Class, money, and surviving in the Global South
Thoughts from a poor little rich girl
Before I start, I’d like to put a lampshade on who I presume my readers to be. You are likely to be someone who is well educated, who is in a comfortable position in your career, but who is hungry to advance. You are probably from either the Global North, or a prosperous urban center in the Global South. You probably work in an international setting. You are likely at least in a financial position that allows for the occasional recreational hobby and vacation.
You-
I don’t know.
Tell me about yourself and then maybe I can change how I write.
For now, I’m moving on.
Below are a series of screenshots taken from a non-work-related blog. It details the financial woes of a person who considers themself upper-middle class in the Philippines (Me. That person is me. I am that person).
As per usual, if you prefer to use a screen reader or have trouble reading the screenshots themselves, here is the transcript of the relevant portions:
So I’m visiting my home province to attend my sister-in-law’s sister’s wedding next week.
The roundtrip ticket was bought and paid for months ago, so no worries there. But getting to the airport is approximately PhP800, or US$13.65. As mentioned, I have about US$85 in my bank account.
I’ve set aside the rent for October, which is PhP8,000 (US$136.54, I know, my rent is a pittance compared to the rent in your fancy schmancy Global North places, I get it. What a privilege. Who cares about the weekly rainy season street-floods or the informal settler community living across the creek, yeah? We have a two-bedroom with a carport and some soil to grow lemongrass and gingers in. Oh the luxury and excess.). But I’ve had to take PhP2,000 (US$34.16) from that to pay for incidental house things and just-in-case money, so it needs replenishing.
So today, I withdrew PhP3,000 (US$51.23) to cover what I’d taken out of the Rent Stash and to get some rice and fresh veg from the itinerant Vegetable and Fruit Men.
My minimum maintaining balance before the Bank starts charging me for being poor is PhP1,000 (US$17.08). So that leaves me with PhP1,000 left to load up my rideshare app so I can catch a ride to the airport next week.
But what about next week’s groceries, you ask? How could I possibly leave my poor husband and his disabled brother without supplies?
Hah.
Next Week Me can have an anxiety attack about that. Today Me can’t afford to be bogged down by such considerations.
And yes, before you ask, no, we do not have a car. Yes, we also do not have air conditioning, and yes, the roof leaks. A LOT. Very Dickensian, I know.
But remember when I said I’m upper-middle class?
Compared to a lot of folks here, even with all the shit I’m bellyaching about, I still am. The aforementioned itinerant Vegetable and Fruit Men? The informal settlement community across the street? If they saw that I had PhP3,000 in my wallet, they’d weep at the unfairness of it, because at least I have that PhP3,000 free and clear (yes, they wouldn’t know that two thirds of that goes to rent, but even with just the remainder, I’m flush.)
What about my husband, isn’t he contributing to this supposedly dual-income household?
Why yes, beloved hypothetically inquisitive mutual, he is. He’s paying for the electricity and the internet I’m using to whinge about our financial woes. He’s paying the water bill. He’s paying for his brother’s needs. He’s filling in the gaps.
And if things get extra dicey, he has a teeny financial cushion he’s been squirrelling away for us to nibble at. Because at least one of us has to be able to save. Just in case.
So what am I trying to prove here? That I’m poor, but not poor at all?
Because both of my 60-ish-year-old parents are alive, healthy, relatively financially stable (compared to many living on the knife’s edge of survival here in the Philippines and other parts of the Global South), and continue to be supportive of their struggling, neurodivergent eldest?
Because I probably have a secret fund from them socked away somewhere, and because my siblings and I have modest plots of property to our names? (Don’t get me started on the Feelings I have about absentee land ownership and the financialization of land and food though, I still need to sort them out. Most of those Feelings is anger.)
Because I have an advanced degree and an elite tertiary education from two of the Philippines’ Big Four schools as well as the capacity to connect with vastly more prosperous Global North communities (for whom the numbers I had detailed in those screenshots are truly pitiable, quite possibly even beneath contempt or even notice) through my network of personal connections, facility with English, and access to a working computer and a stable internet connection?
