Hey Pandas, What Made You Realize Your Family Was Below The Poverty Level? (Closed)

Didn't know until I moved to the Mid-west and we were driving through a "nice" part of town admiring the houses with my siblings. Then my older sister goes, "You know, these are middle-class Americans, right?"
Blew my mind.
We never lacked anything growing-up. I always assumed we were middle-class.
We were not.🤣

Second hand school uniform and my mum making all my clothes.

Unlabelled and dented canned food lottery, lightly expired food from the special expired food shop, food with labels in languages we didn't even recognise and back before Google translate you just had to open them up and see if you could work out what the blazes was in them. Going to friends' houses and finding out they had the actual branded stuff we'd seen in TV adverts.

I realized we were low income as a child because going to other peoples homes they had things we could not buy. I did not grow up going to schools that required a uniform so we wore regular cloths. I wore hand me downs and second hand clothing from a thrift store while quite a few of my friends had new clothing. So, I learned rather early we were not "middle class".

Many meals of cereal, boxed Mac and cheese, fried egg sandwiches, pb&j, boiled hot dogs. Now you have to be rich to buy eggs lol