What weird habits have you developed from growing up poor?

I still can't bring myself to write in Madlib books, or on things that could be reused.

Growing up ultra poor, it was a rare treat to get something frivolous, but Madlibs were also semi-educational,

so every once in a while I'd get a new Madlib book from my dad. But I felt a ton of anxiety about

wasting them by directly writing in them. If I numbered the blanks and then wrote on a separate

sheet of paper with the corresponding numbers, I could reuse the books over and over again.

Being really poor made me live in this awful anxiety-driven state of don't use it up because you might not get any more

anytime soon. And you'd better use it all and not waste anything, which made me overthink and

over-analyze my actions. I was confronted by this preference to not mess things up in my master's

degree program, because the professor would expressly tell me it was

okay to write on the handouts because she'd share the digital copies with us, so we'd

have a clean copy to use in our own classes later, and I still couldn't do it.

Using plastic grocery bags as trash bags, don't really see the points in using actual garbage

bags. Any time someone tries to buy

me food or anything for me, I always go for the dollar menu or try to go for the lowest amount,

even if they say buy whatever. I mean, that's just courtesy. When people offer to buy me Starbucks,

I order tea. It's the cheapest thing you can get from there. There's an expectation not to

order the lobster equivalent on a menu when someone is being nice to you. Operating under a barter

system with friends. Where I grew up, there wasn't much money. So people often bartered goods and

services and often exchanged small handmade gifts as payment, then I moved and discovered

that wealthier people don't do that at all. Not letting anyone in the house. Even though I don't have to,

as much, I still calculate how many hours I have to work in order to afford something to decide if it's a need or a want.

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