Comment Re:I think you may be confused (Score 1) 309
Now I myself am a boarder. Working overseas at less than half my old income in a coal mining town where housing costs 45% of my weekly paycheck. Mandatory insurance eats up another 10%. Then there's food (meat unlikely, as i cannot cook where I live, so I eat a lot of veggies out of the can, for example), detergent to wash my work clothes since I cannot afford to have them dry cleaned, etc. And that housing is a single non-airconditioned room big enough for a bed, garment rack and refrigerator. And hundreds of cockroaches and lizards no matter how many cans of spray I emtpy onto floors and into corners. In the tropics where 95 degree days are common. Kind of makes it not so bad that some mornings there isn't any hot water, because I need to cool off before going to work in my office geek job.
I was lucky to land this accomodation. Many people have it worse; I've heard my region leads the country in homelessness percentage. I begged my way into couch surfing for months while looking for impossible to find affordale housing that 2000 other people in town are also searching for. I was out on the street for a while, periodically when between accommodations. Lacking a car, I slept rough.
And I didn't have to use the daily newspaper for tp only because I could swipe some from a public restroom when needed. But the rest of it, like going without food for 3 days because I'd used up my stock of canned beans, while waitng for the next payday, is de rigeur.
If someone with a masters degree with 20 years experience working in a professional technical field is part of the working poor as a result of the events of the past 3-4 years, and even needed to leave the country to get a deal that good, the country has a problem.