"Tying up the money" or how cash in Romani hands appears to melt away
Have you heard how rich people, especially generationally wealthy ones, don’t carry around cash? Well, we can tell you that generationally poor people don’t either - at least if they are Romani.
It’s liquid cash because it drips and drips… away
It’s almost a given, in our Romani community, that whatever amount of cash you have on you at any given moment, will be gone within hours.
If you have coins, they go for coffee. If you have smaller notes, they go for food and cigarettes. But not just for you. Also for whoever is around you at the moment. If you are hanging out with a Roma person who has just enough money for two coffees, they will buy one for themselves and one for you.
Some cash, especially on salary day at the minimum-wage street cleaning job where many Roma here in Bulgaria are employed, goes to the casino. Sometimes even all cash. Tempting as it is to blame people living in poverty for gambling away their hard-earned money, the psychology behind the gamble is not so complicated and not so alien.
On salary day, you go to the ATM with baited breath because you never know if you’ll get the full sum you’re owed. The supervisors can decide to give penalties, such as a no-show penalty if you’ve missed a day of work. This penalty is more than twice the daily wage. Since the job is already minimum-wage, the money that comes out of the ATM is laughable.
Even when people get their full salaries, without any penalties, even if they have no debts to pay back to loan sharks, even then the money is laughable. If it is only spent on bills and food, it will still not suffice to survive the month.
Taking out a 50 BGN bill out of a 700 BGN salary is easy. “With or without it, same thing,” the saying goes. You’ll starve anyway. But what if you turn this 50 BGN bill into 2,000 BGN?
It becomes even easier after this point. You lost a 50, what is another 50? You’ll starve anyway. Before you know it, the salary is gone.
The driving force, of course, is the wild hope that luck will be on your side today. But something else is at play, too. The burning disdain for this tiny, thin pile of cash that, one way or another, will turn to dust in your hand before you blink. And now, you have another month of hard labor, humiliations, and zero rest, so the cycle can repeat again.
Part if it is hope. Another part is anger. “I will not be reduced to this tiny value. I’ll either make it as big as I deserve or burn it myself right here, right now.”
from “Gambling for survival: Inside the Romani casino culture”
Throughout the month, the Roma borrow money here and there to make ends meet. When they borrow from loan sharks, and are late on a payment, they are then hounded day and night - cars stop next to them as they sweep the streets, buffed-up guys knock down their doors and threaten their families, mothers are cornered as they pick up their already minuscule child benefits. If you have money on you, it gets taken. If you don’t, you’ll receive threats, you’ll get “roughed up” probably, and you’ll get a tight, tight deadline of when to pay back. At this point, the Roma urgently start looking for someone else to borrow money from so they can avert - but in reality postpone - today’s crisis.
The reality of living in poverty is that when you step out into your community, cash flows around less like water and more like electricity. It’s fast, here and gone again before you can blink. You might have your only money on you, a 10 BGN note that would be enough for a pack of cigarettes and bread and some change. But it’s very hard to spend it as intended. Very hard. You run into your sister who hasn’t eaten all day, or you see one of the children coughing or with fever but with no medicine. Or you do buy what you wanted but half your pack of cigarettes is gone by the time you get home because you gave them away to your relatives. The bread is probably also gone or half-gone. The coins you had in change went to buy someone coffee.
With bigger amounts of cash, it’s the same. Last year, one of Pepi’s sisters, Ani, and her husband were being kicked out of the crisis center housing the majority of the tribe. They hadn’t paid their fees several months in a row and now owed over 200 BGN. Someone from the tribe had just pawned his phone and had specific plans for the cash. But he gave the cash to Ani so she can cover the taxes.
Money is always in demand if you’re living in poverty as an entire community. And it’s always a matter of basic survival. Food, medicine, taxes for housing. If you have money on you, you will want to give it, even if it is your last. But even if you don’t give it to anyone else, it will disappear. The Roma know that money is spent very easily if it is in your hands. You’ll be tempted to buy something you really want but can’t afford. you’ll be tempted to gamble a little bit. You’ll treat yourself too much once or twice - take-out instead of cooking at home, or you invite people over for a party and buy food and drinks for everyone, and poof - the money is gone. It’s never enough money. It’s always enough just for one or two things.
