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Fortunately, I knew my dad’s wishes from dozens of conversations: Spend as little on his death as possible, have him cremated without embalming, and spread his ashes at Ossipee Lake in New Hampshire where he spent every summer as a kid. I tried not to feel guilty as I turned down the options the funeral home director explained to me, picturing my dad’s blue eyes as he told me not to spend an extra dime on his death, his insistence that he wanted to keep this simple. I knew my mom’s funeral costs had been impossible for him to handle as a cab driver, and that her brother had paid for almost everything.

After a lengthy and transparent explanation of what was available, I was handed a breakdown sheet with itemized prices. In total, my dad’s cremation costs sat at around $3,700: $2,900 for professional services and basic cremation, $260 for a container to keep his ashes in, $84 for copies of the death certificate, $31 for a cremation permit, $260 for the crematory, and $200 for the medical examiner fee (which went up by 100 percent in Massachusetts in 2019). My wife and I put the cost on a credit card and went home, exhausted.

I grew up in the projects, and lived just above or at the poverty line for the first eighteen years of my life. My parents, like 40 percent of Americans, never had $400 in the bank for an emergency. When my dad received medical bills for things that MassHealth didn’t cover, he let them go to collections because we simply couldn’t afford to pay them. Just a few years ago, my wife and I were in a similar boat. If my father had died in 2016, neither of us would have had a single credit card with a high enough limit to pay for his cremation costs.

My dad’s death was the second expensive emergency we faced in 2020, a year where nearly ten months were spent in an unprecedented global pandemic. In May, we had to pay for our cat’s life-saving cystotomy. I remember how relieved I was when we paid off the credit card we used for her surgery about a month and a half after it happened.

About a week after my dad’s death when the shock wore off, I decided to start a fundraiser to cover the cost of my dad’s cremation. According to GoFundMe, 13 percent of its campaigns created in 2017 funded memorials, and a 2015 Funeral and Memorial Information Council study reported that 17 percent of adults between 20 and 39 solicited or donated money online for funeral-related arrangements. Sites dedicated specifically to funeral and memorial costs have launched, such as FuneralFund and Ever Loved. A 2019 survey from the National Funeral Directors Association showed that the cost of cremation had gone up 8.5 percent in the U.S. over the last five years, and the median cost of direct cremation is $2,495. The median price for a full funeral and burial in 2019 was $9,135, adding to the stress for the deceased’s next of kin. All of this is an even greater financial and emotional strain during a global pandemic, when many people have lost income and while low-income folks, people of color, and disabled people are dying at higher rates due to complications from COVID-19 compounded by racism, classism, and ableism in medical care.

Based on the 4.9 percent fee deducted from each donation at Fundly, I set my fundraiser at $5,000, hoping to raise enough to cover paying off the credit cards before any interest accrued plus a little extra to cover the cost of traveling to Ossipee for the weekend to spread my dad’s ashes once it’s safe to actually memorialize him.

As I shared my fundraiser on social media, I wondered if my dad’s wishes were simply because he didn’t believe much should be spent on death or because he understood that cremation and funeral costs can be pricey.

I thought of my dad, grieving my mom and unable to help pay for her funeral expenses, cutting back his hours at work because he had to take care of me full-time. I thought of him calling me the first time he qualified for a secured credit card after years of financial instability. I thought of my dad giving me and my wife a “mini honeymoon” weekend trip for our wedding because we couldn’t take enough time off to go on a full honeymoon right away, of him buying us dinner and champagne for our first anniversary, of the way he used to stop by and bring us desserts from an Italian bakery in Boston just because he could finally afford spontaneous gifts. My dad was financially secure for the last three years of his life, and he spent most of it in generous ways, helping residents at his sober home pay their rent and paying for aquarium memberships for the toddlers in our family.

Within two weeks, my fundraiser was fully funded, and we could pay off the credit card with zero interest. I almost cried when I saw the fundraiser total amount.

The fact that paying my dad’s cremation costs came down to luck and privilege isn’t lost on me. On average, only 22.4 percent of crowdfunding projects are successful and meet their goal, and 24 percent of Americans don’t have a credit card. There isn’t much support out there for young or low-income people shouldering the cost of a loved one’s end-of-life costs alone, aside from crowdfunding and asking for help from friends and family, if that’s even an option. Death — especially an unexpected, sudden loss — creates a seismic shift in your world, but it shouldn’t create an unmanageable financial burden.

