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How we grow up can leave lasting impressions on our lives, shaping our actions and perspectives from those of others with completely different upbringings. While socioeconomic background should never be used as the sole determinant of a person’s life choices, there’s no debate as to whether our upbringing has a huge part in how we live. Here are dead giveaways that let others know you weren’t raised with a silver spoon.
1. Unwillingness to Trash Near-Useless Items
A striking comment got other forum participants reeling in laughter. It’s that of one user who says their dead giveaway, according to a friend, was unwilling to discard a thin bar of soap, sticking it on a new bar instead so it would increase in size and maybe last longer.
2. Feeling You Don’t Deserve Anything Nice
One user says she considers herself undeserving whenever she buys a lovely item: “Every time I buy something, I feel like I don’t deserve anything nice because it’s just gonna break on me anyway.”
A second commenter feels the same: “I have a problem buying things,” they explain. “I check to see if there’s a cheaper option or ponder if I should actually get it, and I feel like I need to justify it. It’s weird because I make a decent income — it was just how I was raised; money was always made to seem highly crucial to my parents.”
3. Always Afraid to Exhaust Nice Things
Do you remember never wanting to finish consuming the ice cream drumstick during childhood? Someone on the thread said if you’re afraid to use up nice things in adulthood, it is a telltale that you grew up poor.
4. Food Hoarding
You may think something as relatively available as food should not be a big deal, but according to one user, people who are raised poor hoard food, sometimes till it expires. “My emotional state actually drastically improves when I have a full pantry,” someone on the thread claims.
5. Yogurt Containers for Tupperware
One user claims storing foods in containers other than Tupperware could signal a poor upbringing. He argues that Tupperware is cheap enough, and seeking an alternative symbolizes extreme financial conservativeness. Several users say his comment reminds them of growing up.
6. Never Eating Out
What does a few bucks of restaurant glass wine cost? Too little, someone on the thread argues. She explains that if you never eat out and permanently save leftovers, you may have experienced poverty growing up.
7. Constant Fear of Losing Money
It’s crucial to have good money management, but according to a forum contributor, paranoia about losing money is a sign that it wasn’t all rosy in the beginning. Someone else says the delusion that you can save more by being excessively frugal is a pointer to a rose-free childhood.
8. Not Having Traveled Anywhere
Do you feel lost when your co-workers share their travel experience in the sunlit evenings of Africa’s savannah or the ice-cold crystal stretches of Antarctica? If you haven’t been anywhere, many people on the thread say you must have grown up without the perks of financial freedom.
9. Lavish Spending
While extreme financial conservatism could be telling signs of a poor background, lavish spending may be a sign that you want to experience everything the lack of money denied you in childhood, one user explains: “I have no control over my spending habits because now that I have money, I want to buy everything I couldn’t as a kid.”
10. Off-Brand Everything
If you “look for off-brand everything,” there’s no doubt your childhood didn’t have a lot of money in it, one user cheekily explains. In solidarity, a second person narrates their childhood ordeal using an inferior product: “I was bullied as a kid because my cheap Adidas shoes had four stripes instead of three. Classmates called me ‘four stripes.'”
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