What's it like to live at the poverty line?

You can get a phone from the unemployment office if you use it for trying to get a job or for work enough to justify them giving it to you. Libraries also have computers for general use.

 

Home or laptop computer, probably not, but a phone? Yeah, even a burner smartphone is within the price range of all but the most desperate. A certain element in the US likes to complain about people using food stamps while talking on their cell phones, but not everyone has the newest generation iPhone. Burners are usually clogged to the gills with "sponsored" bloatware that keeps the price down at the expense of giving the user little opportunity to add apps or customize the phone in any useful way. k

My parents' divorce was ugly, as were the finances involved in the struggle. I had to stand in the "free lunch" line at school with the other poor kids and get a sack lunch with baloney and mayo on soggy white bread, a juice box, and a tiny plastic cup of fruit cocktail for lunch. I didn't have name brand shoes those years, just whatever was at the blue light special at K-Mart. Jeans were likewise the "designer-o-matic" sort of thing (designer jeans were all the rage in the mid-80s) where the makers would combine two recognizable Italian-ish names to create a fake "brand."

Giovanni Berlucci

Andrea Andretti

Whatever, they were crap, everybody knew what they were, but they were cheaper than Toughskins even if they didn't last as long.

Mom would complain about dad not sending the checks, dad would say he'd send them if he knew she wouldn't spend them on herself or her boyfriend, her boyfriend would take us to Sizzler and we'd feel rich, and to this day I don't know if any one of them was telling the truth or not.

Yeah, that's all I've got to say about that right now.

 

Drive through a low (or no) income neighborhood. Many of the cars in the driveways are nicer than those in lower-middle class neighborhoods. If the parents in your story are sensible, they'll try to live within their means, but one of the ways poor people stay poor is by over-extending. They fall prey to predatory loans and rent-to-own scams in order to live with the amenities that consumer society propaganda tells them they "need." Often welfare checks buy rims and X-Boxes instead of school clothes, though I wouldn't guess that to be the case as often with small business families. It depends on how responsible they are. Either way, poor teens have cell phones and wifi and even cable. Internet and TV may get cut off frequently, and if goes on long enough, they might loose it for good because they owe one company many hundreds of dollars and can't get another service while they're on the delinquent list.

Their phones may be pre-paid knockoffs they're embarrassed for their friends to see with screens that cracked a year ago and scratch their fingers when they swipe, but they'll keep using them. Ever get a splinter or slice your thumb on a broken phone screen? That might be a nice detail to add into a scene or something to bitch about in an internal monologue. In fact, if you need an absolutely devastating moment somewhere in the story, break the kid's phone irreparably, knowing how much more difficult it would be to replace than it would be for a kid with means.

Most of these details depend heavily on how smart the parents are with money and how long and how consistently they've been in these financial straits.

 

Sheesh. Calm down, man.

I mean, maybe I'm making word bloat. But the part I'm concentrating on is her struggling to leverage what she currently has, to make something useful for herself and her family.

 

Magical food generating power?

 

Maybe in Texas, but when I was a health inspector in Baltimore in the 1970s, I was in a lot of poor neighborhoods and seeing nicer cars was very rare ... and even then, most of those cars were company cars that the occupants were allowed to drive home.

True, people can find nicer-looking cars at cheap prices. They're usually the ones who have been in floods, which reduce their resale value to next to nothing. Considering how close Texas is to the hurricane zone, maybe those were the cars you were seeing.

 

I'm about 600 miles from the coast. People who overextend the way I described don't usually get to keep their things, but it's absolutely something that happens, new cars, rent to own TV's, it's ridiculous and predatory, but it happens constantly. There's a payday loan place near my house that sells and repossesses the same electronics over and over and over. My computer store was next door. I spoke to them about it. It's their entire business model.

ETA: *new-ish

 

Huh. Not where I thought that was going. Neat.

 

Thank you all for your help.

Here is, at least, a prologue.

https://www.writingforums.org/threads/healing-light-exalted-modern-world-au.163487/