruzah Surn wrote:
One thing about students is that they tend to have seriously degenerate lifestyles. Everything about them is pathological. Drug use, loud partying, lack of proper nutrition, lack of proper sleep, nestling together like rats.
They believe that everyone should wallow in pathology like them.

Not that you're one to generalise or anything.

Anyhow, can you fix the quote tags on your last comment, it looks like Smacks or I wrote your last comment about foetal alcohol syndrome, and I'm not sure that's an impression either of us want to give.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Buttery Commissar wrote:
I'll admit I cried and went to bed feeling so stupid to have both bought it's, and let it bother me. Probably the tipping point of a larger situation.

Thankyou for posting that. Insightful and genuinely moving.

That's two posts now giving us an excellent insight in how poverty really works. I never expected that.

It possibly says something that both posts are from the UK. Not that we have it particularly worse than any other country, but that we as a culture just feel so ground down by this government that hands out a little benefit with one hand and points at us with the other. There is little to feel but tired and resigned to it rather than ashamed.

There is a massive social stigma about being on benefits here. Partly driven by politics, partly driven by press. It is legal to refuse to rent to people who're recieving that aid. Most housing ads you will see say "No DHS" which is an outdated term to basically say "no low income", as DHS is/was a low income supplement from the council.

There's a now a food-bank donation bin in every major supermarket in the country now. And ironically the town halls of most towns. Some papers even briefly tried to shame those who used the banks. That they include things like sweet yoghurt and cake if it's been gifted. Thankfully that blew up rather spectacularly in the press's faces, and raised funds and awareness for the banks.

That day I mentioned was an extreme example, but you do find yourself having to justify nearly everything to yourself and to others. I've had friends who've kindly spotted me lunch ask why I don't give up my book collection from college. I own artwork personally gifted to me by a few industry names, "...surely you could get something for that?"
Like the small existence I do have can be broken down into things other people might buy, and things I deserve to keep. I can't get mad because it comes from a sincere place of trying to help.

To stay sane... I have to segregate my budget - I have rent and food money, and in five years I've never been late on bills or rent. But I also have hobby money that I make and spend independently of that. If I want a kit, I have to sell and save up from things I already own. Not from my wages or my benefit. It allows me to feel normal.
But it can be hard to explain, when a friend says, "I thought you were poor, why did you buy [x]?" and X is a £15 model or a replacement aquarium valve. Answering to yourself, that's often harder.

 Buttery Commissar wrote:
To stay sane... I have to segregate my budget - I have rent and food money, and in five years I've never been late on bills or rent. But I also have hobby money that I make and spend independently of that. If I want a kit, I have to sell and save up from things I already own. Not from my wages or my benefit. It allows me to feel normal.
But it can be hard to explain, when a friend says, "I thought you were poor, why did you buy [x]?" and X is a £15 model or a replacement aquarium valve. Answering to yourself, that's often harder.

Tell them boredom is not a natural state for the human condition. Eventually, without interests and hobbies, or at the bare minimum, keeping your brain occupied, you either have a mental breakdown, or get dangerously depressed. You can keep a chicken penned up all day, and it would stay in its cage being fine until it dies from muscle atrophy. You can do the same for a dog, for a day, before you start seeing effects. Humans get bored really fast. Symptoms of boredom start kicking in from half an hour to several hours. Its one of the disadvantages of having heightened intelligence compared to other Earthen organisms. If you ask me though, the benefits are worth it.

I was born in Britain, but moved out to Zimbabwe when I was seven, as my father was Rhodesian, and wanted to go home. After five years there, we had to flee the country. There was one particular day when we heard that Mugabe's war vets were coming to shoot all the white people in our community. We literally packed our things, and fled the country. My dad stayed behind in a hotel for a few months to sort out the pets and raise whatever small funds he could for flogging our worldly goods, and then joined us.

