In the Harry potter books the Weasleys seem to be considered poor, a family of a lower standing in society; yet, Arthur Weasley is a mid-ranking civil servant, the family owns their own plot of land, their house, and a car (so no mortgages either).

More than half of their sons are already emancipated and doing well for themselves (specially Fred & George at the end of the fifth book with their shop). On top of that they manage to keep a tuition for all their family in one of the finest schools of magic in europe (which I assume is private), and magic can take care of most other normal expenses...

Sure, they may not seem to be as well-off as the Malfoys, or the Blacks, but JK Rowling's definition of 'poor' seems to be a bit screwed to me, considering she lived in real poverty before she wrote the books. At worst, the Weasleys are to the Wizarding World what a middle class family is to the muggle one.

 

No, because wizards have magic.

The Weasleys are to the Wizarding World what a hobo living out of a cardboard box is to the Real World.

At least that's always been my take on it.

 

Unless we are, due to lack of information, underestimating how much certain things cost. For example, does Hogwarts charge fees? How much exactly does Mr Weasley get paid? Keep in mind, it might technically be a mid-ranked position, but its in the least respected sub-department around. His wages is probably lower on the pay scale than a similar ranked employee elsewhere.

Also, owning a small plot of land means very little if you take it that it has been in the family for generations. Which it may very easily have been.

 

Or maybe Wealth in the wizarding world is measured in higher standards than in the muggle world, or things are way pricier, considering their main currency is gold.

If that was the case, they could go live comfortably in the muggle world, instead of living in a run-down cottage.

It seems to me it's more by choice than by need.

True, but it also means you don't have to pay for a place to live, which is the main expense of modern families, and it adds to your personal wealth, even if it doesn't produce income.

 

Owning land doesn't mean the Weasley's have any real income; there's a reason the term "land rich, money poor' exists. There's no indication that the Weasley's make any income off their land, but all that land does still need to be maintained (magic helps with that, obviously) and there are probably property taxes of some sort that have to be paid on that land.

That matter aside, I've always seen the poorness of the Weasleys as being at the point where they make enough to get by, but they don't have much in the way of disposable income. They're in no danger of starving to death or losing their home, but once the basic life expenses get taken care of there's just not much left over.

There are also a couple hints that the Weasleys don't exactly have the best financial sense. I wouldn't be surprised if some money went into things like the enchanted car that was really just a big toy for Arthur. Plus when the family does come into a bit of money in the third book, they immediately spend it all on a big vacation.

I do think Rowling kind of forgot about the fact that the Weasleys have adult children who are all doing pretty well for themselves. You would think being a curse-breaker for Gringotts or a dragon tamer would bring in a pretty good income. Given the general portrayal of the family, I can't see Bill and Charlie not sending a bit of money back to their parents to help out.

 

Did it not occur to you that they simply have standards that differ to ours? Having magic would no doubt immensely raise the standard of living, and so even if the Weasley's would be middle class by our standards, they're poor by wizarding standards.

Maybe the average middle class wizards live in a mansion, have a holiday home in the Caribean, buy the newest robes and broomsticks for the entire family and eat lobster and caviar for dinner every night. By that standard, the Weasley's and their second hand robes, worn down house and mother that actually has to cook their food seem pretty damn poor.

 

In fact, it did. You just have to read the first lines of my second post.

 

You'll have to forgive me - I read through the thread, then went away for awhile and replied when I returned, hence I missed your second post. My bad.

 

I wonder who else is poor or poorer than the weasleys. There is a market for seconds hand clothes and books. I think the big question is how much did hogwarts cost, and did they borrow to pay for it?

Or maybe not...

 

The Gaunt's are one. Or were. This is all conjecture anyway considering we have little knowledge in the way of money for the wizarding world, income or spending.

 

Why would land be of any value to a wizard who could legitimately live in a small enough area to set down a tent? Why would the Burrow be of any value to a wizard? It's a ramshackle house held together with magic that they (apparently) inexpertly built themselves. Wizards would have no value placed in cars and Arthur Weasley is in a department everyone else considers a joke.

Not to mention— when was the last time a middleclass family you know bankrupted themselves buying school supplies for their children?

 

Money in the Wizarding world is probably fairly pointless for anyone who paid a goddamned ounce of attention in class at Hogwarts (and maybe got the tiniest bit of metaphorical grease on their elbows).

Are there any fics out there that play on a reversal of our world, economically speaking? That is to say, people like the Malfoys and Blacks are the utter laughing stock of Real wizards--pitiable squibs like them have to, get this, rely on house elves and even worse - dare we even speak of it . . . MONEY! to do things real wizards do with a wave of their wands.

 

Rin, that sounds like a really nice idea for the background setting to a fairly political fic, with a nice twist to make it very different from the usual humdrum of that genre.

 

Their relative poverty was mentioned less and less throughout the books, in line with the older children leaving school.

I may be wrong but I can't remember a reference to their money troubles after Fred and George left.

And as to Charlie and Bill making a truckload of moeny to send back, who says they do? Bill probably made decent sums of money but at the end of the day he worked for Goblins; a greedy and treacherous group of jew creatures.

I can't see any reason why Charlie would make lots of money either. He chose Dragon Keeping because he loved the idea of the job, it's what he wanted to do. I'm pretty sure it's been mentioned he could have gone pro with quidditch and made shitloads of money. People working on reserves in Kenya or China don't make large sums of money.

