Middle Class Snack Kids

I am a Middle Class Snack Kid. A Middle Class Snack Kid is the term I just coined for people who do not spend a lot on themselves on the whole, but are running themselves into the ground buying food and drink. We were raised in a house where the Goldfish crackers ran like water and friends came over after school for nachos and Saved By the Bell. We lived like this because we had two parents, who probably each had a job. They were probably not married, but we had them. We lived like this because we probably also had a grandma who had a savings and a pension and a social security check.

Middle Class Snack Kids were raised without some of the finer things, but with a mindset that things were taken care of in all the important ways. We may not have had that new walkman, but damnit if there weren’t cookies made by Grandma every day. And so I may know enough not to go buying an iPhone and a TV, but damnit if I don’t buy myself all the snacks I desire, with no thought given to the fact that I do not have the three incomes of my mom and my dad and my grandma. I have one income. I have the one income of a me, with an entry level-type job and student loans.

On top of this, Grandmas are deceptive creatures. Because while the cookies were abundant in our childhoods in the middle class, what we never saw were all the years they spent in the lower class, separating the cash from their husbands’ paychecks into envelopes for bills, groceries, savings, and fucking NOTHING ELSE. These women bought cars WITH CASH. Cash that THEY SAVED OVER YEARS. YEEEEEEEEARS. If you had offered them a card connected to their bank accounts, they would have beaten you off with a baseball bat. They knew that having that kind of easy access was sinful. That was the devil’s work.

So I am going to do two things:

  1. Make a grocery budget
  2. Buy groceries only with the cash I have set aside for said budget

And that is basically going to be my key to becoming rich. How do I know this will work? Because I spent $367.63 on groceries and eating out last month by simply not paying attention. That is the most embarrassing thing. That is so embarrassing. Admitting that in a public forum is awful.

If my grandma were here right now, she would be ashamed of me and she would throw like five envelopes in my middle class face and she would be like, “Hey! I bought you snacks because I could. But you cannot, so cut it out, dum dum. Also, you’re getting chubby anyway and I’m allowed to say that because I’m dead.”