What is the lowest level of being broke have you ever reached in your life?

30 comments

  1. Sitting on the gutter outside a Salvation Army…that was closed for the weekend. I was probably 13?

  3. It was a really hard time. I was young, between jobs. Moved out from parents house and didn’t want to go back. I had rent paid for a bit so that was nice. Bad thing was I was a bit needy for a woman’s attention. So I took my last $3.50 and went to your mom. I did cum bit I still feel ripped off.

  5. I was in college as a single father after getting out of the military to be in the reserves and couldn’t pay the $2 fee to get my car out of the garage because my class ran 15 minutes too long. I had to walk across campus to the veterans center and borrow the money to get home. I still carry that shame…

  6. Sleep for dinner. Living on discount expired plain pasta with the occasional treat of mixing in expired peanut butter to add some flavour. While living in a shed with no water, and a single power outlet. Fun times.

  8. I enjoy the taste of Ramen Noodles because that’s the flavor of my childhood (still check for movement before eating it too). Was probably in my 20s before I realized just how poor we were when I was a kid.

    Lowest level as an adult would be Sophomore year of college – newlyweds with minimal income and no car made it difficult for either of us to work (we had the leftovers from school loans and my wife had a part time job at the law library) and the only reason we had any extra money was because there was a mixup at the apartment complex and they didn’t charge us rent for the 6 months we lived there. Going from that to a full time co-op position was quite the experience

  11. Ate graham crackers and water for every meal for a month because I paid to have a new roof put on my mom’s house.

  12. This is actually embarrassing even though I’m on reddit and no one knows who TF I am. But I had to go to my dad’s house to “borrow” food while he was at work, I had to start taking my lunch to work instead of buying from the cafeteria and I even had to bum cigarettes from people at work!
    (But one day that I went to my dad’s to “borrow” food as I was leaving he pulled into the driveway and he asked me what was going on, if I was doing ok and that all I ever needed to do was tell him that I needed help)!!!

  13. Was travelling with work and my card was declined for a $1 burger in an airport. That was a hungry trip home

  14. Grew up poor, had to return cans as a kid to get food

    Had a period of homelessness

    Learned a ton about myself and life through these phases and, in some weird way, I’m grateful for those hardships as they helped to carve me into the man I am today

  15. Beating myself up trying to become someone I wasn’t in effort to keep the family together. I broke myself enough times for what she wanted that I couldn’t do it again without completely losing myself. I finally told her we should evaluate the logistics of getting a divorce.

  16. I lived in a homeless shelter for 6 weeks. It’s a good experience to what happens when my company goes bankrupt.

  17. Homeless, sleeping on a park bench kinda broke.

    Sleeping in a broken down car on the side of the highway in the winter for days kinda broke

    And as others have said… sleep for dinner.

  18. Living in an abandoned building. Got a job but the water only worked in the basement and had no access. I cut a hole in the floor so I could take a shower. Hitchhiked to work until payday. Bought a bus ticket to New Orleans and moved in with parents.

  20. I went to china without a phone, no money, no clothes, and can’t speak either chinese or English.
    I didn’t know anyone here plus I haven’t been here before.

    Suffered physically, financially probably spiritually too.
    100% wouldn’t recommend.

    Also am a black man ( teen then ).

    I had no clothes, no bedding, and I had to eat once in three days. I lost weight from 75 to almost 49 kilograms and on top of that the pandemic happened the following year in the city I live in.

    It’s like suicide mission.

    Edit:
    I had strong support system, those people saved me from scavanging through the trash cans

  21. Food stamps and food banks. Suck up that pride and do what’s necessary for the family. Been off them for years but I’m still a big proponent for them. No one should go hungry

  22. A dirty t-shirt upside down as a pair of pants in order to go to the corner store and get more cheap booze.

  24. Currently am, my rent is 110% of my income. Have no fridge or washing machine. Have to live like this for another few months until I’ll earn good money.

  25. -3000 euros when i was 18 years old.

    My parents had financial issues and in order to avoid us losing a roof over our heads i maxed out my new credit card to pay the bills. But this meant i had to drop out of school and work off my new debt.

  26. Lived in a mobile home in the desert with no electricity or running water,, it was 110 outside and 130 degrees inside of the metal hell hole! “Army soup” for dinner every night; which is a few cut up hotdogs, veg-all, pinto beans, and tomato sauce.. and that was the only meal for the day…

  27. After the dot com bubble burst I got tomthe point where I had no gas in my car, no money at all, and no job prospects in my region. With one week left on an apartment lease I was out of options and spent an evening preparing to move into the pine barrens. I packed a couple of bags I’d need to survive, and the plan was to set up somewhere in the middle of nowhere and live off the land.

    Just about everyone I knew had moved away for work since the local economy had collapsed. I had no safety net. But at least I knew how to hunt and fish and knew how to grow veg and preserve food.

    It got to the point where I found an isolated spot and hauled two bags of equipment out to it. I built a tee pee like structure from poles fashioned from branches and camouflaged tarps.

    Two nights before I had to leave my apartment a neighbor I sometimes talked to asked me if I knew anyone any carpenters looking for work. Having had several years experience in that trade earlier in my life, I said I might be interested and was employed later that day.

    I never returned to that camp site in the pine barrens. Since 2002 it has served as a reminder of how bad things can get.

  28. I’ve definitely known people worse off. Me, just *couch surfing broke* for a month or two until I could get some paychecks to get my car in shape I wasn’t worried about getting to and from work and then another month to save up for an apartment deposit.

    I simply didn’t have parents I could move back in with or help me with a car like I guess a lot of people. I had what should be a good enough paying job at the time. I was just out of college and got a job as a social worker. None of that would have been possible without a complete scholarship to college. But when the dorms closed, I didn’t have anywhere to go. I had started interviewing as soon as I had evidence I was about to graduate but it took time to hire me of course.

    I went back to school some years later and was at least able to have a roof over my head. But law school was ‘*eating ramen most of the time and shooting rats in my house with a BB gun while I studied broke*.’ The other kids were scared to come to my neighborhood to study broke. It wasnt really that bad, if you knew your neighbors. Someone tried to mug me there once lol and my neighbors all ran off their porches and beat his ass.

  30. When I got a letter from the bank saying that I was being charged money for having no money. That was pretty shit.

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