I grew up incredibly poor. There are too many stories. It was my mom, brother and I. My mom was a waitress until I was 14. There were years she made $5000-6000. The worst time was when my stepfather threatened the 3 of us so my dad came and got us, when we got back to the duplex (1 bedroom, about 500 sq feet) all of our stuff was sold - EVERYTHING! Mom didn't have enough money to buy us anything and she refused to go on welfare, she did it for one month for food stamps and said we'd find a way without going it. Well, everynight my mom would wash out our underwear in the sink and we'd share the 1 towel we had. My dad bought us a few extra outfits. Eventually my mom would buy a towel every week or 2 and some unders. My mom did a good job finding fun things for us to do. Ate a lot of Spam - Ugh, makes me gag thinking about it. But we went to the beach a lot, it was $2 for the carload. My grandpa bought us bikes for X-mas one year and we'd bike there. My mom work 6 days a week, 10 hours/day. It was rough times and I hated it, the welfare kids picked on me a lot because my mom waited on them. But we did a lot of fun things. It wasn't funny at the time but I can look back now at my brother running around at 3 or 4 bare butted while mom washed his underwear. Needless to say, 20 yrs later, he doesn't mind being nekkid in front of anyone.
I can't imagine raising a family on that nowadays. Not to mention Spam is gross! Ragu also makes me gag to this day. Ugh.