“Ever since we went into debt,” Yoanna was telling us recently, “We haven’t been able to buy even chocolate or candy for the kids.” Her husband Tzvetan borrowed money from several places when their daughter was hospitalized last summer and needed multiple surgeries. Now, he’s working at an unregulated construction job and all his money goes to pay off the debt that keeps on climbing.
Cash in your hands itches to be spent. There are so many places it can go. So, so many.
What do the Roma do, then, when they find themselves with money?
Tying up money in Romani culture
A lucky day at the casino - happens more often than you think. A lucrative, if temporary, job - like working construction at the seaside, or abroad, for a couple of months. Finding treasure in the trash - quite literally. The Roma have an eye for valuables like antiques, jewelry, collectibles - and quickly spot them when they scan garbage containers. Some people from our tribe have found themselves with several thousands’ worth of valuable items that were thrown away as garbage.
Our point is, money does come in. For the ever-hustling Roma, it can come in pretty often, actually. They never rely solely on their salaries because these salaries are enough for nothing.
So, what happens when a Roma person has a pile of cash in their hands?
They immediately get rid of it.
“I was at the casino with Yoanna,” Tzvetan was telling us recently. He had just borrowed 1,000 BGN from a loan shark and decided to gamble a fraction of it, just to test his luck. “I risked 20 BGN. And boom, I got 1,000. I took it out right away, put it in my pocket, and gave 10 BGN to Yoanna. She puts it in the machine, five minutes later, another 800 BGN. We pocket the money immediately, and leave. And I ran, I ran, to my father. “Let’s go take the sound system from the pawn shop,” I told him. “We have to tie it up, we have to tie up the money. Then we’ll pawn it again when we need to spend it.”
By risking 30 BGN in total, Tzvetan and Yoanna won 1,800 BGN at the casino. They also had 970 BGN remaining from the 1,000 he borrowed from the loan sharks.
Tzvetan knew that the smartest thing he could do right now is make sure there’s no way to spend that money. Until it needed to spent.
The Roma don’t trust banks or any institutions for that matter. Every single Roma person we know withdraws their entire salary from the ATM and leaves nothing in their account.
Instead, they tie up the money in valuables.
Most commonly, gold.
Outsiders are perplexed when they see a Roma person wearing a golden chain around their neck, or golden rings and bracelets, while sweeping the streets in their orange vest or collecting broken appliances from the garbage and loading them on their horse-driven cart, and claiming to have no money. The truth is, they don’t have money. The gold they wear, as beautiful as it is, slides off their necks and fingers and wrists in the blink of an eye as soon as they need liquid cash - without a shred of sentimentality.
Vela and Nicky, pictured in the title image of this article, pawned their wedding bands mere days after their wedding.
Gold is a for survival, not for decoration, in the Romani world. Its beauty is a bonus.
Next to gold, come sound systems. An average sound system that gets purchased in our tribe costs anywhere between 2,000 and 3,000 BGN. On an emotional level, a sound system is more valuable than gold. Nicky and Vela, for example, had to pawn their sound system several times - as soon as they come into money, they got it back, until they had to pawn it again. The sound system did several rounds in the pawn show while their wedding bands collected dust. Music, for the Roma, comes even before food. “A Roma would rather have a sound system than a bed to sleep on,” Pepi says.
But when it has to, it goes to the pawn shop.
Tzvetan and his father had a sound system in the pawn shop and when Tzvetan found himself with enough cash, his first instinct was to take the sound system. They would play it every day - until the money has to be distributed between bills, food, and loan sharks, at which point it goes back “in jail” (as the pawnshop is called by the Roma.)
And then we have phones.
“How come they say they’re living in poverty,” you’ll hear an outsider say, “and yet have a smartphone with Internet and everything?”
It’s easy. The phone is actually the easiest thing to pawn off and the cheapest valuable to buy back. A very, very quick 100 BGN. Phones fly in and out of pawn shops like crazy. Very often, one person from the tribe picks a phone from the pawnshop, opens it and finds the photo gallery full with family pictures of a cousin or aunt. Every phone in the tribe used to belong to a relative.
The thing that outsiders don’t understand about any of these valuables - neither the gold, nor the expensive sound system, nor smart phone - is how easily the Roma let go.
It’s never a purchase. It’s never permanent.
It’s only a very pleasurable way to tie up money - until you figure out how best to spend it.
