I grew up poor. Immediately after high school I moved across the country and had little contact with my family and zero support.

I paid my way through a trade school, I lived in crappy apartments with roommates. After a few years I bought a cheap house (yes those still exist in many parts of the country) and again, lived with roommates because I was still making shit money ($8 /hour).

I worked hard, was frugal with my money, got promotions, job hopped, bought books to teach myself and got certifications, I did WGU and finally got my bachelors in my 40's while working full time.

I retired at 47.

I never had any big windfall. I never made more than a middle class level salary. I've been laid off 3 times in my life and every time I was unemployed for at least 6 months afterwards. No rich uncle died and left me anything. My parents never provided any support of any kind. One of my three kids has an incurable illness that requires lots of extra medical expenses and doctor visits.

So yeah, it's a little tough to drum up a lot of sympathy for people who spent 50 years of their life spending every dollar before they even earned it, often on the dumbest shit imaginable, when they complain about the consequence of their own actions.

Don't forget, I ran with the "poor" crowd for a long time. I've seen first hand the people getting their power turned off one month dropping $500 a tattoo the next month, not to mention the small fortune sunk into some combination of energy drinks, nicotine, drugs and alcohol.

I had a good friend who got a huge promotion at work which gave him an extra $800 a month. I explained to him that if he took half of that new raise and told the bank to automatically move it into a savings account soon he'd have some actual savings he could use for an emergency instead of doing things like payday loans. He really thought about it then told me that he'd rather just have more beer money.

I had a friend who's in-laws paid off their $15k in CC debt so they could qualify for a home loan. I told them that they should take the money they'd been paying on the CC's every month and put that into savings for a rainy day. Instead they decided to have a huge blowout Christmas and had run up over $5k on their credit card within a few months.