outside my means

[keannu]

What does this "outside my means" mean? Beyond my property?

mo3-46
I grew up in a small town in northern California, between wide-open ranchland and dark forests, feeling at home in two places: the wild land and books. I read constantly, hungrily, and without direction, collecting a strange stew of facts and ideas about the rest of the world. I longed for a world away from what I knew and outrageously outside my means. One morning I came across a catalog for a college preparatory school called Billups Academy. It had a summer program and offered scholarships for high school students to ‘deepen and extend their intellectual, aesthetic, and moral interests.’ I applied for and won a scholarship. Billups wasn’t just another school

 

[Rover_KE]

It means 'more than I could afford (to pay for).'

 

[BobK]

It's strange that keannu suggested 'beyond' as part of his alternative. BNC has no instances of 'outside + <possessive> + means' but 28 instances of 'beyond + <possessive> + means'.

As the subject matter here is American, I thought COCA might tell a different story. But not so:

1 BEYOND THEIR MEANS 78
2 BEYOND THE MEANS 53 [BobK: followed by 'of']
3 BEYOND OUR MEANS 33
4 BEYOND HIS MEANS 27
5 BEYOND ITS MEANS 17
6 BEYOND YOUR MEANS 12
7 BEYOND MY MEANS 7
8 BEYOND HER MEANS 6
...

There are only 7 cases of other uses of 'beyond * means'. Coincidentally 7 is the total number of COCA hits for 'outside * means'.

In short, in both Br Eng and Am Eng, 'beyond' is better. Possibly, the geographical context being California, there is a Hispanic tendency in either the writer or the local dialect of English:'outside my means' could be (just my guess) a word-for-word translation of fuera de mis medios.

b