My mom couldn’t drive due to her visual impairment, so I only had three transportation options: We could pay more than $100 for an hour-long taxi ride to the hospital, I could wait in the ER for a day or two until they could get a hospital shuttle van, or I could take an ambulance. I grew up in the projects, so my understanding of ambulances was that they came when something really bad happened — when someone was stabbed in a fight, when my neighbor across the street was injured by her abusive husband, when an elderly neighbor had a heart attack, when someone called 9-1-1 on a mentally ill person for shouting at birds. I didn’t want to ride in one, especially not alone.

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We eventually decided on the ambulance, even though the idea terrified me, because I was also afraid of staying in the ER overnight or being in the hospital any longer than necessary. The EMTs didn’t use the siren and I pretended I was just in the back of my Poppy’s old truck, which he used to let me ride in if we were only going to the Melrose public pool down the street.

This wasn’t the first time that I had to make a difficult decision because we didn’t have a family car, nor was it the last. I coordinated my SAT testing schedule with friends so that I could drive with them to the test site, and if I wanted to participate in after-school activities I had to pick the ones that ended before the last round of buses left. I walked a mile and a half to pick up new books from the library and drop off the ones I had finished. I made sure every doctor and therapist I went to was within walking distance or on a public transportation route.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, living without a car isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a public health risk. The CDC is recommending that people drive alone as much as possible, but more than 10.5 million households in this country don’t have a personal vehicle. Many people who don’t have cars are already part of a marginalized group: They’re poor (households with an annual income of less than $25,000 are nearly nine times as likely to have no personal vehicles), disabled (only 65 percent of disabled people drive compared to 88 percent of non-disabled people), or people of color (14 percent of POC households don’t have a vehicle compared to 6 per cent of white households and immigrants across races are even less likely to have a car). Car access is also limited in very urban or very rural areas (54 percent of households in New York City don’t own a car, and more than 1 million people in rural areas don’t have cars).

The transportation options that exist for people without cars were already imperfect — they’re time consuming, don’t cover many areas, and can be inaccessible and unsafe for disabled people and people of color — but they’re even more challenging in a pandemic. Taking public transportation is a risk right now, as is taking a cab or a ride share service like Uber or Lyft (if that’s even an option, since it’s become more difficult to find a ride). At the same time, budgets for public transit across the country have been cut and service has been reduced, making it increasingly risky and difficult for those who do need these services to use them safely and effectively. This combination directly impacts people who don’t have cars, especially people at a high risk of complications from COVID-19 — disabled people and others with underlying and chronic health conditions.

While the pandemic has made many businesses and medical facilities nimble and creative, many have decided to be ‘innovative’ by going drive-through only. Drive-through food, movies, concerts, religious confessionals, haunted houses, even drive-through COVID-19 testing. They all provide convenient opportunities for people who own their own vehicles who want to get out of their homes, but they widen the inequality gap for those who don’t have cars.

Drive-through services are often very literal. One night in my early twenties, I was staying with friends and we found ourselves hungry at 10 p.m. It was close to the end of our biweekly paychecks, and like most broke people, they’d run out of food in the kitchen. The only places open were drive throughs, so we tried to convince the staff at a drive thru to let us order and pay from the window even though we didn’t have a car. Not having a car was a dealbreaker. They said they legally couldn’t serve us or they’d lose their jobs. (While there doesn’t seem to be a specific law addressing this in Massachusetts, in 2016 in Louisiana a blind man sued McDonald’s for not providing him drive-through service when he walked up to the window.) We’d all worked service jobs, so we understood, but we also went to bed hungry.

I’ve had dozens of moments like that throughout my life: Turning down an internship in college because I had no way to get myself there, choosing not to go to the doctor’s because I felt too sick to walk but not sick enough to call an ambulance, asking a friend to help me print out a school assignment because I wouldn’t have enough time to walk to the library to print it myself, calling my best friend to come pick me up when I threw up in the bathroom at work because I had no other way to get home, not applying to jobs because they weren’t on public transit routes and were too far to walk to.

I can’t help but wonder what my mom and I would do if this pandemic happened during my childhood. We’d be facing the same choices millions of Americans have to make now: Do I take an Uber to get to the COVID-19 testing center? Should I cancel my follow-up appointment if I have to get on a bus to get there? Is it safer to take a cab with a stranger or ask for a ride from my neighbor who’s an essential worker? How much will it cost if I call an ambulance to get to the hospital downtown because I’m nervous about taking the train?

