Step into a world where riches weren’t measured in dollar signs. While their childhoods may have lacked material wealth, they discovered a different kind of richness, a profound appreciation for the little luxuries that most take for granted. In this eye-opening collection, we hear firsthand stories of the remarkable treasures they cherished and the simple joys that brought light to their lives. Get ready to be inspired and reminded of the power of gratitude as we uncover what people who grew up poor considered to be true luxuries.
A real bathroom or a shower grew up with no running water in our house. Had to carry gallon jugs of water and fill them at a local water runoff and boil them all on a wood stove for our water source. I remember for a handful of years having a bucket for the bathroom until we could afford the luxury of a honey bucket. At one point in elementary school I got pulled out of class to take a shower at the school because I hadn’t showered in forever, we would have to take showers at a local place that truckers used when we could afford it.
Window shopping. My mom loved to take me out to the stores as a special trip. We’d get McDonald’s and walk around the mall looking at the cool stuff like you’d go to a museum.
I’d look forward to those trips as if they were vacations. We didn’t buy anything but the time spent with my mom and looking at all the interesting things were amazing.
I still love to walk stores and just look. Thrift stores are my thing to this very day. Whenever I visit I make sure to go window shopping at least once. Now though if I see Mom looking at something longer than everything else she’ll get it for Christmas just like I did when I was young.
School parties where everyone brought something to share for lunch.
“If you don’t bring something, you don’t get to participate…”
I brought two carrots after not being able to afford school lunch for two years. Even the teacher laughed at me. My young self just decided that day that some people don’t deserve lunch.
For my school’s spirit week, they had a “thrift shop” day, where most everyone dressed in old ratty clothes, or the weirdest stuff they could find in a thrift shop. Needless to say, as someone whose clothes were 80% second-hand, it was an eye-opener.
Ice Cream. My mom used to work in front of an ice cream shop and on every payday (bi-weekly) she took me to eat ice cream, and always made sure I understood this was a luxury for us and the fact that she did this every payday didn’t mean that I should take that for granted.
After I grew up, I did the math and she was spending like 10% of her salary on this.
Now that I can have ice cream any time I want, I do not actively look for it but WHENEVER I’m near an ice cream shop, I get some. It’s like a magnet.
In high school, my boyfriend (who became my husband) and his family picked up pretty early on that I was poor, and that my family was pretty dysfunctional. They really let me into their family and took care of me in a sweet, not pitiful, way.
I was super into art, so his mom found a neighborhood art teacher that did like basically small group art classes and it was so so cool. Anyways she usually charged like $100 for all the supplies, time, etc. My mom knew how excited I was, and I never asked for anything so she told me to ask the teacher to wait until her next paycheck. The teacher was like “Sure!” By the time I brought that check to her, I think my boyfriend’s mom talked to her, and she ripped it up and said I got a “scholarship” for the class. Honestly, it gives me such good vibes thinking about it to this day.
Until the age of 12, I thought that you weren’t allowed to buy things that weren’t on sale. My mom only bought things when they were on sale and/or she had a coupon, so I thought that the “non-sale” items weren’t being sold.
Grew up pretty poor in Arkansas in a trailer. I literally got a door to my bedroom for Christmas one year. It probably still was the best gift I ever received.
I grew up pretty poor (no TV, no toys, but had a Sears catalog). My dad got in a serious accident when I was in 4th grade and almost lost his life. He won a small settlement from the community college he was working at and I was able to buy new clothes for the first time in my life. Before this, all I ever had were hand-me-downs from my cousin and donation clothes from the church. Most were worn to the point of having patches on the knees.
The worst part about getting new clothes for the first time is I felt terrible the whole time picking out new clothes because I always felt like a financial burden to my parents. I remember going to Miller’s Outpost and picking out typical 80’s clothes (OP, TnC, etc.).
It’s funny how growing up poor affects my everyday choices, for better or worse. I’ll never outgrow some of the feelings I had as a poor kid and I feel for any kid who has to endure a childhood of poverty. It will affect them and their choices for the rest of their life.
My Mom had 7 children in 10 years, 1950-1960. I remember having a whole bottle (those smallish glass ones that came out of the machine for 10 cents) of soft drink to myself instead of sharing 1 bottle between all 7 of us. I was perhaps 5 years old. I still remember this as the best thing ever.
Going places during school vacation. The kids would be all like “What!? you’ve never been to XYZ amusement park!?” No, Trisha. My family doesn’t even have a car.” Which is another luxury for me.
Renting a movie from Blockbuster the first weekend of every month. My brother and I got to pick any movie we wanted as long as it wasn’t rated R. On really special nights, we even got a 2-liter bottle of Sprite for the family to share.
