Haha oh goodness no. Things I actually bought to save money (when I could afford to) were an efficient A/C unit with an inverter (better sleep = faster learning = more money), and a new motorcycle. Not having reliable transit was costing me a lot of money in wasted time so that was a big one to fix. It’s more fuel-efficient too, I use 2-2.5L of petrol a week. I also moved somewhere safer, where the building hadn’t literally collapsed on me before.

Poverty is complicated, there’s no simple way out of it, and the people who say there is… have generally never really been poor (although some have, there are few universal truths here). Saving money is rarely a useful solution – it’s more important to bootstrap yourself to better opportunities, which is really hard without any financial security. The way to do this is super specific to the exact circumstances – and there’s probably not always a way out. If you have money, of course you can afford to take time to study a new skill and so on. If you don’t, perhaps you’ll pay for it with a part of yourself that you’re not going to get back.

Saving money is not entirely useless, it’s a really effective strategy if you already have made some money, and are about to have a sharp reduction in income. It lets you protect your gains better than other people with wealth, so you inch ahead of them every time the market corrects (you don’t have to invest to be affected). The inverse strategy (look for ways to spend) you have to do earlier, to inch ahead again. Your timing has to be better than the market, and it has more information than you, because you don’t have the money or connections to have better information. So again, you’re going to have to pay in the currencies of the desperate – cut out those kinder parts of your mind that betray you to mediocre financial decisions. Then you can perhaps (very slowly) convert modest sums of money into more life-changing sums of money, and eventually land ownership.

Health is a problem too. It’s hard to cram-study engineering if you’re busy dying of cholera. Not my fondest memory, but perhaps an instructive one. I learned that I don’t fear death, only failure.

I guess escaping poverty wasn’t some glorious victory I feel proud of. It was more accurately a series of sad, Faustian bargains. Where at each step, you can end up receiving nothing. Even the devils of our fictions are kinder than the market, and less hungry.