 

Even if Bill and Charlie brought in more money, remember that until OotP both lived outside Britain and had to pay for expenses. I don't think either had much to spare.

 

This, basically. Furthermore, as far as I can recall, most of the points where their lack of funds are mentioned come either from Ron, who is hardly the best judge of it given his jealousy over Harry, or people like Lucius or Draco. I'm not suggesting that nobody else considers them poor, but the most obvious examples come from fairly biased individuals.

 

It's fairly obvious that in the first few years of the HP story, at least, the Weasleys are cash-poor. As NMB said, they seemed to have no relevant amount of liquid assets at all, spending the last of their savings on secondhand clothing and books. In addition, there's no certainty that their bit of property has any meaningful value to other wizards. I'm sure they could sell it to Muggles, but wizards probably don't put much stock in Muggle land value.

Magic may be able to alleviate many of the factors that define real world poverty, but that's not all there is to HP's wizarding world. Wizarding England has a bureaucracy. That makes it quite likely that living in wizarding England involves paying fees to someone (I won't go so far as to say 'taxes,' though). These fees might have nothing to do with magic.

Wizarding England also has a luxury item industry, e.g. high performance brooms. If you can afford virtually any luxury item you want, you're wealthy. If you have to be selective, you're middle class. If you can't really afford any luxury items, you're lower-middle or working poor.

TL;DR: The Weasleys are not Muggle-poor, but I could easily see them being in, say, the bottom 10% of wealth in their society, which could be defined as relative poverty. When people think of poverty, they often think in relative terms, especially if they live in a wealthy society.

 

First and foremost, why are we still trying to shoehorn things like logic, common sense and continuity into the HP books? It's been tried (and tried, and tried) before, always with the same results: FAIL!

Nevertheless, it's "once more into the breach" with me.

The biggest point I'd like to make is that, at least as far as the U.S., a "mid-level civil servant" is fucking struggling to make ends meet, especially if said civil servant has 7 kids and a stay-at-home spouse.

Magic or not, any society is going to have an economy of scale, wherein goods and services adhere to the rules of supply and demand, and whether or not Rowling explained it well (surprise! she didn't!), there will always be the Haves and the Have-Nots, and the Weasleys obviously placed more importance on having the number of kids they wanted than going the Malfoy route.

We don't get the specifics in the books, because (1) it's almost entirely from Harry's perspective, and (2) Rowling admits she's "bad at maths," so we shouldn't hold out hope for her being an economics prodigy.

Yeah, I've known many a poor person with a family plot of land, and those plots have usually been both an added expense and a point of family pride rather than a money-maker.

And we know from CoS that just buying the books for all the kids was enough to wipe out the Weasley vault.

Right. And I could go and live like a king in the middle of Uganda or Zimbabwe, or even El Salvador or [insert South American country here], but as an American accustomed to a certain standard of living, I don't see that in my future.

Look, the Weasleys, much moreso than Hermione or even Harry, are not about to leave the only society they've ever known, simply because it'd be cheaper to "go Muggle." And no, that isn't the same as me packing up my family and moving to some third-world country, but that's the closest analogy we have since, y'know, magic ain't real and all, and we're just using conjecture on a Harry Potter fan site.

I think you mean Net Worth. And net worth =/= accessible wealth.

I agree that it's implied that somewhere up the line, the Weasleys had some poor financial management, though nothing on the scale of the Gaunts.

Still, when one considers the events of CoS, I wholeheartedly support them deciding to use that prize money on a family trip to see Bill. IIRC (and I may very well be canonizing some bad fanon here) Bill was Ginny's favorite brother, and parents could do a lot worse than taking their traumatized daughter to see her favorite bro.

And I view the whole Curse Breaker and Dragon Handler things in the same way I view Cowboys and Bounty Hunters from the American West: they're shit jobs - because if they weren't, people like the Blacks and Malfoys would be doing them. If Curse Breaking weren't likely to get a person killed, you can bet your ass the Goblins would be doing it themselves, and if Dragon Handling were glamorous or lucrative, at some point Draco Malfoy would've crowed about having an ancestor or two in the trade.

I'd say Bill spent a lot of his pay on Veela hookers and curse remedies, while Charlie budgeted a good chunk of his to dittany and the Romanian equivalent of Veela hookers.

As I said, it's an economy of scale, and there's no way Rowling could've pulled it off, so she didn't even try.

Word. See above about emptying the vault for Lockhart's books.

QFT. Somebody write this bitch. NMB, you in here?

Nice.

It's the same for every aspect, in fact. According to Harry, Pansy is pug-faced and Narcissa acts as if she has shit on her upper lip. Yet we all know Narcissa is a MILF-y, cum-starved sex kitten, and Pansy just uses Charms to keep Draco from raping her until Harry can get past the Slytherin stereotype and notice her plump set of dick-sucking lips.

 

The first books make it clear that they're literally poor—that their vault is all but empty—but I always assumed the image of their poverty, especially in proper wizarding society, stemmed in part from their status as a large and well-connected pureblood family and, among the more bigoted families, as blood traitors who are found over and over to be slumming it with the wrong kinds of people.

 

Yeah, Ginny even dated a black dude, for chrissakes.