No one should have to live this way, especially during a global pandemic.

When your grocery budget is entirely reliant on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), your mom’s Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), and other assistance programs designed for low-income disabled single parents and their disabled children, you have to be very specific about what you buy. It’s easy to spend your entire food budget before the month is over and find that toward the end of the month, you’re hungrily eating cheap cereal and off-brand white bread for every meal.

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Recently, Democratic Senators Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand introduced a bill with Senator Bernie Sanders that would expand the SNAP benefit. The bill would increase the baseline for SNAP benefits by roughly 30 percent and expand benefits to those living in U.S. territories. Currently, the Families First Act is temporarily increasing SNAP benefits for households that haven’t been receiving the maximum benefit, and many states are allowing customers to purchase SNAP-eligible items online, a move that makes grocery shopping during a pandemic safer for low-income elderly, disabled, and high-risk individuals. A permanent increase to SNAP benefits and expanded delivery options would make a significant difference in the lives of many SNAP recipients, giving them the ability to purchase more food each month and making it easier for people to shop even if they can’t physically go to a grocery store.

The maximum SNAP benefit for a household of two in Massachusetts, where I live, is currently $355 per month. A 30 percent increase to that would be $106.50, bringing the total to $461.50 per month. That would mean SNAP recipients could almost afford the average cost of groceries ($489.16 per month in Boston, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, though the average monthly spend on food overall is $805.58 once you include takeout and restaurants). Although many families don’t receive the maximum SNAP benefit — in Massachusetts the average monthly household benefit is only $210, or $1.36 per person per meal — the proposed increase in SNAP benefits would at least bring low-income and poor Bostonians closer to being able to afford a full months’ worth of food.

I know how it feels to be able to expand your food budget, even by a little. I remember the first time my dad, who took over raising me after my mom died, had a particularly good month driving the cab. This was before the 2008 recession, and his specialty was driving kids with busy working parents to and from school. We had an unexpected, albeit small, increase to our food budget. I no longer had to survive on $1 Celeste frozen pizzas. I could get a few higher-cost pizzas, like DiGiorno. I was allowed to get inexpensive sushi at the Stop & Shop seafood counter twice a month, and we bought lobsters when they were on sale for $4.99 a pound. We kept the house stocked with sodas and Little Debbie snacks for when my friends came over.

I could actually tell my new high school friends we’d feed them instead of asking them to come over “after dinner,” and we spent one New Year’s Eve trekking through a blizzard to get takeout Chinese food from the best restaurant in the city. I felt rich enough to try crab rangoon, which I’d always assumed I wouldn’t like — when you’re poor, you don’t take risks spending your limited money on food you’re unsure about and may have to throw away. The crab and cream cheese tasted like the freedom of choice and exploration, and I’ve loved them ever since. Then the recession and the rise of Uber and Lyft made it harder for taxi drivers to make money. We went back to eating cereal when we ran out of food money. I got part-time jobs and saved my birthday and holiday money to help my dad pay for groceries.

When I went to college, my food budget slowly started to increase again. It wasn’t much, but I went from being truly poor to just being broke. I’ve always defined the difference by how often the threats of eviction, running out of food, or having the electricity or heat turned off crossed my mind at any given moment. If I had enough money that those things were just background noise, I was broke. If I had so little money that I couldn’t help my dad pay down the electric bill so the power company wouldn’t turn off the lights. I was poor.

Being broke meant I could sometimes save enough money to take my girlfriend (now my wife) on a sushi date, if we kept the meal inexpensive or it was a special occasion. It meant splitting pizza delivery with my friends on Saturday nights, after we’d all had a few cheap vodka cocktails and were sitting around the dorm room laughing at weird memes. Broke was being able to get something else out of the freezer if I’d overcooked my chicken nuggets to a burnt crisp, instead of laying on my bed devastated because I’d ruined my chance to eat.

A few years ago, after my wife and I both got full-time jobs and were no longer relying on the modest budgets of grad students, we first noticed the difference at the grocery store. We were no longer poor or broke; we could get fresh salmon for dinner instead of frozen. We never had to put things back if we were over-budget, we could just have an honest conversation in the car afterward about whether we wanted to cut back the next time. I didn’t even cry when our zucchini went bad the day before we were planning to cook it, even though the child in me — the one who still remembers eating a free pizza lunch at the park with my mom on the August day that she died — was determined not to let it happen again.

