I once observed that a few of my college-aged friends were subsisting on canned tomatoes and beans, and struggling to make ends meet. I suggested that they use my Costco membership to buy a months worth of supplies at once for roughly half to two-thirds or what they were spending. They patiently explained to me that part of why they lived this way was because they were already barely living within their means, which made acquiring two weeks worth of dining funds impossible (even if it meant "free" food for the rest of the month).
These fees are the kind of death-by-a-thousand-cuts that keep people in poverty.
Being poor is expensive, indeed. Most people don't realize that until they experience it. If they ever do.
If you never have much surplus money, you can rarely if ever do the things that save money in the long term. You can't invest in good clothes or household goods that might cost twice as much, but last more than five times as long as what you can afford, for example. You can't buy a freezer and stock up on food when it's on sale, or cook large cheap meals and freeze them to free up time later. Often, things like good benefits from banks and credit card companies are simply not available to you. Et cetera.
Obviously things like being unable to afford preventative health care and sort of health maintenance stuff like checkups and new glasses and so on can lead to much more expensive problems down the road. "Noncritical" health services like dental and vision are big things there. It's not like you can get a root canal or new glasses at the ER.
And it's very difficult to fight back against mistakes other people make that screw you over when you have few resources on hand. Problems with your bank? In my experience, if you have money a bank is a lot more likely to help you than if you're poor. I was treated a lot better when I had thousands of dollars in the bank than I am now, when I'm scraping by. And that's if you can even open a bank account at a reputable establishment at all. That is not a given.
Then there's renting vs owning property. Owning property isn't for everyone perhaps, but if you're handy and don't need to pay a professional to do everything the house needs, it's a lot cheaper to own than rent. Plus there's the general freedom you have on your own property vs rented property which opens all kinds of doors for saving money or just better quality of life in general.
Having money means you have the freedom to live very frugally by making smart choices and thinking long term. Not having money in the bank, free to spend on the right investments and opportunities, makes that enormously more difficult. And it's only getting worse with time.
sounds like a good situation for giving your friend a loan for a couple hundred dollars. Not necessarily you personally, but it would be a step towards being above hand-to-mouth if they could borrow a small amount of money to get the benefit of some economies of scale.
I once observed that a few of my college-aged friends were subsisting on canned tomatoes and beans, and struggling to make ends meet. I suggested that they use my Costco membership to buy a months worth of supplies at once for roughly half to two-thirds or what they were spending. They patiently explained to me that part of why they lived this way was because they were already barely living within their means, which made acquiring two weeks worth of dining funds impossible (even if it meant "free" food for the rest of the month).
These fees are the kind of death-by-a-thousand-cuts that keep people in poverty.