Hengruh

Like you, I’ve either worked my whole life (self-supporting since I was 17) or attended school to better myself, and paid in the system and would not hesitate to access benefits I needed to get through a rough stretch.

We all need to be doing more at the local level to take care of our own, and there is a part of my heart that believes we will do what’s right and just.

While on our way there, please be brave and let us know how it goes.

Warm thoughts to you and your wife.

Pearly May

To look in our cupboards, we eat fairly well. Our 8yr old never misses a school trip. We have prepaid internet and mobile.

But we don’t go to the movies. We don’t drink.We don’t have cable tv, or many other things that are considered normal.

We pick and choose where our money is spent – good food is important to us, cable tv is not.

But if you saw us in the shop, people might think we were living the high life on public money due to what we buy. And they would be wrong. We are careful, frugal, and have our priorities right where they need to be. That doesn’t always match up to what others think we should be doing.

Over here (and i think it is similar in the US?) people pay into the public coffers that this money comes from via taxes etc. So for the majority of people recieving payments, they have been contributing to that money for years beforehand. Should they need to then make use of that system, does that mean they need to then justify their lives to strangers?

Cheats are not as common as the media would have you believe. To suggest the people who are receiving payments should only spend their money in “socially acceptable” ways is insulting. There but for the grace of god – remember that.

It is very easy to judge.

I’m always surprised by people who seem to know a great deal about other people – and also by people who seem to assume a great deal about other people – about what a look means, or what a piece of clothing means. I’ve always suspected that I was at a disadvantage not being terribly good at picking up visual social cues, but clearly I am, because clearly there are whole complex interactions being conveyed by a look and a head shake around me.

For me, I suspect it is simply not my job to dispense justice in the universe. I have no doubt when I give money at the food pantry that some small percentage may go to someone who milks the system. So? I want even jerks to eat. I want even the people who milk welfare for a check to have a little food in the pantry for their kids and to be able to make the rent. Honestly, getting money from the state isn’t that easy – it involves taking a lot of crap, doing a lot of paperwork, sitting in waiting rooms a lot, being bored and condescended to. Honestly, I don’t see that most people would find it much more appealing than a job, but if some do, it just isn’t my job, as I’m walking down the street, to try and figure out who they are, so that the
$.004 cents of my paycheck that goes to them can be properly reclaimed.

Sharon

My mother’s story is more common than the story of the Welfare Queen. But our collective bias against poverty refuses to see my mother’s plight as common. Instead we get hung up on the notion that poor people are just leaches on the system. The end result becomes a public policy that is focused on the few cheats at the expense of the many who need the help.

Something else you might try is freelance writing. I used Elance.com, and once you build up a client base, it’s easy enough to get gigs, if you’re a good writer.

Pretty much, if someone says they need someone to do something for them, I jump at the chance (within my limits, of course)–fixing a fence, baking a cake, sewing some curtains, pet-sitting, running a friend’s art gallery for the weekend…I’ve been paid for all of these things and more. It’s all a matter of keeping your eyes and ears open.

Are you physically able to do odd jobs? Garden in someone else’s yard? Borrow a snow shovel from a family member when there’s a severe weather warning, stage it at your place, and make some pocket change shoveling snow?

Have you tried putting up a sign at the college where you teach (or posting on craigslist) and getting some tutoring students?

I’m so sorry to hear about your wife. Does she knit? Can she knit socks? Would she? Yarn is often available at thrift stores, sometimes in the form of dreadful projects or worn but good quality sweaters that can be unraveled. Is there something else that she can do at home that would either bring in a little cash or trade? Bake bread or make tortillas? There is a market for handmade tortillas.

You are an educated man. Can you pick up some work helping write business plans and grant applications? Many people just need help putting their ideas into formal English.

Can you volunteer to do something that has the potential to leverage social contacts into paying gigs? The idea is to pick something socially useful and intrinsically rewarding that puts you in contact with a lot of people. Senior center, library, volunteer tax preparation, etc. And then tell people what you do. A certain percentage of contacts will turn into call-backs or referrals. If not, smile, enjoy your karma points and go on the the next volunteer gig.