That’s how a 30 percent SNAP expansion could change your life. It gets you from poor to broke. From hungry to offering to split your Caesar salad and brownie with another broke friend in the school cafeteria. It’s the bare minimum a person needs to be able to spend their days without low-level anxiety about how they’re going to survive. In the richest country in the world, the bare minimum shouldn’t be too much to ask for. We all deserve to get freshly baked muffins from the grocery store bakery every once in a while, and take the small risk of trying crab rangoon for the first time.

I’m no longer poor like I was growing up, and I generally have more meal options; even at my brokest moments in the last five years, I’ve been able to afford a basic meal at Panera Bread. I’ve since given up a lot of the poverty foods that I grew up with, mostly because I find other options tastier and, like many millennials, I’m more willing to spend my money on food than my parents were. When I first tried sushi in 2008, I loved it enough to work it into my shopping list occasionally despite the high price; I’d rather have one serving of sushi than eight Celeste pizzas for the same price. But I still drink at least two cans of Coca-Cola every day, and I’m not planning to stop anytime soon.

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Soda, like the other inexpensive foods that many poor people rely on, is frequently demonized. It’s often cited as a health risk for weight gain, which is a fatphobic tactic that ignores the fact that being overweight is not directly linked to health problems. And alternatives to soda that many people suggest, such as fruit juice, often contain the same amount of sugar and calories as soft drinks.

Still, these attitudes persist. Soda is taxed in over 35 countries and seven U.S. cities, and these taxes continue increasing; Washington, D.C. is currently considering raising taxes on sugary drinks. I’m often told by well-meaning friends and family about the amount of sugar and calories in the soda I drink.

After the second or third time I laugh off my soda habit by opening another can in the face of a dissenter, they usually get the picture and chalk it up to one of my quirks. I’m very privileged to be able to do that: I’m white, thin, and no longer live in poverty. When I was living on cereal and cinnamon toast, it was harder to rebuke people’s comments about what I ate; I had no choice. If I didn’t eat that one dollar chicken sandwich, I wasn’t going to eat dinner that night. If I let the sugary cereals expire, it was valuable money wasted. Growing up, I didn’t even have enough money to maintain a diet consisting of foods that don’t cause my disabilities to flare up, which I realized when I finally had the financial freedom to give up red meat in 2011 and stopped experiencing weekly stomach aches.

When you’re poor—especially if you’re also fat, disabled, a person of color, an immigrant, or from another marginalized background—the world feels entitled to share its opinion of every choice you make. What cell phone you use. How you pay your bills. How often you go to the dentist. What foods you put in your grocery cart, and how many of them you have to put back at the end of the trip because you’ve run out of money. Whether you pay for those groceries with SNAP.

Poor people have fewer choices; there are so many things I can do now that I couldn’t do when I was poor. I can spend a few dollars to rent my favorite movie on Amazon Prime, save up enough for a weekend trip to Maine with my best friends, take an Uber or Lyft when my body is in too much pain to walk ten minutes from the train station to my home, and eat sushi with my wife when one of us is craving it.

Every choice you make when you’re poor is more likely to be criticized by other people (“Why would you buy your sister a birthday gift when you can barely afford groceries?”). These choices also carry more weight: What if you decide to buy her that gift she really wants and then you’re stuck eating rice for weeks? It’s easy to judge poor people’s choices about what to eat and drink because these decisions are so visible, but sometimes getting a vanilla Coke with your Wendy’s chicken sandwich is the best choice you’ve been able to make that week. I remember sitting down with my dad to eat Pizza Hut, knowing he’d recently been injured in an accident at work and was having a hard time making enough to pay our bills. I ate pizza and watched Shameless with him, thinking this might be the last time we’d get to do this for a while if our cable and electricity were shut off. Maybe we could have kept the $10 (plus tip) we spent on pizza, but it wouldn’t have paid our bills. It wouldn’t have helped my dad, an independent contractor cab driver, figure out a way to work when he couldn’t physically drive.

Research shows that escaping poverty requires 20 years with nearly nothing going wrong. I haven’t reached that milestone yet, but I’m better off economically than my parents, a disabled mom on SSDI and a cab driver dad, were when I was a kid. My dad used to choose our meals based on what was on sale; I choose my meals based on what my wife and I are in the mood for. Do we want chicken or fish? Do we want fresh blueberries or frozen vegetables? I rarely eat fast food as a meal anymore (if I do eat it, it’s usually because I’ve been out drinking with my friends and it’s 2 a.m.). But I’m not planning to give up soda. As my wife’s aunt recently joked, I have a glass of Coke in the morning with my breakfast in lieu of coffee or tea.

