Is this a southern thing?

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I live in Texas and I've recently heard a phrase that sounds distinctly southern to me. The best way I can describe it is if you have an abundance of, say, cars, someone might tell you "well your just car poor!" or if you were to have a lot of pets, you may be told "your pet poor."

I absolutely don't get this phrase. It makes no sense! Why would you say someone is poor of something if they have an abundance of it?

Has anybody else heard this saying?

I'm going to guess it means the expenses involved. Car payments, insurance payments, buying gas, getting the car serviced. With cats feeding them and vet bills.

I have never heard of that but I have a friend who lives in Texas. I will ask him if he knows what it means.

My friend just said that it means that someone is doing reasonably well financially but they can't afford a car to get around and get to work in.

But that would not make sense if someone said it to a person who had lots of cars. But that is what my friend from Texas says it means.

Have heard my mom (not from the south) use a related expression: "Being house-poor".

It means your okay income wise, but too much of your wealth and income is sunk into X particular thing. Commonly that's one's house. You pay so much mortage on it, or property tax, or maintenance on it, or some combo of the above that you cant afford anything else. So for practical purposes your house (or your collection cars) is causing you poverty.

X thing is making you poor. So you're "X Poor".

Interesting, I wonder if there is a dialect change going on here. The most common use that I have heard is something like; "I'm money rich but time poor" - so more along Zachwashere's sense of it; "X poor" = "don't have much of X." I have never heard of the "X consumes too much of my resources" version before, but maybe that sense just doesn't occur here in the UK. It's a bit like "could care less" - I know what people mean when they say that, and it is a common enough idiom, but "couldn't care less" seems more logical to me, and is definitely more idiomatic here in the UK.

It's not unusual for idioms to reverse their meaning in this way over time, for example:
- Blood is thicker than water - Originally the "blood" of your compatriots in battle, "water" as in "breaking waters" at birth; so it meant that comradeship was more important than family, the exact reverse of its current meaning.
- A rolling stone gathers no moss - Originally being a "rolling stone" was meant to be a bad thing; if you don't settle down somewhere you can't gather a community around yourself. Nowadays it's usually meant in a positive sense of being a "free spirit", curious to explore the world.

I never thought of it in terms of being to financially involved in something that you are "poor." I can see how that makes sense. Interesting idiom.

There sure are a lot of interesting figures of speech in different cultures.

I live in VA and we use those expressions. We also have an opposite expression for the way my household lives, but I don’t think it has a polite equivalent. If you have a lot of day to day spending money, but live cheaply in your housing and transportation, you are said to be n-word rich. It is meant to suggest that a poor person has suddenly come into some money and splurges on petty items, such as spending $50 on 7-11 snacks or spending $1000 on a Walmart wardrobe.

I don’t recommend using this other expression, even if you are black. But if you hear it, that’s what it means.

I relocated to GA from NY almost a year ago and I don't even interact with enough people to even hear these terms.