If advertising wouldn't work, there wouldn't be so much of it.

Look at yourself critically. How many of your last year's purchasing decisions were based on actual need? And of those, how many times could you have bought something cheaper instead? And no rationalisations about cost and quality and long-term amortisations and whatnot, please.

Yes, poor people suck at managing their money. But at the same time the advertising industry focusses on them. A lot of price-based advertising relies on people not looking at it closely enough. Yay, free phones with mobile contracts. I can buy a new sofa for only $50/month (over the next ten years). This ringtone costs only 99 cents (if you subscribe for 3 ringtones per week at a cost of $2.97/week and all the ones you want are in different subscriptions and don't forget the offer code you originally subscribed with or you'll have a hard time cancelling the subscription when you notice it a month from now).

Our culture places a lot of emphasis on status symbols and wealth. If you're not wealthy, that's because you're lazy. If you can't afford status symbols to prove your wealth it's because you're a failure as a human being. This is an exaggeration, but it's what the mainstream media tells you and what the billboards shout at you.

I'm not saying it's impossible to manage your funds well if you barely have any. I've seen plenty of old widows in Germany be able to make do with welfare because they were used to not being able to afford anything (or even theoretically be able to buy anything if they had the money) throughout the post-war period, but we're talking about people who've learned to cope in a situation where it was entirely possible to freeze or starve to death even if you did everything right. Luxury meant having a variety of food on the table (or having spare tobacco for your own use, rather than for trading), not being able to afford the latest iPhone.

I would also argue that HN necessarily isn't representative of "average folks". The average HN user is special. Not better, but different. There's a disproportionate amount of entrepreneurs (yes, they are the exception) for example. Plus, there's the survivor bias: if you're here, you probably haven't found it an impossible task to keep out of poverty (even if you ever were close to it). If you had, you wouldn't be here in the first place.

But the entire point is moot anyway. If everyone is able to engage in some kind of critical thinking, self control and doing basic math, and still there are a lot of people trapped in these cut-throat contracts, the average person is evidently not sufficiently able to avoid them (and if those things are all it takes to do so, they are evidently not as good at them).

But I think this isn't a question of facts, it's a question of ideology: I think it's our responsibility as a society to keep people out of situations where they become practically unable to act freely (even if they only have themselves to blame). You seem to hold the opinion that if they screw up their own lives, we have no obligation to help them and they only owe it to themselves.