Nothing tastes as comforting as freshly poured fountain soda with crushed ice. Maybe it’s the nostalgia from my childhood memories of drinking soda and eating pizza on the couch with my mom, who passed away in 2004, as we watched reruns of Seinfeld. Maybe it’s the satisfaction of thinking about haters clutching their pearls as I ingest what they would denounce as pure sugar and empty calories with my fresh salad.

Maybe there’s a kind of power in having enough money to choose any beverage, but still choosing the one that costs $1 any size at McDonald’s. I may not go through the drive-through often anymore, but I always know that it’s there waiting for me, like a crispy slice of cinnamon toast with my best friends on Saturday morning.

“Finance it? What do you mean?” I looked at the box in my hand, which held a sterling silver and diamond ring I planned to give my girlfriend for Christmas in a few weeks. She was elsewhere in the mall with our friend Katie; we’d separated so we could buy each other gifts.

The associate explained that I could apply for financing and pay for the ring in installments, which were interest-free for the first 12 months. I had the slightly more than $300 that the ring cost in cash; it was one of the nicest rings in my budget. (All the white gold ones were too much money.) But if I financed it, which I hadn’t even considered as an option, I could afford to spend a little more on my other gifts and even save some for the new year. I could start putting away money for appliances I needed in my apartment or a used car to drive to an off-campus internship.

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I asked for an application and after a few minutes of processing, I was approved. I had started using my first credit card, a Discover Student card, only a few months prior, and it wasn’t maxed out yet, so I genuinely believed I could make the decision responsibly.

After I left the store, I met back up with my friend Krista, my shopping partner while I looked for my girlfriend’s gifts. “That was the most money I’ve ever spent on Macey,” I said, nervous and excited in equal measure. “I hope she loves it.”

I was too embarrassed to admit I’d opened a store credit card to pay for it; it seemed like something my college friends, who all came from middle-class families, would know better than to do. “Don’t spend money you don’t have” was a wise adage their parents shared when they taught them tips like paying for a car in cash. My dad taught me how to return items to Walmart without a receipt if we were running low on money between paychecks and needed an extra $20 for milk and bread.

A few weeks later, Macey and I spent our first Christmas Day together and I surprised her with the ring during a short, chilly walk. I didn’t tell her that I’d financed the ring or how many hours working in the reading and writing center on campus it would take to pay off. I didn’t say that I’d wanted to get her a white gold ring with a larger karat diamond. She’d also given me her priciest gift to date, a sterling silver replica Time Turner from the Harry Potter franchise I’d been obsessed with for years but couldn’t afford.

Instead, I said that I loved her and wanted to marry her someday, and asked her if she wanted the same thing. We both cried and she said yes, but the reality of ever having enough money to get married eluded even my colorful, wildly hopeful imagination. We both grew up with single parents with underpaying jobs who couldn’t foot the bill for our college education. We would graduate in a year and a half with student loan debt (and me with thousands of dollars in credit card debt just to buy necessities like books, snow boots, and groceries).

The diamond promise ring was an irresponsible romantic lifeline; I was betting on our future. Someday, I would pay off the ring. Someday, we could afford to get married. Someday, I would be able to spend more for white gold, Macey’s favorite. None of that felt true as I went home to my dad’s over winter break to collection notices and service shut off warnings; business was slow for a cab driver during the rise of Uber and Lyft and in the wake of the recession.

It took me about a year and a half to pay off the Belden Jewelers credit card, which I promptly closed. Eventually, I admitted to Macey that I’d taken out a loan to get her ring. She told me that she never wanted me to feel pressured to spend money on her or use a credit card to buy her presents, she just wanted to spend time with me. She told me she’d sometimes felt the same stress: That the cost of her gift reflected how much she loved me, and she worried about spending less on my gifts than I did on hers.

It’s easy to write-off the monetary value of holiday gifts or the importance of deals on Black Friday when you’re financially comfortable. When I was poor, that fact haunted me like an ever-present ghost in my relationships, which felt transactional to me even when my loved ones insisted they weren’t keeping track and were doing me favors out of love. That was easy for them to say, when I noticed it was always me who needed rides to the library to use their free printers or me who carefully calculated the cost of my meals and couldn’t afford to split the check evenly.

