A viral tweet posted Wednesday showed precisely why so many city-dwelling Americans aren’t actually poor, they’re just extremely financially illiterate.
The tweet featured side-by-side screenshots of two posts from Colombia professor and author Molly McGhee. The first of McGhee’s tweets read, “God I am starting to think that being poor is something that happens to you at birth and you can never escape it. I teach at an Ivy, I’m a New York Times Bestselling editor, I have a novel coming out, and I am still so fucking poor it’s embarrassing.”
Okay so firstly, being poor isn’t embarrassing. Secondly, you ain’t poor, Molly! If you have all of the income and reputation your profile claims to have, you just have the worst financial literacy. The reason McGhee’s tweet went viral is because it was juxtaposed next to another where she posted a photograph of her extremely over-the-top personal library at home. (RELATED: We Thought We’d Heard Insane Debt Stories, But Nothing Tops This)
After going viral, McGhee attempted to argue that she managed to decorate her library with thrift shop finds, but there is a massive hole in her argument … because thrift shops ain’t that cheap either. To decorate even one room from a thrift store in the way that she claims she has, you’re talking costs well into the hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. Trust me. I am an expert in thrifting.
People like this are why your student loans are never getting canceled. pic.twitter.com/D9zAorTtWg
— Nicky Frank (@NickyFrank30) June 15, 2023
McGhee is far from the first person I’ve met who has cried poverty when really they just haven’t bothered to live within their means. Did McGhee need this library? No, but she bought its contents anyway. (RELATED: Dear Kay: I Just Saw The Banking News. Are We Screwed?)
So if you feel poor today but you’ve bought a coffee at a shop, a new item of clothing, or anything you don’t need for your survival, shut the heck up. Grow up. Find a financial advisor, or anyone smarter than you, and have them help you budget. All you have to do to rise out of your poverty is to manage your money better. Be grateful, because most people don’t have this problem. Most people are legitimately broke.
Also, truly poor people don’t complain about being poor. We complain about how much everything costs, and how the financial system is designed to screw us over and keep us in financial poverty. From there, we plant vegetable gardens (even in our apartments), find local farmers for meat, leave the big lights off, stop thrifting. Mostly, we work together to mitigate the destruction caused by Democrat-led financial policies and realize we’re the richest people on Earth because we know how to comfortably survive within the chaos.
Nnote: making the “Help me I’m poor” joke from “Bridesmaids” doesn’t count as complaining about being poor).