Avoiding Poverty
Four Simple Rules to Follow
By Daniel Muniz

Living in poverty is awful and I ought to know because I was born in a barrio of a small South Texas rural community. However, my parents were determined that we would not spend the rest of our lives being poor. So after years of a lot of hard work and effort on their part, we were able to eventually move to the suburbs of San Antonio when I started high school. And soon afterwards, my parents then moved into a much larger suburban house that sat on a bigger lot and they now enjoy a comfortable retirement.

Being poor is not a lifestyle that anyone would enjoy. But there are ways to get out of it and although everyone’s journey to the great middle class is different, researchers at James Madison University have developed a plan that has a whopping 95 percent chance of success to help people escape poverty. Here are its four basic tenets:

That’s it! There are just four very attainable objectives that have to be achieved in order to leave a life of abject poverty.

Attend High School, Pay Attention, and Graduate
The grim statistics bear it out that people with a high school diploma have a far greater earning capacity than dropouts. Dropouts have also simply missed out learning the reading, writing, and arithmetic skills that are needed in today’s society. And kids not only need to stay in school but they also have to at least participate in what is being taught. That doesn’t mean that everyone is required to be straight A students or to be enrolled in the Gifted and Talented program but it is vitally important that a kid actually has to try to learn something.

One of the biggest complaints from many employers is that applicants with only a high school diploma still have very poor reading and writing skills along with deficiencies in math. And we are not talking about rocket science or brain surgery but rather the basics that should have been learned in high school but were never mastered.

Unfortunately, some school districts have rigged their grading systems to prevent slackers from failing. And there are principals that have no problem passing a student that has failed a class and they will do it without even consulting their teacher. But even in the bad schools, kids can still get an adequate education if and only if they are willing apply themselves to the coursework.

So overall, this objective is purely voluntary especially if a student wants to get a real education instead of allowing a school to pass a flunking kid.

Don’t Engage in Criminal Activity
Nothing will limit your career faster than having a criminal record especially if you are a convicted felon. In fact, many employers are now starting to do background checks on all applicants because they don’t want people who have shady or violent backgrounds. And there is also an enormous liability involved for an employer in case something bad happens. These employment screenings are also cheap and fast especially when they are done over the Internet so it is easy for a boss to find out if you have ever been arrested and convicted for shoplifting, stealing, or for a violent offense.

And criminal activity also includes illicit drug use. I have personally known too many people who ardently claim that they are only recreational drug users instead of addicts but they still end up flunking a drug test when applying for a job because they could not stop themselves from shooting up or smoking a crack pipe or a joint the morning or the previous day before getting tested. As a result, many of them now only apply for jobs that do not require drug testing, thus their career opportunities become severely limited. But overall, employers don’t want to hire druggies.

A career in crime instead of getting a real job doesn’t really pay regardless of the glamour that is depicted from rap music and popular culture. With extremely rare exceptions, you will still earn more money even from a low paying job than what you could ever make from stealing or selling drugs. And a real job is always far safer than doing any illegal activity that will get you shot at or physically assaulted.

So stay away from drugs and from criminal activity. And again, this objective is purely voluntary.

Take Any Job
Even doing manual labor can teach people, especially young adults, the value of a work ethic. Menial tasks still have to be done right and they have to be done on time and there is so much to be learned from that. I consider my most important jobs to be the minimum wage ones that I took when I was young because I learned so much that I was able to apply to my professional career. In fact, some of the most successful people in the world, especially self-made millionaires, once worked in gritty dirty jobs such as washing dishes or mopping floors or in doing mundane repetitive clerical tasks.

It is difficult for a young person to be at a job on time every day and still be willing to work without resorting to excuses. And it becomes dramatically worse when he or she becomes a much older adult and is still a slacker.

And yes, entry-level jobs don’t pay much but everybody has to start from somewhere. But most importantly, learning how to do a job right and on time is a valuable employment skill that will translate into a valuable commodity because employers covet employees who have a genuine work ethic that they can trust instead of the bad habits from slackers.

So get a job, any job, and do the best that you can do at it because it will prepare you for better employment for the future. And once again, this objective is purely voluntary.

Don’t Have Children Before You’re Married, and Don’t Get Married Until You’re At Least 21
Nothing will condemn a child to poverty faster than being born out of wedlock and then raised by a single parent, especially if the parent is young. Is this preaching or sermonizing? Absolutely not because the cold hard facts vividly demonstrate that the people who are the worst off are usually the ones who are single parents raising children.

And granted this is perhaps the wiliest objective to accomplish because of the changing norms of our society. Popular culture, Hollywood, television, the Internet, and rock stars saturate the airwaves with lustful lewd behavior. It may be easy for a millionaire celebrity living in a mansion to have plenty of children out of wedlock but for the average person, it is tough raising a kid own your own.

But sadly, in some barrios and ghettos, an unwed teenage girl having a baby is seen as a status symbol in those neighborhoods. That is, a kid reached true adulthood before all of her peers.

Also, a generation ago, men could easily disappear or just completely ignore their parental responsibilities. Times and laws have changed for the better so a state government can now legally hold a man financially responsible for his offspring. Again is this preaching and sermonizing or is it just the cold hard facts that men ought to be fully prepared to be held responsible and accountable for their behavior since it can involve almost two decades of paying child support.

And when a marriage is done later in age and done before children are conceived is especially essential. Unfortunately, too many people view marriage as another living arrangement that comes and goes. It becomes truly tragic when children are in the picture because there are enormous consequences to raising a child alone.

Admittedly, this objective is perhaps the most difficult to accomplish but it too is also purely voluntary.

In conclusion, it doesn’t take much to escape poverty although that doesn’t mean that everyone will end up well off. But being poor for a lifetime is the result of a series of making really bad personal decisions. To avoid an impoverished livelihood means avoiding the terrible decisions that produce those negative results. And it also means avoiding putting one’s self into situations that can lead to bad behavior.

Note that each one of these four objectives is purely voluntary. Every individual controls each and every outcome in the pursuit of these goals. Although there are plenty of people who immediately want to blame the government or the white man or the president for their financial woes, it is still solely contingent upon the individual’s free will to work hard to diligently to accomplish these four rules.

Life is full of personal decisions and the real trick is trying to make as many of the right ones as possible.

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