Change is worthless

You know the cliche about being so hard-up for money that you're checking your couch cushions for change? Now that our money is so inflated that some people are talking about doing away with pennies, that's really not so applicable anymore. What the hell can you get for a handful of change? Not much.

Ever try to pay for something with change? Man, that's embarassing. You try to get a stack of the same kind of coin, to save the clerk some trouble. Like a dollar in dimes. Or a couple of bucks worth of quarters. But you get halfway there and start mixing in other silver coins. And pennies? Fucking useless. Which is why you've got about three times as many of them as you do silver coins.

Every now and then you go to one of those Coinstars, or a machine that counts your change and gives you actual money. Look at the receipt. They charged you for your own money! That should tell you how worthless having change is right there. Even when I was broke as a joke, I'd barely ever bend over to pick up anything smaller than a quarter. Because coins are basically an errand. And that's just what you need when you're poor.

Your social life suffers

People who haven't spent some time under the poverty line don't know this, but it's damn near impossible to leave your house without spending some money on something. Gas money. Food money. Can't even get a damn cup of coffee for under a dollar. So how are you supposed to have a social life at all?

This is why poor people have the best parties. Go to a cheap apartment. It's loud. Yes, it sucks when you live there and you're trying to sleep, but the only way to have fun is to have a bunch of people over and share the wealth a little. Then next time, you go over to their place and they feed you. Somehow, it's almost cheaper to feed a bunch of people at once rather than one at a time. I call this the Jesus effect.

And as for one-at-a-timing social activities, forget about it. Like I said, you can barely even get a beer or a cup of coffee for under a dollar. So you're kind of limited in what you can do. What do you do? Have a friend over to watch TV? That's free. But it's boring as hell. And they could do that at home. Go to a movie? Money. Go to a restaurant? Money. Have dinner in? That's probably money AND a trip to the grocery store, unless your friend likes exactly what you like to eat -- which they never do.

Holidays are absolutely no fun anymore

There's nothing more frustrating than Christmas when you don't have any money. You start to wonder whether any company in America does Christmas bonuses anymore. Before long, you're getting pissed off when someone wishes you a "Happy Holidays." And not for the Bill O'Reilly reason.

So you say to yourself that you'll try to do the holiday on the cheap. But when you're poor, just about the only thing you've got going for you is your friends. And you don't want to lose them. So you ask people for money as a gift. But nobody wants to do that. That's like being stuck up by your friend! And also, nobody ever wants to give you practical gifts. Say you need new cookware in the kitchen. That stuff is expensive. But if it's on your list, nobody will give it to you even though it's what you need! Because nobody wants to be the friend who got someone a skillet for Christmas, even if it was what you wanted.

Being a cheapskate is expensive in a roundabout way

I can't count the number of times I've been a cheapskate and paid for it in the end. Often with embarrassing results. Like the time I bought my wife a bargain-basement, refurbished .mp3 player as a gift. Then it stopped working about a month later. Thanks for the paperweight, honey. And here I thought I was doing her a favor.

You buy jeans at some secondhand store, and they rip right away, or else they're all stretched out and baggy in weird places after being stretched around some stranger's body way too many times. Gross. And it looks like hell. Then you wind up spending even more.

When I was hurting for money, I went through maybe 2-3 cheapo pots and pans a year. They'd bend from the heat or get scratched, or the non-stick coating would come off and look like pepper in my scrambled eggs -- which is funny because I hadn't peppered the eggs yet. Hmm. I eventually realized I'd actually spend less if I broke down and just bought some pricier cookware.

And why is it that the worst food for you is also the cheapest? We must be the only country on earth with morbidly obese people who barely have a dime to their name. It's because of the dollar menu. Just pray to God that thing doesn't make you sick (either acutely or chronically) because then your uninsured ass is really screwed.

There's no time for anything

Can someone explain why when you're poor, you also have no time? Shouldn't there be a tradeoff? Like if you have no money, you should at least have some free time. But you never do. I never worked harder than when I was poor. All the worst, hardest, most unpleasant jobs are also the lowest paying. That doesn't seem right to me.

And if you don't have a job, looking for a job practically is a job. I don't understand how people manage to find a job while they already have one. It's like working two jobs at once. There's so much time you have to invest, filling out paperwork, making phone calls, following up on phone calls, getting ready for interviews, doing interviews, following up on interviews. And that's if it's going well. If it's not, it's even harder!

Of course, there's plenty of other stuff to do. You've still got to feed yourself and get some sleep. You've still got to exercise and have a social life. If you've got a significant other, you've got to take care of them. There's so much stuff to do in a day, but there's no time to do it. If only you could pay someone to do it for you! Whoops, forgot. No money.

Your mobility goes away

I'm not even talking about travel here, although that goes right out the window as well. No, what I mean by this is that any medium- to long-term plans to move somewhere else have to be scrapped while you shore up your resources. It's a real "dream deferred" situation.

I mean, let's say you wanted to pack up and move to a state with more and better jobs, where your spouse might get paid more, or where there could be a boost in quality of life. You might move there and find your fortunes changing in just a few months. But you simply can't do it because you don't have the financial freedom to move.

Grabbing your stuff and hitting the road is a tremendous expense, and there's always unforeseen expenses that come out of nowhere and sock you right in the wallet. You can save some money by doing everything yourself and not hiring movers, but at the very least you need to pay for a big truck or a friend's gas money if your friend has a big truck. It doesn't even matter if you're moving across town or across the country. The expense is still huge.

It's more expensive not having money

You know they say, "You have to spend money to make money?" Well the flip side to that is that when you don't have any money, you have to do everything in the most expensive way possible!

If you're buying something new that you need like furniture or replacing a broken appliance, you've got to stretch the payments way the hell out so you're paying for it for years.If you're buying a car, you have to get the loan with the lowest payments, which means more interest. If something breaks, you can't afford to fix it. Then the maintenance you can't afford to do winds up causing even more damage, putting you in the hole even further!

Probably the worst thing about this is that I didn't even realize how badly the things I couldn't afford to fix were costing me until I got the money to pay for them. When you pay off some old debts, it's amazing how much money you didn't have before. If only you'd had the money in the first place, you'd have had even more money. Cruel how that works.

It's really expensive to run out of money

This goes with what I was just saying. Why is it that when you have no money, people start hassling you for having no money? Like it was a choice you made? As though you didn't have enough problems?

You write a check that it turns out you didn't have the money to cover. Doesn't matter if it was a penny or a C-note. It's the same damn fee. Some banks will actually charge you if you don't have "enough money" in your account. Louis CK has a great bit on this:

You think of everything in terms of what you can buy

If you're pinching pennies long enough, you start to look at the world in a very different way. Everything has a price tag on it. Even things that didn't before. Your co-workers ask you out to lunch. Aw, geez. I had planned to go without today. That's more expense. Somebody has a family emergency. Well, that's gas money to the hospital.

My wife and I got like this so bad at one point, that we started thinking of our checkbook balances in terms of how many pizzas we could afford using the Little Caesar's $5 pick-up pizza deal. I don't know if they still have this anymore. But if I had $50 left in my account, I knew that was 10 pizzas.

You start thinking about things you never thought about before

I played cops and robbers as a kid, but back then it was a game. As an adult, when I was hurting for money, it was a mental game that took up way too much of my time. When you start to think about how much $1,000, or even a tenth of that would change your life, you start to understand why people knock over convenience stores.

Then you think, "Naw, that guy behind the counter's got it just as bad as I do. He doesn't need someone robbing him." You hear a radio report about a bank robbery while you're driving around and you think, "Those people must get away with it, or else they wouldn't do it so often. And when was the last time you heard a story about a bank robber getting caught? Only when they knock over more than one. And I don't need that much money. Just a few thousand..."

It's a little alarming how elaborate these flights of fancy can get when you really start to think about them. It's not that you want to think about that stuff, but it just jumps in there.

