[Elspode]

Lower middle class all the way. I'm actually much better off than my folks were, and I'm still lower middle class, in the grand scheme of things. We struggle from paycheck to paycheck, but we have an awful lot of amenities and luxuries that my folks never would have even been realistically able to obtain.

When I was very young, five, six, seven years old, we actually had very little to eat many times, our lights got turned off a lot and we had constant threatening phone calls (back then, bill collectors would call and actually threaten you verbally - there really were no laws that dealt with how such things had to be handled). We lost one house to foreclosure. My father wasn't terribly keen on the 9-5 gig, so he was always flitting from one "big time opportunity" to the other, looking for the big score, and bringing home marginal money, when he got any at all. We were pretty reliant on my mom's folks when things got real bad, and I'm sure the financial BS was largely responsible for my parents' divorce when I was 10.

Things weren't a lot better when my mom married my stepdad. They both worked full time, so he wasn't afraid of steady work, but he was a totally insufferable asshole (we called him "Rick the Prick"), so despite the fact that we were more stable financially (although still firmly lower middle class-no new cars, no flashy stuff of any kind), it was still a crappy life for my mom.

Of course, as a kid, you are pretty self involved and oblivious, so I'm sure things were much, much worse than I was ever aware.