This year, Macey and I are celebrating our first holiday season as wives, three months after our wedding. In wedding planning, we were both clear: We wouldn’t let any insecurities or the grim hand of capitalism make us feel like we had to do anything we couldn’t or didn’t want to afford, and we didn’t go into debt to pay for any of it. Even if it meant we had to answer questions about why our reception was buffet style or why we didn’t have an open bar.

She and I are now the kind of financially comfortable I could only dream about my entire childhood, meaning we don’t have enough money to own a home and we still have mountains of student debt, but we pay all our bills on time each month and we can even afford to travel if we plan well. But as November crept closer, I still felt the pressure surrounding me just like it had when we were spending our first Christmas together. Didn’t my gifts have to be epic?

One day while Macey was at work (she commutes and I work from home), I sent her a text: What if we did a lowkey Christmas this year, just one gift and one book? We could save money to travel in 2020 and there are no physical gifts I really want.

It is an incredibly privileged position to be in, and I know that. When you have enough of a financial cushion to go on nice dates when one person gets promoted or to buy a new bookshelf as soon as you need it, holidays don’t have to be about prioritizing everything you need for the entire year. Macey and I got a lot of the home goods on our list this year between our wedding presents and a sponsored article I wrote for Bed Bath & Beyond that came with a couple thousand dollars worth of free store merchandise. We’re at a point where we have more than we can comfortably fit in our one-bedroom apartment.

But back when we were both poor or broke, Christmas could be the only time of year when we actually got big ticket items we needed, or pricey experience gifts like a couples’ massage. I once waited months to get a new purse in the hopes that Macey might get it for me in December, and another year, my Christmas gift from my dad was a fancy date for the two of us. We ate sushi at a restaurant with three dollar signs on Google, played games at Dave & Busters, and took professional photos together.

Macey texted back: That sounds good. It was harder than I expected to fight the urge to shower her with multiple expensive gifts after promising not to, especially when I came across a $1,500 moon necklace on Instagram (that I absolutely can’t afford but I know she’d love).

Our stockings this year will be filled with the promise of a two-week honeymoon in 2020 and love letters to each other. Capitalism tells me that isn’t enough, but I’m not listening.

But when my manager was giving me paperwork and collecting my forms of identification, I realized this job would be yet another situation where not having a bank account would be a problem.

Tedeschi Food Shops didn’t offer paper checks as a form of my payment, like my other jobs tutoring and grooming dogs had. There were two options: Sign up for direct deposit with a bank account, or have your paycheck put on a payroll debit card, which would charge me a fee of around $5 for every ATM transaction. The use of payroll cards is on the rise, particularly among freelancers and independent contractors. In 2016, 8.7 million people received payroll cards, compared to just 5.5 million employees receiving paper checks.

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I was part of the 8.4 million households who are unbanked in the U.S. as of 2017, according to a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation survey. I didn’t have an account because of former credit and account issues, like 14 percent of unbanked people; when I was 17, my dad and I purposefully overdrew my bank account by about $400 to cover basic necessities when he lost his job for a few months. We both thought we’d be able to pay it back fairly quickly, but we couldn’t, and my account closed.

People who are unbanked (or underbanked, meaning they have some access to financial services, but not everything they need) spend an average of 10 percent of their annual income just to access basic services like check cashing or credit. I had so little already, with barely any cash saved and an hourly job that paid Massachusetts minimum wage ($8 per hour at the time). I couldn’t afford to lose a portion of my paychecks to ATM fees.

Instead, I built up the nerve to talk to my girlfriend of four years and ask her if she’d let me use her bank account to get paid.

Like many people who grow up poor, my relationship to money impacted all my other relationships. I didn’t want to be financially dependent on my girlfriend. I wanted us to be able to make the decision to share our finances someday when we lived together and both felt we were ready. But I also didn’t have many other options; my dad had been without a bank account for longer than I had, and he was my main support system after my mom passed away.

My girlfriend said yes, and I put her account details down on my direct deposit form. I started picturing how I would feel when I got the money out of the ATM after being paid the following week. It was more money and more hours than I’d made at my on-campus tutoring job. I just wished that finances didn’t have to complicate my relationship all the time. I wanted to save up to take my girlfriend to Provincetown for her birthday that summer, but I didn’t want to share every single detail of my financial situation with her yet.

Sharing a bank account required an immense level of trust. I was putting all the money I was making into her account and relying on her to take it out of the ATM and give it to me. She had access to find out exactly how much I was making per paycheck and if I decided to make an online purchase with her permission, she could see every detail in her account statement.

