Lifestyle #2: Steal Magazines

If for some reason you absolutely must leave your apartment, remember to take your jobby friends’ leftover New Yorker/ VOGUE/Wired/Vanity Fair “for the train.” This solves two problems at once. First, you can talk about how much you love reading on the train, when really your broke ass has no other options. Secondly, you get to catch up on the periodicals and finally read scathing Gawker comments on Maureen Dowd’s treatment of Tina Fey with some insight!

Lifestyle #1: Stay at Home

So all your jobby friends are going out to La Esquina or Momofuku or Al Di La and you know they’re going to wind up “splitting the bill” because that’s what working bees do and even if you only get one antipasta and a beer you’re gonna be in for $50. There is a simple solution: stay at home.

Tell your friends you’re on a date with a “Mystery Girl/Boy” or studying for the LSAT or working on a huge graphic design project or busy doing something in Brooklyn that’s cooler than what they’re doing. This way you don’t spend any money and they’re not even insulted and will still invite you to their country houses this summer!

Career Path #2: Running an “Independent” Graphic Design Company

This “career path” can include anything from fiddling with your own portfolio website to taking $30 from your newly unemployed (and disastrously in denial) i-banking cousin to lay out his resume. This is great, especially if you are willing to take little-to-no money for real time-consuming work!

Career Path #1: Graduate School

In order to tell people you’re in graduate school, you do not actually have to be in in graduate school or applying to graduate school or even in the process of applying to graduate school. As long as you’re studying for a graduate school entrance exam, you are technically in graduate school. Knowing your absymally poor academic record, though, you probably haven’t bothered. But if you’ve bought the Test Prep Guide or looked through it once at Barnes and Nobles (before deciding, of course, that you’re too poor to to pay for it), you can at least say that you’re  “thinking about” graduate school. This will impress your parents and their friends – “what a level-headed young man/woman!” – and get them off your back. They might be so impressed that they decide to pay for graduate school, in which case you have succeeded beyond your wildest dreams and are no longer Poor.

Things We Tell Our Parents’ Friends

It’s always embarrassing when the children of the upwardly mobile are forced to explain their own downward mobility to their parents’ friends. Has this ever happened to you?

“oh hey Mr. Friedman how are you” / “great jonah so what have you been up to” / “oh you know college” / “didn’t you graduate three years ago” / “sort of yeah” / “what have you been doing” / “i saw a movie last week it was pretty good”

Congratulations. You have just admitted to Mr. Friedman that you are an unemployed hobo.

Poor Rich Kids

Hobos

Welcome to the world of the downwardly mobile. Our parents had a bit of money; some of our friends have a bit as well. But we, well, we’re sort of broke. Hell, we’re so broke the recession didn’t even affect us! Anticipating a flood of recruits to our underemployed ranks, we’ve decided to share some of our secrets with the more fortunate.