Survive on S$600 a month as a single mum of two? A workshop puts you in the shoes of low-income women

I was once a single mother with two young kids, and S$600 in my bank account to last the month for the three of us. One time, I chose to top up my daughter’s EZ-Link card with S$20 rather than buy a concession pass that cost over S$100. Another time, I ignored my hunger pangs at work just to save that S$5 I would’ve spent on a snack. 
At least this was my reality during an experiential “poverty sensitisation” workshop, This Is My Experience, meant to simulate the challenges faced by low-income women. The two-hour workshop is run by local charity Daughters Of Tomorrow (DOT), which serves women aged 18 to 63 from low-income families surviving on less than S$1,500 per capita per month. 
It’s conducted for various groups from employers to new volunteers, exposing them to the realities of living with poverty in Singapore. 
When I was invited to attend the workshop in July, I figured participants would simply imagine themselves in the shoes of low-income women by listening to them recount their challenges. I didn’t believe two hours could help anyone truly empathise with the poor in Singapore, especially since participants could return to their regular, presumably higher-income, lives after the workshop. 
But it took merely a few minutes for me to abandon my scepticism and broaden my understanding of what it means to live hand to mouth from day to day. 
TACKLING REAL-LIFE CHALLENGES, CONSIDERATIONS 
Designed in a “choose your own adventure” format, the workshop comprises 30 questions. Each poses a different yes-or-no scenario related to various areas of life, like whether to spend more on healthy groceries and whether to allow one’s daughter to go on a school excursion. 
Each participant, adopting the persona of a single mother with two children and limited resources, has to decide what to do at each crossroad. While one option usually requires more money, the other isn’t necessarily the “better” choice. 
All the scenarios are actual day-to-day choices and consequences that have been faced by the low-income women DOT serves, executive director Kaylee Kua shared with CNA Women.
As such, it’s crucial for interested volunteers – from individuals offering childminding services to organisations hoping to connect DOT’s beneficiaries to professional networks – to undergo the workshop before they’re deployed.
“It’s to ensure they don’t come in with preconceived notions of why clients don’t make certain decisions. It gives them another perspective on why certain things happen… so they don’t have an idea of how a person living in poverty should behave; they don’t impose certain impressions onto the clients that they interact with,” Kua explained. 
For workshop participants, the goal is simple: Survive the month on S$600 as a single mum of two. 
But the choices, despite their binary nature, are not as clear-cut. There is no right answer, no correct way to spend the money, no single lifestyle for low-income women to follow.
BEYOND NUMBERS 
As participants quickly realised, S$600 was barely enough for a low-income mother of two to cover the basics, like transport, groceries, utilities and a prepaid SIM to stay connected. Often, we had to forgo things we wanted, like a skills upgrading course, in exchange for things we needed.
Many of the scenarios also revealed that financial considerations went beyond a numerical value for low-income women, like in the real world. Even when a decision didn’t decrease one’s savings, there was an intangible cost. 
In one instance, we were told that our daughter had qualified for an overseas school competition. If she went, we’d have to pay for the air ticket, and the cost of making a passport. Most of us, myself included, opted not to let her go on the trip. 
Saving that substantial sum seemed like the more logical decision for a single mum of two trying to make ends meet. But I also knew from experience that a child doesn’t easily forget the formative moments when a parent lets them down, and despite not being a mother in real life, I felt a wave of guilt for making a supposedly wise choice. 
In reality, DOT had likewise observed that the burden of caregiving is more likely to befall women than men. So their beneficiaries’ choices and the consequences of not making those choices often centre around these unspoken, yet rooted, gender expectations. 
Whenever a family lacks financial resources, it’s “up to some female personnel to come in and care”, and these gender expectations often become “an inter-generational thing”, Kua said. 
“When their older daughters grow up and their parents’ health starts to fail, even starting from teenage years, they have to take on some form of caregiving duties and responsibilities.”
Unlike personal finance advice that usually focuses on practical aspects, I’d always believed most financial decisions are emotional in nature, like splurging on a frivolous purchase despite being in debt. These behaviours stem from an early understanding of money from young, such as whether it was a source of distress or pride at home, and how that affected life. 
But through the eyes of a low-income mother, I understood that the emotions surrounding money were heightened when complex external factors like gender expectations and familial obligations influence financial decisions; when cash is tight and there is no room for error; and when a single, unnecessary, expense could set a family back by months or even years.
MORE MONEY, MORE CHOICES
Low-income families who face such situations “like two to three times a month” eventually develop “chronic stress”, which impedes their decision-making ability, said DOT’s Kua. 
While the charity observed its low-income women beneficiaries were unlikely to experience back-to-back stressors daily like in the workshop, the questions are “a condensed experience” to simulate the chronic stress that they face from compounding situations. 
Barely a few questions into the workshop, I already glimpsed a fraction of the pressure these women experience every day. We were saddled with a utilities bill of S$200 in that scenario, and had to decide whether to pay up. It was just the start of the month, and the sum would effectively wipe out a third of our savings for the remaining period. 
The alternative was to save that money… but risk getting our water and electricity cut off. 
About half the participants, including myself, chose to take that risk, albeit after much deliberation. Even though the choice to pay the bill might have appeared obvious to the other half of the room, I’d reasoned that the risk of getting my utilities disrupted wasn’t guaranteed, compared with the certainty of instantly having S$200 less for the whole month.
Several questions later, we had to choose between caregiving duties and work opportunities. Attending a course for work would mean hiring a babysitter to look after our children, while passing up the chance to upgrade our skills meant we could be a good mother. We’d stay home to look after our children and save money on the babysitter. 
Before making our decision, we were informed the latter, albeit the “more affordable” option, would likely result in getting penalised by our boss. Get one too many misdemeanours and we’d be fired from a job we needed. The mounting anxiety among participants was not only palpable, but a sobering reality check.
For many low-income families, it can feel as though their next move is a binary decision, similar to the either-or options presented in the workshop scenarios. And I realised my greatest takeaway was that my staunch belief that life is rarely black and white was, perhaps, less applicable in the face of poverty. 
Ultimately, money gives you options. You can try an alternative path or two, with little worry that it would wipe your bank account clean if the choice doesn’t pan out. You can leave a bad relationship or environment, because your finances don’t depend on maintaining the status quo.
And you can afford to fail because the biggest privilege of having money is getting another chance.
CNA Women is a section on CNA Lifestyle that seeks to inform, empower and inspire the modern woman. If you have women-related news, issues and ideas to share with us, email CNAWomen [at] mediacorp.com.sg.