I grew up in rural white trash America, so I thought everyone lived like we did. Sometime I'll tell everyone the story about when I walked into this girl's mansion and came to an epiphany about how poor we actually were.
Anyway, in undergrad, our new president thought it would be a great idea to build a new soccer stadium for the schools (national champions at Div II). How did they fund that? Slashing student aid...including previously allocated student aid...including my aid. This wouldn't have been such a big deal but my mother had developed a form of meningitis that year and it was touch and go. I was covering a lot of her bills and her mortgage, and borrowing heavily to do it, but remembering that I was getting substantial aid from the school made that possible. I had also made some questionable purchases, again, on the basis of receiving a certain amount of aid per quarter.
When they took my aid, I actually owed the school money for that quarter's tuition (private school tuition, no less, about $15K). And I owed it right away, on top of a preexisting debt of around $35K. I sold almost everything I owned that had any value, except my computer and car. Beef Ramen was all I ate. My roommate and I took strange jobs like clearing out offices for companies that were moving and reselling the furniture they left behind. But that just wasn't working.
Through a friend in the East, I got a job from a guy who was a computer hardware reseller...for hardware and software licenses of dubious origin and legality. I knew it was dirty and I felt dirty just being there, but the money was extremely good (corporate systems), and I was actually able to skim equipment without detection and get myself mostly back on track within a few months. The legitimacy of the enterprise aside, the worst thing about being there was the association with people like the owner, who was a slimy piece of shit and I hated dealing with him. Being a thief is one thing, but I later found out that this guy used his wealth and power to fly down to places like Cuba and the DR and fuck little boys on sex tours, all the while pretending to be a good religious husband to his oblivious (but really fucking hot) wife.
I got out of there in about six months, and received a bunch of scholarships that summer, so I didn't have to go back. The timing was good. Turns out the FBI and a very large computer company from Palo Alto were on to this guy. They busted him for a series of serious crimes (and put him away for seven years in a federal prison), none of which I was involved with directly, but again, I just felt dirty for having been in the same room.
You hear people who don't know anything about being poor often say that poverty breeds character. A very wealthy man I grew up respecting told me that poverty doesn't breed character; it breeds desperation. He was right.

