***THIS STORY WAS ORIGINALLY POSTED ON MEDIUM.COM BY THE AUTHOR***

Growing up on the southside of Chicago where poverty and violence plague our communities, one could only imagine the mental, spiritual, and physical hardship associated with these types of communities. Within communities classified under the low socioeconomic status, it is difficult to focus on financial freedom when you are forced to protect your physical body and spiritual energy.

Breaking the poverty cycle is an objective that starts from infantry, rolls through adolescence, and becomes an obstacle by adulthood. The poverty cycle starts as an uncontrollable inheritance and progresses through life as a toxic mindset where people are ignorant toward financial literacy, misinformed by the wrong people, or looking for the quickest dollar oblivious to creating long-term wealth.

Take, for instance, the education system. By no means is the educational system ineffective as knowledge is power but obtaining knowledge should not cost young adults a negative $50k-$200k head start. Throughout life, people are always appraised for their intellectual gifts, but are only taught to apply their intellectual gifts institutionally — i.e. receiving as many degrees as possible to compete in corporate America.

One of the toxic cycles of poverty is the education system. Unless the student receives scholarships that will significantly reduce or eliminate debt post-graduation, the education system combined with student loans barricades a person’s financial potential.

Not to mention, a bachelor’s degree is seldom enough to compete in corporate America, people continuously preach about going back for the master’s, and then enrolling back in school for the doctoral degree. By the time a student is done with school, assuming they followed the aforementioned process, they will be about 30 years of age and accumulated around $100,000-plus in student loan debt.

Aside from student loan debt, other factors are contributing to the poverty cycle in low-income communities as follows:

1. Failing to understand the importance of credit and how to leverage it.

2. Trained to believe without school they are a failure.

3. Looking to please other people instead of trusting who they are within.

4. Reading and self-education.

5. Bad Parenting and leadership.

6. Lack of Resources.

7. Becoming a product of their environment.

Failing to Understand the Importance of Credit.

Understanding credit is an important part of early adolescence and adulthood because the majority of adults will leverage credit at some point in their lives. Obtaining a good credit history and score between 700–850 is one effective method to end the poverty cycle. The first step in taking control of your credit is obtaining your free credit report from Experian, observing the negative hits on your credit, and disputing inaccurate information.

The next step is to pay all credit card debt down to at least a 30 percent utilization rate. Utilizing over 30 percent of your credit availability is detrimental to your credit score. The key to the credit game is to keep your revolving credit below 30 percent, always paying your bills early or on time, and periodically checking to ensure there is not any inaccurate information on your credit report.

For people who are new in the credit world and do not have existing credit, it is EXTREMELY easy for you to establish credit and obtain a 700-credit score — which is good standing. The easiest way to accomplish this is to obtain 3 secured credit cards about $300 each, max them out, and then pay them below the 30 percent utilization rate. After some time has passed, you will exist in the credit world and your credit will SKYROCKET, allowing you to begin to leverage it in other ways — such as creating assets, getting a car with low interest, or starting a business (another asset) with other people’s money.

Trained to believe without schooling you have failed.

As the adage goes “school isn’t for everybody,” and that could not be the furthest thing from the truth. Obtaining lump sums of debt is not for everybody, it should be for NOBODY. Most people stuck in the poverty cycle were trained to believe without three degrees and a huge network they will amount to nothing.

I’m here to tell you this is NOT the case. There are a plethora of effective alternatives including trade school, arts, military, apprenticeship, and fellowship, and starting a need-based business such as tax preparation, accounting, consulting, childcare, etc. School also imputes within the subliminal conscious that people can only specialize in one thing by picking a major. Contrary to popular belief, the human brain is complex and capable of developing multiple talents, skills, and gifts.

Looking to Please Other People.

Looking to please other people who are also trapped within the cycle of poverty is extremely detrimental to breaking the cycle and living out your hopes and dreams. The masses obey and defend the status quo; therefore, by objecting to the status quo of poverty you are doing something they never had the knowledge or guts to accomplish. If you die pleasing other people, you never lived to please yourself which will help you bless other people in the long run.

Reading and Self Education

Reading and taking a minimum of two hours a day to read and learn something new every day is important to escaping impoverished traps. People like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Oprah Winfrey have all obtained multi-generational wealth and reads five-to-six hours a day. Receiving an education from an institution is great, but taking time to read and self-educate shows self-discipline, self-care, and the willingness to learn and break the cycle of poverty no matter the hardship.

Bad Parenting and Leadership

Part of breaking the cycle of poverty is understanding everything you were taught is wrong, and your “mentors” are only teaching you what they know … which may not be much. Now, this is not to say your parents are necessarily “bad” parents or that your mentors are “bad” mentors, but what they are teaching you is common knowledge and commonly applied. It takes the last three steps:

1. Trained to believe without school they are a failure.

2. Looking to please other people instead of trusting who they are within.

3. Reading and self-education.

To understand everything, you were taught is not the way, truth, or light, and that your life’s path, purpose, and destiny is the road less traveled by. Most parents and mentors of the millennial generation were taught by their parents and mentors, the baby boomers, the traditional way of living — go to school, get a job, and work until you retire or die 30 years later — never really obtaining true happiness, freedom, and wealth. Only the people that took risks and the initiative to discard everything they were taught and self-educate themselves are the individuals who are ahead of the pact.

Lack of Resources

The lack of resources is one of the most commonly known factors contributing to the cycle of poverty. In areas where poverty and low-socioeconomic status are the majority, the school system, the criminal justice system, and the economy are designed for them to fail. The school systems in these communities participate in the school-to-prison pipeline where students are punished like criminals and imputed in the criminal justice system for in-school infractions that deserve nothing more than a timeout or alternative disciplinary measures.

Failing to have adequate resources also has a negative cognitive effect on children and adolescents because they enter survival mode. When people enter survival mode, they become desperate and throw logic out the window to do what they feel is required to survive. For people within these low-income communities, this means resorting to crime to make ends meet … which means they have given up and chose to become a product of their environment.

Becoming a Product of your Environment

The easiest way into poverty is to conform to your impoverished environment and adapt their beliefs, habits, mannerisms, and financial illiteracy. Becoming a product of your environment usually occurs when people have given up on life and decided to follow their peers and what they see. At this stage in the poverty cycle, the majority of people end up dead, in jail, or addicted to drugs for the rest of their lives.

Breaking the cycle of poverty is easier said than done but avoiding and identifying the aforementioned seven great plagues will help break down those barriers and end poverty for you and your family.

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