Yeah, kind of.
Hell. I’m freaking loaded. With my relatives and the friends I’ve made in university and beyond, only the Philippines’ elite have access to the kinds of connections I have.
But I am poor though. If we look at the numbers, it’s hilarious. But like. In an “I’m laughing because otherwise I’ll cry” sort of way.
Some months are much better than this (I recently got married, and the cash wedding gifts have been a huge help, for instance. And occasionally, I’ll have a US$1k+ windfall from work, and my husband and I would make it stretch for a month or three), but some months are worse.
October (the time of this writing) is the worst it’s been in over a year, so I’d like to think the Bad Times (the Why Did You Buy That Can of Corned Beef We Can’t Afford It Times) are behind me. But I’m not sure. I don’t think I’ll ever feel sure.
In an earlier piece, I wrote about my battle with depression, and how difficult it made working. What I didn’t mention there was how the combination of that depression and my material circumstances synergized to keep me a paralyzed adolescent, umbilically attached to my aging parents. I couldn’t move into my future. I couldn’t marry the love of my life. I couldn’t even finish my bloody MA thesis. All I could do was the desperately slog through another week, another day, another hour, preferably without cracking completely.
(I’ll pause here to make a note of how our present, productivity-driven system is deeply unkind to folks who are not completely healthy or neurotypical. It forces us to twist ourselves and contort who we are so that we can fit into the little alienated boxes capitalism has built for its consumers-prey-hosts. Those who cannot do so are often shunted off to the side as not-quite-human, as valueless because they create no monetary value themselves.)
And this was me, medicated, loved, and reassured that I would not suffer literal starvation. I had access to my own choices, in spite all of that. Because I had the safety net of “you-won’t-die-in-the-street.” Because, for the price of my dignity and my autonomy (and possibly therefore, my sanity), I could live quite comfortably under the aegis of friends and/or family who were better off.
That’s mostly behind me now though.
Yes, I am struggling financially and may very likely not make it to next week, but I am firmer in my hold on my own life. I am much more confident in myself and my own boundaries. And getting to this point? It took more connections, unique access to work that regularly supports, challenges, and intrigues me, and a period of financial stability that made it possible for me to get married and attain the coveted social status of “adult.”
What of the people who don’t have my connections? My extensive network of support? The leg-up of my education and acculturation as a Westernized and well-educated upper-middle-class lady?
What are their lives like?
Do they suffer the same continuous, gnawing anxiety? Do they also constantly weigh and measure the small nourishments and pleasures they allow themselves against the monetary value these possess? Do they deny themselves those meager nourishments and pleasures out of guilt and terror that they might not be able to eat or drink or have access to hygienic facilities the next day?
These are guesses based on my own experience, but ultimately, I can’t presume to know.
Anyway.
I’m pretty fantastic, aren’t I?
Articulate, compassionate, perhaps a little kooky?
(I don’t know, maybe I’m being arrogant and presumptuous; come to your own conclusions if you feel like it, it’s ultimately not up to me to dictate how you feel about me)
I like who I am.
But without the reassurance of all of my safety nets, this week? I could not be.
“Be what?” you may ask
You know.
Be.
Exist.
Exist-as-me (a being in Being, if you feel like being Heideggerian about it) — me-here-and-now- and not as the quivering node of fear and anger and confusion I would otherwise be, pulled inexorably forwards through time and circumstance towards a tragic and possibly premature end.
Because I’d be a different person. More preoccupied by fear, more hounded by anxiety, more eaten away by a vague bitterness at the unfairness of a world that is designed to squeeze every last bit of monetary value out of my queer and neurodivergent brown body until the wellspring of joy and love and avid curiosity that makes me who I am is extinguished by exhaustion and despair.
But I am also them.
I am living in the same world. I am breathing the same polluted air. I am weathering the same Category 5 typhoons. I am sitting in the same inhuman (lack of) transportation system, waiting and sweating and battling to get from Point A to Point B. I am running from the same fascist authoritarians hellbent on exploiting what I and my family have protected for generations in order to turn a fast profit.