Taking a bath. I mean we bathed every night, but it was by heating up water (that we would go to the park down the road to get in 5-gallon jugs) and filling up a mop bucket to wash off with. Staying over at a friend or family member’s house and getting to take an actual shower was amazing though.
I remember in 8th grade on my birthday at school one of my teachers asked me what gifts I had received. He asked in front of the whole class, I excitedly shared that I would be getting contact lenses. My parents let me choose one thing that I wanted and I desperately wanted to stop wearing the broken glasses I had, which I usually didn’t wear. One of the boys in class made a comment like “Contacts aren’t a present..?” And my teacher had to explain to him- again in front of everyone- that for some families they were too expensive not to be a luxury.
Hershey’s chocolate syrup. I was used to an 8 to 12 oz glass of milk with a feather touch squeeze of drops of chocolate added when I was around 6 or 7. It would barely tinge the milk a light malt color but that’s all mom would allow for years. 13 years later my baby sister is old enough to have her vocalize demands and the like, and I’m old enough to serve her while mom ignores her, but we’re doing so much better financially so we always have a bottle of syrup on hand and she gets the big 24 oz tumblers of milk and I have to squeeze enough syrup out to make the chocolate dark dark muddy brown or she cries I’m ripping her off.
Having a bedroom to yourself. I can’t recall a single time before I had my own place that I ever had a bedroom to myself. At first, it was me and my grandmother because my mom was out drinking, then my grandmother died and my mom had another baby which me and him shared a room in a small apartment, then I couch-hopped and stayed at a friend’s house in my teenage years, then I went to live with my dad who was also poor and lived with my grandmother in a run-down trailer and he slept on a foam mattress in the living room and I slept on a love seat. I’m 25 now and I do really well for myself overall. I have a nice 2 bedroom, 2 bath house, I’ve got 2 cars that are reliable, and I have a girlfriend and little boy that I love more than anything. I grew up in a really bad position honestly, so being able to provide for my son the way my parents never did for me really gives me a sense of pride and accomplishment. I don’t want him to ever wonder where he’s going to sleep or to have to worry about anything that I ever had to grow up. To this day me and my mother don’t have a good relationship and my dad is trying to be better and be a part of my son’s life. Giving him the things I never had is enough for me.
New school ‘things’; things like a new bag or new pencils were a massive thing to me because you don’t grow out of them.
My mum was choosing to spend her free money on me to buy me a new bag, I think it only happened in my first year of secondary school and then halfway through but it was so nice to have something clean and new to use.
I remember crying at about 8 that all my friend’s moms would give them chocolates or sweets after school for the walk home and we never got anything. The next day we had a Snickers and I was so shocked.
I still remember that day so clearly. My mum was so happy.
I didn’t see my dad much but sometimes when I spent the weekend with him he would take me to the dollar store and let me pick out 2 or 3 toys. I thought he was the most generous dad in the world. My mom couldn’t afford much and rarely bought me toys so I was always overcome with awe. I didn’t understand how cheap a dollar was at 4 or 5.
This might be dumb, but Tupperware. My mom would pack my lunch using old food containers like yogurt, sour cream, salsa jars, etc. and I always got made fun of. I started packing my own lunch as soon as I was able.
By that, I mean having any sort of leftovers that are thrown out. Even if you eat a whole meal if you have any sort of leftovers they are reused for dinner or lunch the next day.
I have a love/hate relationship with cooking because I adore cooking for my loved ones but the thought of f*cking it up and wasting a bunch of food gives me so much anxiety that I struggle to cook.
The amount of times I overheard my mum muttering/crying to herself about not being able to afford her medication or her orthotics this month because she had to find a way to put food on the table.
Even now that we are in a better place and aren’t living on the poverty line like we used to, I still can’t consciously waste food. It drives me up the wall when friends waste food and if I’m forced to do it for whatever reason it haunts me for a little while because all I can think of is how expensive it is.
My school had a uniform where girls had to wear skirts. I was wearing my brother’s socks and they had loose elastic which they would slip and bundle around my ankles. My teacher asked me to change the socks and I told her that we were poor and we could not buy new socks.
Having chocolate to yourself. My mum would buy one Mars bar and cut it into thin slices that our family of 4 would share. First time I went to a new friend’s house I was given a regular size bar of chocolate, and they looked bewildered when I asked who was going to cut it up. Being told it was ALL for ME…..blew my 8-year-old mind.
Butter. Real, actual butter. I grew up on margarine at home, and the only place I got to have butter was during visits with my grandparents, who as it turned out only bought the cheap, nearly colorless store-brand stuff. But to me, it was still “Rich people’s food”.
