Here are some of the most eye-opening ones:
1. "Many banks charge a monthly fee to have an account with a balance under a certain level, like $1,500. It's literally a poverty fee."
2. "If you can't afford your own laundry machine or an apartment that comes with one, it costs like $10 in quarters to do laundry. EVERY TIME."
3. "Cars. Maintaining an unreliable junk heap is very expensive and a sinkhole. If you can't afford a reliable vehicle, your financial progress is going to be a lot slower. Missed shifts, unexpected expenses — it sucks."
4. "Poor people can’t pay for childcare. The wealthy rely on underpaying people to take care of their kids."
5. "Having to buy cheap shit that breaks fast because you can't afford good-quality stuff (clothes, shoes, electronics)."
6. "Not being able to save by buying in bulk. Even though it costs less per unit, the TOTAL is higher."
7. "You live in a food desert and, besides being more expensive, all the options are highly processed foods that lead to obesity and other expensive and life-shortening health problems."
8. "Uber driver here. I live in a major city with shit public transportation. I can’t even tell you how many rides I give weekly where the Uber ride one way costs more than the passenger's hourly wage. I drive tons of people working part-time shifts that pay $12 an hour when the ride just to work costs $20. I feel very bad for them. It’s not like I am making the big bucks driving Uber, but paying $40 to get to and from work when you only make a few hundred a week doesn’t make any sense to me, but this is the reality for many."
9. "I’ve never had the money to spend on dental work, so now I’m spending thousands more to fix everything that was neglected."
10. "Chase has a $35 overdraft fee."
11. "Rent versus mortgage. The bank says you're too poor for an $800 mortgage payment, so you have to pay $1,500 on rent instead."
12. "The monetary burden of poor people is staggering, but the stress is just as bad — if not worse. Owing money that you don't have is incredibly stressful, as is struggling to perform a shitty job just to barely scrape by. The mental burden of being poor also requires money to cope with and, since professional help is expensive, it often ends up being dealt with in an unhealthy way..."
13. "If you have a low credit score, you have to pay a $300+ deposit in order to get the power turned on at your place."
14. "How about the fact that homelessness is illegal..."
15. "Not being able to afford preventive medical care leads to huge medical bills later. I’ve seen it numerous times where people put off routine exams/procedures, and then come through the ER and end up with an amputation — or even death — because the illness had progressed so far before they sought treatment."
16. "Higher interest rates anytime you borrow and lack of assets to borrow money against. You can't get ahead."
17. "The hardest part of being poor — for me — was the 'cost' of time. My weekly grocery trip took almost four hours. Time spent looking over fliers and making a list of what I could afford, walking to the closest bus stop, transferring to another bus, an hour of shopping and tallying up my total to make sure I was within budget, waiting up to 20 minutes for a bus home (including another bus transfer), and then walking home with all my groceries from the bus stop."
Note: Some comments have been edited for length and/or clarity.