  We provide investment advice for an individual who wishes to minimize her
lifetime poverty, with a penalty for bankruptcy or ruin. We measure poverty via
a non-negative, non-increasing function of (running) wealth. Thus, the lower
wealth falls and the longer wealth stays low, the greater the penalty. This
paper generalizes the problems of minimizing the probability of lifetime ruin
and minimizing expected lifetime occupation, with the poverty function serving
as a bridge between the two. To illustrate our model, we compute the optimal
investment strategies for a specific poverty function and two consumption
functions, and we prove some interesting properties of those investment
strategies.
