I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who continually make bad decisions of their own volition. There are many people who have mental, physical or other limitations that hold them back from reaching their full potential but many people who struggle in life do so because of consistent poor decision making. Not trying to be cold but I ran a business with employees on the lower end of the income spectrum for over 15 years and there are a lot of people out there that just make making poor decisions a habit. Then they start stacking the poor decisions on top of one another and compounding takes over and they find themselves in a downward spiral.

A couple of examples: hired a guy once to be an operations manager and when we tried to add him to the insurance for the company van it was discovered he had a previous license suspension and outstanding tickets that if he didn't pay so insurance was balking at covering him without adding a significant amount to the premium. We even offered to front him the money to clear up his tickets and deduct it over time off of his pay, he said no and instead would just drive his own van and we could pay him for gas and mileage. Two months later I get a call and he tells me his license got suspended and he got caught driving while under suspension and his vehicle got impounded so he could no longer work for us.

Another guy that worked for us for years told me he really needed to make some extra money to pay off around 5k in debt that was weighing on him. So I moved some things around and got him some hours on one of our teams that was doing weekend project work. I called him to tell him I could get him enough hours to make another 800 a month doing project work on the weekends. He said he really wanted the work but not on the weekend because "that's when I hang out with my friends".

I have tons more but there are a lot of people who just can't get out of their own way.