>(bought a new phone? Let's keep the old one even if it has a cracked screen, just in case... <throws phone into drawer full of hopelessly unusable and outdated electronic doodads>.)
Never been poor; me and my whole family have always done this. I just forced them to get rid of their standalone DVD player. They have remote controls for devices going back to the 90's.
The cellphone example is even better; you'd be a fool to immediately dump your old phone. It's small and easy to store, and if your new phone craps out or gets lost or stolen you may very well have a use for another phone that works right now. I have phones going back 2 generations.
This is just frugality and contingency planning.
Scarcity mindset is more like, "I have $300, I need to spend it before it goes away". That's what keeps people poor.
You don't have to be/(have been) poor to be a hoarder. On the old cellphone, my emphasis was a drawer full of backup-to-a-backup-to-a-backup devices that are now 10 years old and is running Android 2 and are potentially a fire hazard while charging and are not fit for use - they are emotional support devices. Keeping one generation of backup device is rational, 3+ means there's something to unpack.
I'm curious about how your family tradition came to be: a high number of people who experienced the great depressions in their formative years are/were compulsive hoarders in latter years.
Being poor is what keeps poor people poor; costs of necessities go down the richer you get; being poor is expensive
Never been poor; me and my whole family have always done this. I just forced them to get rid of their standalone DVD player. They have remote controls for devices going back to the 90's.
The cellphone example is even better; you'd be a fool to immediately dump your old phone. It's small and easy to store, and if your new phone craps out or gets lost or stolen you may very well have a use for another phone that works right now. I have phones going back 2 generations.
This is just frugality and contingency planning.
Scarcity mindset is more like, "I have $300, I need to spend it before it goes away". That's what keeps people poor.