<prompt> Human: Hey PF,Just wanted to say this subreddit has helped our family not only in our PF awareness but most importantly we have hope for our children to break a viscous cycle of poverty.My SO and I come from a family background where the majority of our family collects either welfare or disability. We we never taught any financial lessons other than how to collect welfare and think in terms of immediate gratification. There is literally no one in either of our families that has not been in welfare and or in debt up to their eyeballs. Anyway long story short we managed to beak the poverty threshold in my family. Nothing to brag sbout my SO I earn about 120k a year combined incomes. However we made it through life without welfare or help from anyone. The shitty thing is we only have 20k saved for retirement and we are 39 and still have dome debt house 160k, car 10k, student loans 12k.We got married young, had a kid at 19 and another at 22. We came from poverty and had no clue how to manage money. Our 20s blew by with working 2 jobs and going to shool , our 30s were spent growing our careers and paying off a ton of CC debt now we are finally able to start focusing on our savings. All that to say what we are most proud of is our oldest son has been working since he was 17, hes paying his way through community college, and hes enrolled in his company 401k whick already has over 2k in it! He has paid over 3k for college we gifted 1k will have his Associates degre this May. He is taking a year off school to save as much as he can so he can transfer and go to Med school. Sadly we couldnt afford to save for his college but we were able to teach him the importance of not following in our shoes but rather to save young and be wise with not only finances but life decisions. It has been a hard lesson to teach but I believe it has taken root. We have 2 teenagers who do not have a sense of entitlement and understand the value of a dollar, strong work ethics, and how they have the leverage of time with respect to saving for retirement. I know this may not seem like much to a lot of people but it means the world to us. Breaking out of the poverty cycle is difficult to say the least and now we have hope that despite our financial shortcomings our children are already establishing sound financial choices.We are playing a game of catch up and our goal is to not be a financial burden to our family in retirement but also to have our children learn from our mistakes and misfortune. It makes us both proud and hopeful our boys will do better than us financially and in life.My SO and I have worked hard our entire lives between school and work, having kids at a very young age. But the hardest thing of all is to learn fiscal responsibility and surpass our family traditions of poverty and government dependency. The hardest thing of all is to deal with the guilt that we are better off than our families. We certainly arent living an extravagant life hy any means. We have a small 1000 square foot house, 2 used chevy impalas, and no vacations or flashy stuff.For anyone who has come from poverty and is financially secure what was your biggest hurdle? How did you break the poverty cycle? If you have children how did you or how are you helping break the cycle?  <response>: Well done. Seen a lot of comments recently on Reddit in other subs lately and a lot of people still think that if youre poor thats pretty much it. You cant get ahead because of xyzObama. 