It made me feel extremely vulnerable. I scrutinized a lot of my own purchases — would buying this make me seem irresponsible? Then I scrutinized my relationship — what if she no longer wanted to be in a relationship because she realized what a burden it was to date someone who was poor? What if I never climbed out of poverty like I hoped I would after college, and I had to rely on her and her bank account for the rest of our lives?

And then, a few weeks after I started at Tedeschi, my girlfriend also got a job there. We both needed summer jobs to save between our junior and senior years of college, and it was the perfect fit for her, within walking distance of her house. The day she went in for her training, she got frustrating news: Because her bank account was already attached to my direct deposit, she couldn’t get paid the same way. She had to use a payroll debit card and lose the $5 every time she took her paycheck out of the ATM. We talked about seeing if I could switch and let her use her own account to get paid, but she said it seemed like more trouble than it was worth.

She was essentially being punished for doing me a favor.

All relationships have their challenges, but I felt the strain of our socioeconomic differences. There was a power dynamic underlying every interaction. I felt like I had to be the “perfect” poor person: I couldn’t make any reckless decisions, couldn’t spend my income on anything frivolous, had to work as hard as humanly possible to get over the poverty line. My girlfriend never made me feel lesser because my family had less money, but I felt it all the same.

When you’re poor, all your relationships are strained by your lack of money. I’d felt it in moments where my best friend had to drive me to Walmart when my dad and I didn’t have a car so I could get school supplies. Or when my friend printed my high school papers for me because we didn’t have a printer. When I had to turn down opportunities to go out with my friends because I knew I couldn’t afford dinner and a movie. When all my friends had brand new decked-out dorm rooms and mine was decorated in hand-me-downs and DIY collages I made for less than $10.

At the end of that summer, my girlfriend and I took our trip to Provincetown. We both took work off for the long weekend and headed out in my green Buick. The hotel I’d booked as a birthday gift to her was one of the cheapest I could find that was three stars or more, and it was squarely in between all the things we wanted to do on our trip.

On our way to the hotel, we stopped at a bank branch to deposit some money into my girlfriend’s account to use during our trip. A bank associate asked me if I wanted to open my own account. I told her I thought I wouldn’t be able to because of past account issues and she encouraged me to apply anyway.

After 15 minutes, I learned I was approved. It could have been because I’d been building credit with a Discover credit card for several months, because I paid my Sprint phone bill on time, or because I’d been under 18 when I overdrew my checking account. I wasn’t sure but didn’t question why the bank was allowing me to open a new account; I’d rarely had good fortune when it came to finances and I didn’t want to jinx what was a step in the right direction. After four years, I was able to open my own account again. I could buy gifts online for my girlfriend as a surprise without worrying she’d see the cost on her statement. I could make financial decisions that were visible only to me without worrying how they might impact someone else’s life.

I could have control over my own money: How I kept it, how I spent it, where it went.

What we aren’t talking about as often is credit card debt. Consumer debt recently exceeded $4 trillion for the first time, according to the Federal Reserve. The average American has a credit card balance of $4,293 and 1 in 3 people are afraid they’ll max out their credit cards when they make a large purchase (and most defined “large” as anything over $100).

Although research shows that young people are hesitant to take on credit card debt, one survey found that there are actually more older millennials who have outstanding credit card debt than have student loan debt. Millennials are also more likely to take out personal loans, which can be used for anything from consolidating existing debt to paying for a vacation or a wedding.

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You might be thinking: Millennials can’t avoid student loan debt and a college education is worth it, but it’s downright irresponsible to take on so much credit card debt. Young people just don’t understand how credit works, or they don’t care.

The reality for many millennials with credit card debt is very different — I know, I used to be one of them.

I still remember how I felt when I picked up my mail from the box downstairs in our on-campus apartment my junior year and found my first offer to apply for a credit card, a Discover student card. I was both excited at the opportunity to manage my financial future and terrified that I would wind up trapped in a pile of debt I could never dig myself out of.

I knew that credit cards should always be used responsibly — that you should never spend money you don’t have, that it made the most sense to pay off your balance in full before the due date every month, that racking up debt could seriously damage my credit score. I also knew that in the first two years of college, I’d had to borrow money from friends more times than I could count because I needed textbooks or a bus ticket home when we were required to leave campus for breaks.

So I applied for the credit card, and within days I was approved and had a $500 credit line.