The funny thing is, I have trouble with good quality butter now because the bright yellow color reminds me too much of margarine. Go figure.
My mum was a single mother of 4. One of my sisters was always severely sick and even though we live in Australia, a lot of money went on her for her medication.
Once every 3 months, we would get a few hundred dollars from Dad as child support.
When we got this money, we had Mcdonald’s.
Whenever mum got a little extra from centrelink (welfare) we also got McDonalds.
I remember some nights we didn’t have dinner because mum literally had no money and we would go to bed early hungry but then we would be woken up at 3 am with Happy Meals because mum would have received her money then.
It’s a comfort food for me now. Don’t get me wrong, roast vegetables are amazing and so is pasta but if I’m really sad or about to cry I as an adult nearly 30 take myself to a McDonalds at 3 am to get a Happy Meal. It’s not filling but it really does make me happy.
And my favourite toys they ever had were from 2001, they were little plush animals.
My brother got a little lion and I got a purple rabbit named Lavender from that toy line and I still have them.
I remember my mom had a fight with my dad overtaking me to get my ear checked out (had a lot of pain, was crying a lot, sound made it worse, etc.) and my dad finally took me to see a doctor. I had a silverfish in my ear and it was eating into my eardrum.
My dad justified expenses based on what he wants and if it can do something for all 4 of the kids who lived with him, not based on individual needs. I have atrocious teeth, but because my siblings got nothing from dental work meant for me, it meant I didn’t see a dentist until it got so bad my teeth had to be pulled.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but the “luxury” item we could never use was perfume/body spray/scented body lotions.
When my mom would get them as gifts from anyone, she would literally never use them for years and years and unless she was going to a dinner, musical, etc.
When I was in middle school I got hip to Bath and Body Works because we started changing in the gym and all the girls had all kinds of lotions and sprays and I could not believe it. I became so self-conscious of what I smelled like because I just smelled like my soap and daily lotion and was terrified people thought I smelled bad.
Now that I’m in my 20s and my mom has successfully transitioned from WIC support in 2008 to getting her masters in clinical psychology in 2020 we’ve been really confronting what luxury means to us. “Treat yo self” is definitely her new favorite thing.
I went to elementary school in the south. Long story short we were two mixed girls with a mother who’d passed and left us with a grandmother who was already raising another older boy from my mother and this lady was an old angry battle axe…also slightly racist to boot. Anywho, we lived off of the other kid in town’s used clothes after my mom died. In the South, you get to be little pageants if you got good grades. I finally got out of my funk after my mom died and earned a spot in the pageant….but my grandmother had never bought us one stitch of clothing and I knew I needed a little dress. I cried at school when they told me I could be in it because I knew we couldn’t afford a dress. They gave the spot to another girl …the teacher’s daughter who always got the spot anyways. I was devastated.
I came to school one morning and I remember a teacher and her aide presented me with this beautiful little blue and green dress. I had never seen anything like it before in my little life. I don’t know if they bought it for me, or had an old dress laying around but I loved it so much. None of my family saw me in the pageant, nobody cared. But I felt important that day.
Families that had orange juice in the fridge. It probably didn’t even cost all that much come to think of it, but it was just something I associated with luxury because we never had it.
A barbecue, just a small one with a burger, hot dogs and a little chicken drumsticks.
And while not a luxury – meat in general was a good day.
Often times at the worst 2 years – dinner would be crisps (potato chips) with bread, or plain boiled pasta with tomato ketchup.
Once my mom had dug herself out of the financial black hole her first husband left her – things got better.
She then developed an almost religious belief a meal was only a snack if it did not contain meat.
As an adult now, I can’t survive more than 2 days on my mom’s cooking it’s just so meat intensive – when we go visit her for a few days – my wife and I often duck out at meal (dinner time) time’s – after day 2 – and end up eating vegetarian at some restaurant just to balance it out.
My wife grew up very poor in another country. She used to tell me about getting a pack of ramen noodles was a treat. When she came to America and realized that they sold ramen noodles in bulk (12, 24, etc packs) and her family could afford to buy it, she felt like they have finally made it.
Ham. I went to a friend’s house and saw that they had this fancy thing that tasted soo good, they bought it at the grocery store, I had seen it before but really hadn’t tasted it. So when I went to my friend’s house I always asked him if I could eat a sandwich and he let me put ham in it and it was like a dream come true.
Now that I’m grown up I always tell my wife that I can’t believe we can afford to buy fancy Ham. And if you think I’m talking about expensive Ham then that’s not it, I’m actually talking about the one you order on the back, just simple slices, honey roasted and that stuff.