When we got back to England, we were flat-arse broke refugees. My father's mother took us in after my mother's mother refused, and me and all my siblings crammed into a tiny room in Staines. M,y parents went through some serious marital strife at the time though, and our family hit some real financial issues.

My parents did the best they could to shield the children from the fact that they were having to count out every last penny from the dole money, and stretch it. My mum would desperately try and find us things to do that didn't involve money, like taking walks by the riverside to the kids playpark, going windowshopping, or to the library.

Depsite that though, you can only hide so much, and kids are surprisingly aware. I remember the arguments borderline poverty would cause, the tears my mother would try and hide in the evenings, the somewhat grim way they'd cheerily refuse to buy a 50p ice cream because the week's dole money wouldn't stretch.

I'm a bit older now, but as a self-funded PhD student, not much wealthier! My parents meanwhile, have scraped along in reasonable borderline poorness. They earn enough from fostering kids for the state to pay the bills and keep the lights on, but being poor still causes problems. My mother has troubles with her teeth falling out, and the NHS dentists only do horrible metal fillings. White enamel ones are for people who can afford them. So now she's paranoid to go out and see anyone or talk to them for fear of them glimpsing a mouthful of shiny metal. She actually talks in such a way now to try and hide her teeth.

Luckily, in turned out a few months ago that my father had a few thousand hidden away in a long since forgotten about pension pot from the 1970's. Even though he's not retirement age, Osborne's new pension rules means he can get it now. So that'll cover their extraction and replacement with the less obtrusive ones. That was a lucky fix though. I've spent many sleepless nights over the last year wishing I had some way of raising the income to pay for it myself, as seeing those you love in distress for lack of a few thousand pounds is horrid. Unfortunately, I break my back doing three jobs and holding down a PhD as it is, and I'm still broke and unable to help. I desperately look forward to the day though, where I can help my parents in situations like the above.

TL;DR You don't have to be starving in a gutter for poverty to affect you.

 Grey Templar wrote:

You can also save a lot of money on poultry by buying whole birds, which are usually between $1-2 a pound, and butchering them yourself. Buying cuts individually drives the prices way up. If you only want to eat white meat, buying a whole bird, cutting off the breasts and throwing the rest away is cheaper than buying breasts individually.

Yeah, that's not true. A small, whole chicken usually comes in at around 2.5 pounds. If we assume that chicken costs 1.5 USD per pound, then its total cost will be 3.75 USD. Chicken breast (whether boneless or bone-in) is usually about 3.5 USD per pound. If you are throwing away everything but the breast meat from our example whole chicken you are paying more in total and getting significantly less than a pound of breast meat, meaning your effective cost per pound is going to be higher than 3.5 USD per pound.

Do we really need to quibble of the exacting price of chicken (which will no doubt vary by location?). At the end of the day, I think it patently obvious that a $250 budget for feeding a family of 4 for 31 days (and expecting not to run into health issues sooner rather than later) is beyond absurd

Besides. Everyone knows Turkey is the superior white meat

 LordofHats wrote:
Do we really need to quibble of the exacting price of chicken (which will no doubt vary by location?). At the end of the day, I think it patently obvious that a $250 budget for feeding a family of 4 for 31 days (and expecting not to run into health issues sooner rather than later) is beyond absurd

Besides. Everyone knows Turkey is the superior white meat

Pork, the other white meat.

Dont forget internet. That is pretty much a neccesity. Want to find a better Job? Go on monster or Craigslist. Ya gotta be near an email.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Dont forget internet. That is pretty much a neccesity. Want to find a better Job? Go on monster or Craigslist. Ya gotta be near an email.

Facebook keeps telling me that's what the Public Library is for.

Yeah........No. Unless you make it to the Library every couple of hours. I have been applying to jobs non-stop, online, and they only contact me Via email

And feth you if you live in a rural area, cause lots of those don't have public libraries, and even when they do how are you going to get there without the 'luxury' of a car?