At first, I tried to manage the card responsibly, following the financial advice my dad gave me that he’d never had enough financial freedom to follow himself. I didn’t want to pay more money for items because I’d accumulated a bunch of interest. I would go to the mall with my roommates on the weekend and resist the urge to splurge on new clothes with money I didn’t have in cash or in my bank account. But it’s also exhausting constantly denying yourself happiness when you’re poor, so there were occasional times when I pulled out a credit card, like when we all went out to Japanese food to celebrate my roommate’s 20th birthday.

As I spent small amounts and paid them off quickly, Discover increased my available credit to $1,000 and sent me a free report showing that my score had improved. I remember thinking, maybe everything will be okay after all.

Then I went home for five weeks for winter break and found out my dad and I were in danger of having our heat, electricity, and internet shut off. We both pleaded with representatives on the phone to put us on a payment plan to no avail. He was a night shift cab driver who was having trouble working due to his disabilities, and he’d already been making significantly less money per month than he did before the recession because people couldn’t afford to take cabs anymore.

“I’ll pay the bills if you can pay me back at least some of it,” I offered. At school, I was living off a stipend thanks to grants and scholarships. I also had two on-campus tutoring jobs that paid a little more than minimum wage in Massachusetts, which gave me enough spending money to put gas in my car and pay my phone bill each month.

We needed heat through the winter, and I needed the internet to research summer jobs and internships and get started on my senior thesis. I paid our bills with my credit card and cringed when I saw my available credit start to disappear. One study found that 1 in 5 millennials are helping to financially support their aging parents, and giving their parents an average of $18,250 a year. One third of that financial assistance goes toward living expenses such as food and housing.

The reality is that being poor is expensive. Every time I’d just about caught up with the latest round of credit card charges — $150 here for an emergency car repair on my 1998 Buick Century, $50 there on a book that the professor didn’t put on the syllabus before the semester started, $200 to pay off overdue bills to help my dad — something else would come up.

And then, during the fall of my senior year, my dad suffered from a traumatic brain injury during an on-the-job car accident. While it had been difficult for him to work before, now it was nearly impossible. As a cab driver, he was an independent contractor, not an employee, so he didn’t have any of the protections employees can get, like paid medical leave or unemployment benefits. If he couldn’t work, he simply wasn’t paid. The meager stipend and part-time jobs I had weren’t enough to keep us both afloat in an emergency.

The credit card charges mounted. When things were getting really desperate and our heat was about to be turned off in the middle of winter again, I even applied for a predatory payday loan online. I was denied because my credit score had dropped thanks to my high balances. I sat in my bed, covered in as many blankets as possible, wondering how cold the apartment would get if we didn’t have heat. Eventually, after searching the internet, I found another scammy credit card company that would give me a credit line of $400 in minutes with an APR of 29.9 percent.

By the time I’d become too untrustworthy to qualify for another line of credit, I had almost $5,000 in credit card debt across six cards and no plans to pay it off. My highest interest rate was 30.49 percent. I barely survived my senior year of college and first year after graduation, making only the $25 and $35 minimum payments on each card respectively.

I was only able to start tackling my debt when I began working full-time and freelancing on the side. I was really fortunate that I lived with my partner, so we shared bills and expenses and helped each other out during tough financial situations. She graduated with more student debt than I did, including a couple of private loans, so our priorities were paying off her highest interest student loans and my predatory credit cards as soon as possible. She also understood my frustration with credit, as she fell into a similar trap with her credit card after she was suddenly laid off from her first post-college job.

With our two incomes, we finally had enough for necessities with some to spare. Every month, I would throw more than the minimum payment at my credit cards, starting with those with the highest interest rates and balances. Whenever I had an unexpected amount of money, like if I got more well-paying freelance work that month or I received a bonus at work, I’d funnel $200-500 into paying off another card.

In December 2018, I sent in the last payment to the first credit card I opened from Discover back in 2013. With that payment, I’d paid off all my credit cards in full. I never thought I’d sign in and see a $0 balance due again; I no longer have to worry about years of interest fees piling up on what was originally a $50 purchase. My credit score also improved (although marginally) and I’m finally in the average bracket instead of poor, an assessment that feels even more ironic when I think about the fact that I’ve been poor my entire life and I’m only now just catching up to middle class.

I’m still a little scared to use my credit cards now, even responsibly. Last month at the checkout at Target, I used my store credit card for the first time in years, saving 5 percent off my total purchase. When the balance popped up in my account in a few days, I paid it in full 10 days before the due date.