I’m just insulated.
By layer upon layer of privilege.
How about you?
Edit:
I have only touched on how hilariously small the numbers I’d mentioned I currently have to work with are, so let me line it up for folks a little more clearly.
I don’t really make money consistently enough to suss out an average that makes any kind of sense, but here’s a small comparison:
United States of America’s median salary as of Q2 of 2022, according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics: US$1,041/week, or US$54,132/year
That amount in Philippine Pesos, as calculated based on today’s exchange rate (07 October 2022) would amount to PhP61,391/week, or PhP3,192,380.97/year.
The Philippines’ median or average salary is a little harder to suss out; the Department of Labor and Employment releases no such numbers, but according to this August 2020 Philippine Daily Inquirer news article, which references Numbeo.com
The Philippines’ average monthly salary is PhP15,200 (US$257.75).
Yearly, that would be US$3,093. That is a fraction of the USA’s US$54,132 median annual salary.
According to Numbeo.com’s Cost of Living calculator summary
Monthly cost of living for a single person in the city of Manila is PhP29,466.94 (US$499.67)
Note that the city of Manila is not necessarily the most expensive city in the Philippines to live in, but it is within Metro Manila, which is composed of seventeen component cities. Old Manila is one of the most expensive cities to live in in the entire country. In fact, according to this news article, Manila (presumably Metro Manila the megacity and not Manila the component city) is the third most expensive city to live in ASEAN.
That same Cost of Living calculator estimates that
The average monthly cost of living for a single person in the USA is US$984.34 (PhP57,982.37) without rent.
So what does my inexpert and ad hoc exploration reveal, ultimately?
That even though cost of living in the US, a Global North country that profits considerably from its continuing relationship with its former colonial possession the Philippines, is quite high, the median salary therein appears to more than cover it.
In contrast, while the Philippine monthly cost of living is around half that of the US, its average salary is around half that of its cost of living. Meaning:
The average single person living in the Philippines can only afford around half of what it costs to achieve an “acceptable” (according to Numbeo.com) standard of living.
Yes, my math is terrible, and I’m drawing from multiple sources without bothering to figure out how they even got their numbers, let alone calculate for differences in calculations and adjust therefor, but I’m not actually interested in the numbers.
I’m interested in experiences.
I’m a qualitative researcher. Reducing things to pure numbers is anathema to how I work, even though I see how it could potentially come in handy in certain situations (but don’t get me started on how bloody dehumanizing it is and how it enables the kind of colonial, economistic nonsense that brought us the Aid Industrial Complex and Sustainability Inc., among others; we’d be here all week).
And having lived the experience of living on (less than) US$257.75/month, I can say with complete scientific accuracy and authority that it sucks hard. I’ve already detailed the crushing anxiety and despair it creates. You can read the earlier parts of this piece again, if you like.
But anyway, yes, my husband and I share costs and incomes, but together we can barely afford the abovementioned single-person-in-Manila Cost of Living. And there are three of us. And one of us has specific needs related to his disability.
Things are, on average, a leeeeetle better for me now, but that’s beside the point. My experience -minus the reassurances created by my considerable multiple relative privileges- is very common. It’s the air people breathe. I cannot stress enough how shitty and stressful that air is. People often don’t talk about it because that’s their life. There is no other way to be.
And it’s primarily because of the dehumanizing, alienating intersections of colonialism, finance, and profit motive, among others. I am articulating this poorly because this piece has already gone on for quite a while, and my brain is a bit tired, but there are webs within webs and circles within circles creating these systems. And learning about those systems and the tension points in and through them is confusing, tough, time-consuming, and emotionally draining. Learning where, when, and how to act in response to what we are learning is just as confusing, tough, time-consuming, and emotionally draining. Possibly far more so.
But if we want to understand and do something about the how and why of the situations I’ve described above, we have to at least start.
So start.
*edited 8 October 2022 for phrasing and clarity