Things like this will follow you forever I never forget every time I encounter that I can actually consume or have something that I thought it was impossible as a kid.
There were so many but one of the biggest was maybe having birthdays, as in like having people over and getting gifts. I don’t celebrate my birthday to this day and it’s weird to some people – I always have to explain why.
Taking your own lunch to school. We got free hot meals provided by the govt and had to queue up in the “poor kids queue” to get lunch – sometimes they’d make us go last and all the good (in hindsight, the bad) food would be gone. My mum remarried and I was no longer entitled to free school meals and I got to take my own lunch box for the first time. I was seven or eight and remember it vividly because I threw up all over myself in the first class of the day but refused to go home because I was so excited to have my homemade lunch. My lunch box was turquoise with a pink handle and too big for my bag. I loved it.
I didn’t really date a lot when I was a teen, and as I got older I wasn’t really into dating at all. So I was 22 and, after a couple of zoo dates (free with membership!) my boyfriend asked if I wanted to hit up Red Lobster for dinner. I got really self-conscious and asked if I was dressed good enough for it since I was just in jeans and a T-shirt. He was baffled that I thought I had to dress up for it, but as growing up I always had the idea that restaurants like Red Lobster, Outback Steakhouse, and Olive Garden were for wealthy people only.
Toothpaste. We brushed with baking soda. Milk. We used powdered milk. Water. Ours was rusty. But I’d mostly say the peace of mind that comes with being settled. I almost don’t know how to live without worry.
In all the years I only ever remember 2 holidays away from home. All other holidays were stay-at-home and entertain-yourself style.
Not that we ever complained, our friends from down the street would come over and they would bring friends and we would vanish off into the bush or to the river or on our bikes for the whole day, get home dead tired, be up at 5 am the next day and do it all over again. Never really thought about it until I left home and realized going away on holiday was actually a very common thing to do.
As a kid, I didn’t really understand that I was poor. I went out and played with my friends and would come home for a snack like a bologna and mustard sandwich. When my mom wasn’t home I would sneak some bologna, throw it in a pan and fry it up until that bubble in the middle showed up and it was great.
One day my mom brought home a jar of miracle whip to try. When she made my bologna sandwich that day she put the miracle whip on it instead of mustard and when I took a bite, whoa boy, it was so delicious! I ate it constantly, even toasting bread and just putting miracle whip between two slices for a toasted miracle whip sandwich!
Fast forward a few days and I was super sad when the jar was empty because we had to wait until she got her next Social Security (SSDI) check to get some more.
When I was in middle school, my mom and I would budget and often end up like “Okay, 5 days until payday. We have $20 a day until then.” But sometimes it would end up being like $4 a day until payday. During those weeks, if we could manage to not spend money the first few days, on the last day before payday we would go to the Chinese restaurant down the street that we loved.
It always felt like a victory. Like, we made it through a bad week, we can do it again. I would kill for a Flaming Appetizer Tray right now, could use that small victory
Batteries. We never had them around the house because they were so expensive. If a toy needed batteries, we’d have to ask Mom to make a special trip to the store to get some, which she’d eventually do. Of course, she’d come back with exactly the number and size batteries needed; never any extras for next time.
Now that I have my own job, house, wife, kids, etc., we have a box in the closet full of hundreds of spare batteries of all different types. It’s such a luxury going to the battery box and pulling out what you need when you need it.
My mom took me to an arcade once for my birthday and gave me a dollar. We couldn’t ever afford doing those types of things and all the other kids at school would go fairly often, so I was super excited. Four quarters didn’t really go far, but it still was the best birthday for me. I remember looking over at some guys in their twenties who were just crushing it in skee ball and had a bucket of overflowing tickets! I remember hoping that could be me one day. I only got like 8 tickets, so I couldn’t get anything. I was just two shy from a spider ring or a Chinese finger trap! haha As I walked away from the counter disappointed, the group of guys from skii ball walked over and handed me their bucket of tickets and walked out! I couldn’t believe what was going on. I felt like I won’t the lottery, I was never more excited in my life! Lol I was able to get a stuffed animal from the top row! I picked a border collie since I always wanted a dog. So to those gentlemen out there somewhere, major gratitude to you for making a little poor kid’s childhood. Don’t think you realized the magnitude of your kind gesture to me as a child. Now when I ever go out to arcades with friends, we group the tickets and try doing the same for the least fortunate-looking kid.