Poverty kills romance dead

A lot of older couples look back on their early relationship and say, "Ah, we barely had anything back then, but we had each other and we were happy." I don't think I'll forget just how hard it was to try to maintain a rewarding relationship in the face of having almost no money to spare anytime soon.

Try having a romantic night alone in an apartment where the carpet smells like the previous tenant's cat pee. Try wooing your beloved on a Salvation Army mattress with water stains from the leaky roof your cheap landlord won't fix. Try getting busy when you're wearing stretched-out, holey underwear from two years ago because you can't afford new boxers. A romantic getaway? Is there a Motel 6 there?

They say fights over money end more marriages than any other cause. I can definitely see that. You don't want to fight about something so stupid, but when it becomes such a big problem that it impacts everything you do and has to be thought about constantly, it's a struggle not to let it take over.

When you don't have money, everyone else does

This recession may be the exception to this rule, but probably not yet. I really hope it doesn't get any worse, but if it does, this will become less of a problem. What I mean is, you really notice when you don't have any money that it seems like everyone else does.

People invite you out to go to a movie. Crap, you can't. No money. You think about all the fun they're having without you. Your neighbor gets a new car, and you want to stab him in the face. Your other friend never wears the same outfit twice. Someone sends you a postcard from vacation in Germany. Must be nice...

I'm betting the person who wrote "Thou shalt not covet" for the first time was in a pretty comfortable position, economically speaking. Because comparing and contrasting your life with everyone else's is practically all you do when you're broke. And why not? It's a free activity. As I said, there's precious few of those.

There's no ceiling on money, but there's damn sure a floor

Cutting back on expenses and purchases is an art form. For a while it's fun. You cut back and begin to see the results. That's rewarding. But there comes a point where there's no more fat to be trimmed -- at least not without costing you even more in ways you didn't expect.

You can't not buy warmer clothes for winter, or you'll have to deal with doctor's bills. You can't not repair your car, or there's no more paychecks from work. You might consider getting a bike, but that's capital you don't have. You try to make your groceries last longer, but then you wind up spending even more at the store because you're now out of everything.

People tend to think that you can always spend less. I know so-called personal finance experts like to say it, but it's not always true. There's no more frustrating place to be than when you've chopped every extra from your budget and there's nowhere else to go.

You try to do something free, and it usually sucks

Then one day, you wake up and say to yourself, "You know, the best things in life really are free! I'm going to enjoy what life has to offer, and screw the money!" So you take a walk around the block. Hey, it feels good. You're exercising. It's actually a little relaxing.

Then, damn! The next day the balls of your feet are all sore and your arches ache. Man, I could use some walking shoes and some more appropriate walking attire. Oh, wait. That's money.

Then you reach into your wallet and dust off your library card. Great idea! Hey, my taxes are paying for it anyway. I'd be an idiot not to pay the library a visit! Then you sit down to read a book, and some creepy-looking guy is watching porn at the computer. Ughhh...

You need a cheap date, so you try to do something romantic but free. You make a picnic lunch and take it to the park. When you get there, some hippies kick their hackey-sack into your salad, bees and ants pester you, you discover you spread your blanket on dog shit, and then some young punks make off with your pick-a-nick basket. And it seemed like such a good idea...

The moral: No, money can't buy happiness*

*But it can certainly prevent you from having to deal with a lot of bullshit that gets in the way of your happiness. And it can give you the flexibility and free time to be with people who make you happy. And it can stop you from worrying so much, thus making you happy.

You get goddamn tired of thinking about money. It's freaking demoralizing!

I didn't mean this to be a bring-down. I'm sorry if you reacted that way to it. Just wanted to offer a few laughs from somebody who's been there, and could return there lickety-split.

I always found that the best source of good vibes was always friends who took your concerns seriously and made you feel better about them without judging you or questioning whether your problems were legitimate. Often these people would be in the same boat you were, or at least they could remember a time when they were struggling just as hard or harder.

I hope I can be one of those people for you. If there's an upside to this recession, it's that many of us are finding out that we're not alone.That can be a huge source of comfort.