Basic Trope: A character is temporarily forced to live on little or no income, usually for exactly one episode.
- Straight: Alice loses her job and has no savings. She lives in poverty until she gets her job back two weeks later.
- Exaggerated: Alice is normally a millionaire, but loses her vast fortune due to a bank error. Everything she owns is repossessed, including her Big Fancy House. She ends up homeless and is forced to eat garbage in order to survive. By the end of the episode, however, the error is corrected and everything is back to normal.
- Downplayed:
- Alice is briefly demoted, and has to live with a slightly lower income than usual.
- Alice is a compulsive shopper in danger of going broke. Because of this, she challenges herself to go as long as possible without spending any more money. When the time comes to buy groceries, she buys only the essentials.
- Justified: Alice is used to having money to spend.
- Inverted:
- Alice gains a vast fortune, and isn't sure what to do with it. She blows it all in one episode.
- Alice goes from Rags to Riches.
- Subverted:
- Alice is still bankrupt at the end of the episode.
- Alice is a miser who is well-adapted to living within modest means. Still, while the loss of her fortune hasn't affected her day-to-day living, it's still a tremendous source of anxiety to lose the massive nest egg she's been building since childhood.
- Double Subverted:
- In the next episode, she has inexplicably regained her money.
- Before too long, she becomes used to not having a nest egg and reorients her outlook and plans accordingly.
- Parodied: Alice, a millionaire, is fined $500 for littering. She immediately stops spending money and panics as if she had gone broke.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice goes from being a member of the Fiction 500, to broke, to upper-middle-class, to lower-middle-class.
- Averted: No one ever has to do without their usual amount of spending money.
- Enforced: "We want to show how much Alice cares about her money. Let's have her go broke, but only for one episode, because keeping her that way would alter the plot."
- Lampshaded: "I hear Alice lost it all. That's why I try not to spend more money than I need to."
- Invoked:
- Alice carelessly spends her money, and doesn't bother to save anything. So when she loses her source of income, she is hit hard.
- After a rather doozy spending spree, Alice's parents temporarily cut her from her allowance to teach her a lesson.
- Exploited: Alice was saving up for an item she really wanted and/or needed, but when her rival Bob learns she can't buy it, he makes a point of buying it to rub it in Alice's face.
- Defied: Alice keeps a large amount of money in her savings account, so it's no big deal if she loses her job.
- Discussed: "What? You thought I'd gone bankrupt? That could never happen to me, because I'm careful always to keep a year's worth of money in my bank account." "That's stupid. You earned that money, and you should have fun with it."
- Conversed: "Alice must have been rich all her life, because she sure doesn't seem to know how to stick to a budget."
- Deconstructed: Alice loses all her money for one episode but then gets it all back at the end; however she becomes so paranoid about losing it all again that she becomes miserly afterwards, living within even more modest means than when she was broke, in order to guarantee that she'll never go broke again, but as a result has forgotten how to enjoy her money.
Back to Broke Episode
