The brownstone I lived in for eight months in 2009 and 2010 had few amenities – the building often smelled like leaking pipes, the carpets were threadbare in many places, and the steam heater in the corner was completely out of my control, resulting in quite a few freezing mornings and sweltering nights. It did, however, have a gas stove and oven which, the landlord had told me, was pretty new and “worked great.”

Unfortunately, everything else in the unit was electric, which meant that I’d need to set up separate utility accounts and pay for the gas every month just to run the stove and range.

“It’s like $10 to turn it on and then another $20-$30 per month depending on how much you use it,” she explained.

Yeah, I’m just not going to do that, then, I thought, doing the math in my head.

At that point, $30 was just a little bit less than my take-home after a day of making lattes, which is what I was doing every day that I wasn’t at my public radio internship. The rent on the apartment – which was the least expensive I could find in Seattle – was already going to cost well more than half of my monthly income. With student loan payments to top it off, I barely had living expenses to speak of, and the extra money I’d spend on the gas just didn’t seem worth it.

This wasn’t my first go-round with poverty: We grew up without much money, and I supported myself through college. But after graduation – when the student loan envelopes started showing up and I had to move out of my inexpensive college town to a city that actually had jobs – the situation was dire. But I knew how to handle it.

Every month, I’d scrutinize my budget, looking for things to trim or ways to increase my earnings.

I moonlit as a cocktail waitress. I considered selling plasma (again), but the bus ride to the clinic was too long to fit into my days. I didn’t have a car or health care (or a stove). I picked up odd jobs on Craigslist, receiving cash under the table for nights of cocktailing or working as a cater waiter. I visited food banks. I never bought clothing. I stopped shaving to save money on razors.

Eventually, I was able to get a slightly more lucrative job, began piling on freelance work, and basically never looked back.

I am very, very confident that I did everything in my power to provide myself the best life possible as a young adult, and that the choices I made were the correct choices. My life now would indicate that that’s the case. And still, without fail, when I tell someone or write about that time in my life, I’m met with a cascade of advice.

Well-meaning people who have never been poor are convinced that they know what I should have done. That subtle tweaks to my budget could somehow stretch my $9.50 per hour. I should have gotten a roommate. I should have lived somewhere cheaper. I should have found a better job.

Anyone who’s ever lived in poverty has probably had this experience.

In the US, we have become so accepting of the fact that poverty is not a symptom of a grossly unequal economy, or the result of numerous systemic failures, or the product of years of trickle-down economics, but instead, that the only thing standing between a poor person and the life of their dreams is their own decisions, their own choices, and their own failures.

This is why I would advise any person whose immediate reaction upon hearing about a friend, relative, or stranger on the Internet who is living in poverty is to offer unsolicited advice to hold their tongue (or fingers), at least long enough to consider what other forces contribute to poverty and how their “help” may actually be insulting, incorrect, and downright damaging.

The Most Common Advice Doesn’t Add Up

The over-simplification of poverty is often apparent in the advice that gets disseminated by people who have money and companies who make money off of other people’s financial predicaments.

Earlier this year, an infographic circled around which underscored this fact. Created by a company called InvestmentZen, the infographic showed how to “build wealth on the minimum wage.”

Aside from the fact that it contained numerous logistical issues – it used the federal minimum wage, which isn’t accurate in most states, either because their wage is higher or lower due to tip-crediting – the graphic also seemed to be concerned about moralizing the decisions of poor people and less about actually helping anyone.

Advice from the graphic included “learning skills on YouTube,” only eating in-season produce, and remembering that “the best things in life are free.”

“You can make excuses, or you can do something about it,” the graphic chided. “It’s your choice to make.”

Twitter instantly took it to task; the response was so heated that it eventually led one of the men responsible for circulating to issue a retraction, calling many of the criticisms “fair.”

I suspect that the graphic was so easily mocked because the advice it selected was familiar. Despite the myriad systemic reasons that many people live in poverty, there are a handful of “tips” that well-meaning (most of the time) folks recycle with alarming regularity.

Move somewhere cheaper. Buy in bulk. Get rid of your car. Get a roommate. Eat out less.

These changes seem simple – if you just spent less money on groceries, you’d have more money! If you didn’t have a car, you could save hundreds on car insurance! – but they fail to take into account one crucial element of humanity and existence: The dollar amount of a thing doesn’t fully capture the value of it.

Most people who live in poverty are working jobs where their income is determined by how many hours they can spend on the job, which often don’t fall within typical commuting hours, and often run well over forty hours per week.

When you’re poor, your time – especially your free time – is extremely precious. And many of the prescribed tips for saving money cut into that free time, make it less enjoyable, or might even actively cost more money in the short term.

I’ve written before about the actual cost of moving – renting a truck, putting down a deposit, the financial hit of taking time off work to move – but recommending that someone relocate their entire life to save on rent also neglects to account for the real value of living in a place with a support system.

Whether it’s a family by birth or by choice, living near people you know offers a sense of responsibility and place – not to mention a couch to crash on if you get evicted and the potential for free childcare or other assistance.

To illustrate this point, let’s use another common tip: giving up a car.

Access to transit is one of the single biggest investments that communities can make to help people get out of poverty. But overwhelmingly, transit systems are failing poor people. And for seniors or disabled people, taking the bus may be even more difficult if cities and transit authorities don’t accommodate for various mobility, vision, or hearing impairments.

Which means that the cost (both figurative and literal) of giving up a car might be steeper than keeping it. Which means that even if a person makes the choice to save money by riding the bus, the bus may not be there for them.

There’s also the issue of time and convenience, particularly if you live in a smaller city, which tend to have much spottier bus service.

We can look at it like this: Estimated cost of owning a car over a year: about $725 per month, according to AAA. That’s a lot, but compared to riding the bus (because let’s assume a person doesn’t have the upfront cash for a bike, a lock, and the gear they might need to commute in all weather), it’s not really.

Where I live, it costs about $5 per day to commute via bus, assuming I’m traveling inside the city and just going to work and back using a single method of transit. Multiply that by five days per week (though most people working minimum wage work more than that), and it’s about $100 per month. That’s still less than $725 – until you account for: