It's not just real estate problems. Landlords, you know.
It's the groceries. My mother, who never has money, is telling me I need to shop for more food in each go. If I shop for more food, it means more things accidentally go bad in the fridge. If more things go bad, I might be spending 20% of my grocery money on food that goes right into the trash can.
She and her mother (before her mother went to the home) hoard several hundred dollars of food under the bed. My grandmother was so delusional that she watched those "end times prophecies" on TV and stayed in her home and watched "the world is ending" on cable news. They've been painting a false picture about life and risk and crime since forever, and it's only getting worse. But a lot of good it did her to worry, because not only did all that food go bad, my mother was over there with her second husband, in 2007, and he broke his toe by stubbing it on a bag of sugar she'd bought in the 1990s waiting for Y2K to kill all of us.
He was beside himself, because my grandmother didn't get all that crap at Aldi or even Walmart, she went to the expensive old people store and then she'd load up her Cadillac with cans that were rusted and swollen and tell mom and Brian "There's nothing wrong with those. It just says it went bad, but you can ignore that!" and then they were tossing them in the trash.
Well, some time went by and my mom started doing it too. You could give her $1,000 every DAY and she'd have 72 cents in her bank account at the end of it all. I don't think that in the state of health she's in, that she's going to be around at 93 like her mother.
Her own mother making it to 93 is something of a medical marvel, because when my grandfather passed in 1998, she mostly started living off sweets and toaster strudles, and ignoring her insulin.
There's some pretty heavy stuff, mentally, running through my family, both sides, but I know I can handle money because I got it from my dad's side of the family. My grandmother on dad's side was frugal and watched every penny. One day, her TV set went out, and my dad came over (dad was the senior equipment designer at the company that made the television) and it was the actual tube, and it was just going to cost too much to fix because by then the TV was old and you'd have to go looking too hard for parts.
She just called up the furniture store (back then, a TV was a major purchase that could easily exceed $2,000 for a great set, and it was a literal piece of furniture). She didn't even ask how much it would cost. She just said sent me the nicest one and I'll pay for it when it gets here.
When she died, she had six figures in savings, back THEN, and my uncle said there was so much money he just stopped counting.
Needless to say, I think I'm more like her than my mom and her mother.
There are always things you can control in your budget assuming you work and bring in an income that's not terrible, and for most people, having no savings and being in credit card debt is a life choice.
