Despite her best efforts, including not buying her daily coffee, 25-year-old Tyra Manning is still dealing with the effects of intergenerational poverty.
“I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” said Tyra. “I stopped buying my daily $3 coffee from the cafe on my block and I’m still poor.”
Tyra, whose family descended from American slaves, decided to quit buying her very inexpensive daily coffee after hearing the advice of many pundits and baby boomers.
“There were so many articles and outlets reporting that skipping your little daily expenses was the path to overcoming decades of familial economic insecurity,” she said. “So I tried it. I even started bringing my lunch to work every day. Unfortunately, I’m still deciding which bills to pay!”
Ms. Manning, who has accrued thousands in student loan debt getting two degrees to better her financial situation, has also given up other tiny pleasures in order to achieve her goal.
“I deleted my Netflix account, I stopped buying avocados,” she explained. “And I walk everywhere, even in the winter. It seemed like all those things combined would have some kind of positive effect, despite my family being systematically excluded from the opportunity to build generational wealth due to our race. But I’m still broke, somehow!”
Friends of Ms. Manning are confused as to why she’s taking these steps.
“I don’t understand how, if she’s doing all this, she’s still so broke ALL the time,” said Marnie Kettering, who has a trust fund. “Her grandmother just passed away. Shouldn’t she have gotten some kind of inheritance?”
“It’s a shame she has to cut out so many small things to keep her head above water financially,” added Kate Carmichael, an acquaintance with a two-bedroom apartment and no job. “She’s probably just too proud to ask her parents for money.”
But Tyra isn’t giving up yet.
“My daily cafe au lait is one of the small joys in life that I’m able to afford,” she said. “If giving them up means I can finally claw my way out of the poverty that has plagued my family for generations and was intentionally designed by a racist government to keep my community down, then I’ll give them up. It just hasn’t worked yet, for some reason.”
