Frankly, this should be no surprise to anyone who has read my posts, that I really enjoyed the sentiments shown in this Op-Ed piece. I'm kind of surprised it hit the NY Times, but good on them for publishing a "non-sky is falling" piece like this.
I think one of the biggest misunderstandings about thrift and wealth, is the idea that one needs to have a high income to save and invest.
In 1998, I had a car accident that left me unable to work at my relatively high-paying job. We lost our house, and had to move back to Iowa from Chicago, and were forced to live frugally, on subsistence wages, until 2003. On a very modest income, we were able to save around $500 to $700 a month.
One of the things we did, was clean people's (usually very expensive) houses. Many of the people we worked for were one paycheck away from financial disaster, and a couple of our customers "stiffed us" by going bankrupt.
But what really ticked me off at the time, were some of the self-proclaimed "poor" people, who would gripe and moan about how hard they had it and blamed "the rich", when they easily made twice as much money as we did.
