Being poor, being broke - and ignoring the difference

It's Thanksgiving, which can mean only one thing:
Black Friday.
Somewhere amidst the turkey and family and football and expressing all the things we're thankful for, we've managed to turn this weekend into the biggest shopping day of the year.
Are you thankful for shopping?
On Monday of this week, I was listening to a story of people who are already lining up outside certain retailers to be first in the story for the great deals offered on Black Friday (which some stores have apparently determined now begin late Thursday).
These are easy news stories, in that you go out and find people who are camping out to be first in line to get the latest craze in electronics or toys (remember "Tickle Me Elmo"?). And I've always thought the people who camped out like this are the same people who camped out in college for tickets to concerts or sporting events, and it came to be popular as much the experience of the camp-out as it was for the event.
It is certainly smart to take advantage of these sales, particularly in this economy where all of us are struggling.
However, in this report I was listening to on radio Monday, many of the people who were camping out already were saying they "had" to do this because the economy was so bad and they were "poor."
It made me think of a lot of the popular news stories about being poor, and I realized a lot of people just don't understand the difference between being "poor" and being  "broke."

I've been poor.
Now even in saying that, I recognize everything is relative.
But for the sake of pointing out the difference ...  in my first newspaper job, I made something like $150 a week. Before taxes. And even in the olden days of my youth, $150 a week didn't go far in Atlanta, Ga. I shared an apartment right off I-285 near the Chattahoochee River, and even though I drove a small car that got better than 30 miles to the gallon I had to drive about 30-45 minutes to and from work and it was expensive. My boss thought I was a real hustler because I volunteered to go to every press conference in the city, but the truth is that in those days most press conferences also served free food. There were days when lunch or dinner consisted of a 50 cent coke and a 50 cent pack of crackers and cheese from a vending machine - a meal for a dollar. And, yes, I remember bringing packs of ketchup from fast food restaurants and mixing them in boiling water to try to create something close to tomato soup. And ramen noodles. I honestly didn't make enough money to live on. Thankfully I was single; I'd never have made it if I had been maried or had a family.

And I've been broke.
After that first job, when I started making more money, I guess I tried to make up for those years of being poor by spending everything I made. I made enough that I could live on my own and drive a newer car and eat regularly and go to concerts and movies and things that cost money, and I tended to spend everything I made.

I think about that when I hear people talk about "the poor" in this country. I know there are poor people. But I also know there are people who claim to be poor who are just broke.
Oh, they probably don't make as much money as the median income or whatever measurement you want to use, but they make enough "if" ... if they knew how to do things like budget and differentiate between wants and needs (two things that, I freely admit, I don't know how to do very well either).
We all know the cliches of the families on welfare who have big screen color HD TVs hooked up to satellite dishes that sit in the yard next to two relatively new SUVs.
Maybe it's not cliche. One common measure of poverty in the United States is something called the "poverty threshold'' set by the U.S. government that establishes poverty as a "lack of goods and services commonly taken for granted by members of mainstream society."
That means we judge poor in this nation in comparison to what the rest of us (the "broke) have.
And the problem with that is if we're 'broke' trying to get all the stuff we think we need then we're raising the standard of poverty and blurring the lines between 'poor' and 'broke.' No wonder we think government should provide cell phones and internet access!

So naturally when I hear people who claim the "need" to take advantage of the Black Friday sales because they are "poor," I think, why don't they save the money they are spending on these "needs" and put it in the bank and maybe next year they wouldn't be quite so "poor."
But then I have to ask myself, why don't I?

This may sound judgemental, but I don't mean it that way. There are poor people, people who don't make enough to provide for the basic needs all of us have. I do believe government has a place in helping, but just not as big of a role as government has taken on. But that's another blog for another day.
As much as anything, this is aimed at me (and maybe people like me).
Somewhere along the way, I read a story about an old preacher - John Wesley, or someone like him. The story went that, for most of his life, he lived off the same amount of money he made his first year of preaching, and that when he got raises or made more money he used that money for the ministry. I remember thinking, I used to live off a certain amount of money less than I make now; what if I had just continued to live off that amount and everything above that I put in savings or invested or donated to worthy causes? How much easier would life be?
I know the answer.
It's just doing it that seems impossible.