An allowance. I was around 8 or 9, and I was supposed to get $5/week for the chores I did, but we didn’t have enough money for my mom to actually pay me. So our deal was I could go through her work clothes and whatever loose change I found I could keep. Never even added up to a buck, but it was enough to buy some candy at the store once in a while.
Having a bathroom inside the house and not outside in a separate building. I was growing up in rural Russia/Ukraine/Georgia and sometimes we’d have a house that didn’t have any amenities inside but a bath shack outside. I remember running back to the house all steamed up after a hot shower or bath all wrapped in blankets and towels, my mom rushing us back home. The first time we moved to a place with a bath inside it felt like such a luxury I still remember that feeling. Honestly, those times taught me the best lessons in life.
A full tank of gas. When I was 19, my now-wife filled up my car for me because I didn’t have enough to make it to work. I started to cry at the gas station. Thats the first time I’ve ever had a full tank of gas.
Fresh food. When I was growing up you had to make the food stamps last the month. So we would eat from boxes and bags most nights of the week because it was cheaper. And My parents got really smart when they heard about this place called Aldi an hour and a half away. They sold their canned food for like $0.20-$0.25 a can. (Can’t remember the exact amount now.) So they would try to save a little bit of the food stamps each month, and every 3 months we would go buy a ton of canned green beans, corn, and mixed veggies. Oh and mushrooms and cream of mushroom soup. Just anything cheap in a can really.
I grew up eating so much sodium I should be desiccated, but I survived. Fast forward wife and I got together when I was 19, and we have vegetables at her mom’s house one time.
OH MY GOD! Why aren’t these carrots squishy? Turns out I didn’t like cooked carrots because I had only had them from a can. And that goes for asparagus, spinach, peas, and most types of beans. Now every year we plant a giant garden and I will just take raw vegetables in my lunch to work.
I worked my way up to an engineer’s position where I work, so we are now solidly lower middle class. We can’t buy everything we want, but we will never skip over something at the grocery store. I plan our grocery trips on the Saturday after I get paid, and if we see it and want to eat it, we get it.
Buying food from the school canteen during recess. We only had jam sandwiches packed from home and always envied our friends who got to enjoy hot food in the canteen.
Eating 3 meals a day. Usually, I only got the free breakfast and lunch at school during the week and on the weekends it was canned green beans and canned tuna once a day. I didn’t get 3 meals a day until I was around 13 and my birth mom married some middle-class dude who was a hunter. So we ate a lot of deer and sometimes wild birds and canned or frozen vegetables other than green beans. I also got pretty good at hamburger/tuna/chicken helper, so we ate that a lot, often just made with venison.
We definitely could never swing cable in our house. So anytime I stayed over at a friend’s place on a weekend and a Disney Channel Original Movie came on, I was in absolute heaven.
Since I was a kid I idolize Kobe Bryant and when he released Adidas Crazy 97, I really wanted it but we couldn’t afford it. One time my father surprised me with the shoes however it was fake Adidas Crazy 97 with 4 stripes instead of 3. I didn’t care if it was fake. I still wore it at school and all my friends laughed at me. Now I thank God every day for all the little things I buy especially things that are essential in life.
This one is really specific, but the school book covers. In elementary and middle school you were required to cover your book to protect its integrity of it.
It was always easy to spot the kids who were poor (me being one of them) as their books were covered by a brown grocery bag. All of my friends had cool book socks that were different designs and colors. But if you had the brown paper bag it stuck out like a sore thumb.
I just remember the sinking feeling of not wanting to show my book because it wasn’t the cool book sock. This is just one really small example that kids internalize from growing up poor. I don’t even want to go into living in a trailer and the hoops I would jump through so friends didn’t know where I lived out of embarrassment. I don’t think a lot cuts deeper than being called trailer trash as a kid.
Getting to be alone with my thoughts for a few minutes. I was at school, then I was working, then I was having to deal with my siblings, and by the end of the day, I didn’t have time to just relax for a few. So the days where I got a few minutes were the best days.
Now I love my alone time so much. There’s a reason I’m single and even when I date I refuse to ever move back in with someone.
Whenever my mom and me went grocery shopping, I picked up a stuffed animal (a yellow duck) and walked up to my mom. She always said “Honey, you know we don’t have enough money for that”, so I quietly put it back. My mom said it broke her heart that I understood that, and that she could’ve dealt much better with it if I’d been throwing a tantrum.
One Christmas day, my mom told me to look outside the door, there’s a present, and on a chair sat my yellow duck! I was so excited to actually get what I wished for! I just stuck with the name “duck”. I loved it like another sibling and took it with me everywhere. Duck still lives with me 26 years later. Duck still calms me down, and it is now one of my most beloved treasures.
