With electronics specifically, it's often just more convenient to toss the old device in a drawer. You're not supposed to put them in the trash, and e-waste disposal often incurs a fee. This is why refrigerators end up dumped on the side of a road in a ravine, because municipalities make it harder to dispose of them responsibly than to just dump them.

>(bought a new phone? Let's keep the old one even if it has a cracked screen, just in case... <throws phone into drawer full of hopelessly unusable and outdated electronic doodads>.)

Never been poor; me and my whole family have always done this. I just forced them to get rid of their standalone DVD player. They have remote controls for devices going back to the 90's.

The cellphone example is even better; you'd be a fool to immediately dump your old phone. It's small and easy to store, and if your new phone craps out or gets lost or stolen you may very well have a use for another phone that works right now. I have phones going back 2 generations.

This is just frugality and contingency planning.

Scarcity mindset is more like, "I have $300, I need to spend it before it goes away". That's what keeps people poor.

A -> B =/= B -> A

You don't have to be/(have been) poor to be a hoarder. On the old cellphone, my emphasis was a drawer full of backup-to-a-backup-to-a-backup devices that are now 10 years old and is running Android 2 and are potentially a fire hazard while charging and are not fit for use - they are emotional support devices. Keeping one generation of backup device is rational, 3+ means there's something to unpack.

I'm curious about how your family tradition came to be: a high number of people who experienced the great depressions in their formative years are/were compulsive hoarders in latter years.

Being poor is what keeps poor people poor; costs of necessities go down the richer you get; being poor is expensive

Different view: sell your old phone soon so you can get better second hand price.

> Never been poor

So what basis do you have for commenting on the experience of it?

> me and my whole family have always done this.

I'm sure there are other things that both your family and poor families have done, but that doesn't have explanatory value.

I'm not commenting on the experience of being poor; I'm saying that the mentioned behavior isn't "part of being poor", it's part of being frugal.