The Cost of Being Penniless

I have a friend, I'll call him Ben, who has a nice house in a well-to-do suburban neighborhood, but yet he barely has two dimes to rub together. It was Ben's parents' home and his parents have both passed away, leaving Ben with the property. He moved into the house when his father was very ill, on the verge of death. That was about 15 years ago and Ben has lived there alone ever since.

Ben is in his mid-60s, unmarried, unattached, and unemployed. That pretty much sums up the basics of his life, such as it is. He has not held a steady job in almost 20 years. He does not like to work for other people, so he doesn't. He receives a little bit of money per month through a successful lawsuit decades ago. That is all of his income. Ben does not drive. That would cost far too much money. He purchases everything on sale. He buys store brand when at all possible. Ben's clothes come from a thrift store.

Ben saves a little bit of money and invests it in long-shot penny stocks over an internet brokerage account. He's been doing this for years. He wants to have a lot of money... a lot of money. A modest amount of money will not do. It's all or nothing for Ben. So far it has been nothing. The overwhelming odds are that it will be nothing until the day he dies. To Ben's credit, he makes it a point to never burden anyone else with his poverty. He never asks for a loan, or even to be driven to the doctor.

The specific reason for this blog entry is that there is one thing about Ben that becomes apparent way too often: his constant thoughts concerning money. Ben himself has stated that those who have no money tend to think about, or at least worry about money far more often than those who actually have money. To me, this fixation on money may be one of the unnoticed tragedies about poverty: the time spent contemplating money and where it can be best acquired, or saved, or, heaven forbid, spent. Many's the time I will make some social observation or utter something intellectual only to have Ben stare at me blankly, then quickly ask me if I thought Hormel chili was on sale at the nearby grocery store. I once mused about what I would like to change if I could go back in time 20 or 30 years knowing what I know now. I said something about my younger self being more sophisticated while in the company of women. Ben stated that he would have the knowledge to invest in Microsoft. So much for that philosophical discussion. Ben does not concern himself with global warming, Islamic terrorism, or whether mankind should visit Mars. Sadly, he might contemplate all of these things if he were not worried about his economic state.

Don't get me wrong, Ben is a good guy. He laughs at jokes and will on rare occasion give me a beer out of his refrigerator. It's just that each of us has only so much time on earth and it seems unfortunate that anyone should spend hours plotting how to get a buck when that time could be spent dwelling on better things.