It sounds like you need $400 a month to bridge the gap. That is totally doable in the informal economy. If you have some handyman skills it is possible to work up a clientele of elderly persons and single mothers who call you when their washing machine needs unstopping or their gutters are turning into hanging gardens. If you stay small and stick to word of mouth advertising, you are under the radar.

Another helpful approach is to take any weird ass part time job you can get. I used to have a sterilized resume for applying to weird ass jobs, with all the credentials polished off. This stopped working when the internet became universal. The best way is to try to expand your social network and let people know that you are looking for part time jobs and gigs. Make up some business cards with your name, contact info and some generalized description such as “handyman” or “odd jobs and pet sitting”.

Here’s an important tip: don’t be a taker. Don’t be out to get something from everybody you meet. Do the opposite. Just help somebody when they need it, and don’t ask for anything in return. They will know who to call later. Bake some cookies and hand them out with your business card. All kinds of small and welcome gifts can be made with free or low-cost materials.

My work is by nature seasonal and project oriented. My business is limping along, and I too am reaching into my recession skill set to make up a shortfall of several hundred bucks a month.

Shira in Bellingham, WA

Linda in Montana, and all the rest, I make about $8000 a year, teaching part time at a local community college as needed (because of union contracts, since I am an adjunct they won’t let me teach as much as I would love to). I have taught archaeology, environmental history and ethics, sociology, drawing, painting, and basic landscape design. $8000 this last year is the most I made in 3 years; usually it has been $4000 or so.

I lost my fulltime job working for a state agency in 2006. In all that time and with 50-60 applications, I have only had two interviews and I wasn’t hired for either one. The only reason I got hired to teach as an adjunct, even though I am qualified with two Masters degrees, was because I knew someone at the college and they were hard up at the last minute. I work hard and get excellent evaluations from students.

My wife is unable to work, so that 8K covers both of us. The strain of how we have come to our present situation has broken her, and she has become a recluse who never leaves the house. She refuses to seek any help, and all we do is fight when I try to talk her into it, so I have given up since there isn’t any help in our community, and she isn’t a danger to herself or others.

Both of us took school loans in better days, but with my job loss, her illness, and such, things will never get better. I went to see a psychiatrist at a clinic, and all he could come up with is there was nothing I could do but divorce her and try to save myself. That is not an option. No health insurance = no meds anyway. There is a thing I will not break. I expect to see a lot more of mental breakdowns and psychiatric disorders as our society fails over the coming months.

We rent a small 1 bedroom apartment in an old partitioned house for $450 a month in a rundown part of town. No yard so we can’t garden, but I am learning about wildcrafting, and I gather such things as dandelion, violets, and such from the lawn and berries and rosehips from alleys.

I walked people around telling ghost stories and local history for a few bucks this summer (when there was no school) for food and pin money and to help pay utilities, including the Internet access (without which I wouldn’t learn about what’s going on in the world).

I walk to work most of the time, catch a ride with a friend when it works out. I borrow a family member’s car if I have to get something big like flour and bulk stuff from the store. We eat pretty good because we have family that hunt and get wild game, and then all we have to buy is bacon (we use the fat too), milk, potatoes and rice, and seasonings. For an occasional treat the wife bakes a cake from scratch or we get a chicken and roast it, then make soup from the bones.

We don’t have health insurance. I take vitamins, try to eat good, save pennies for when I will need antibiotics or dentist. I know I have cavities but not enough pennies yet. I know some old Native American herbal cures for fevers and flu -we got through the swine flu this way. Lilac bush leaves also bring down fever as tea. Lots of stuff in yards and alleys if you look and study.

I wish we could rent a little place with a yard so we could garden potatoes, and raise some rabbits and chickens. They are going to cut classes this January so I will go from this fall making $1000 a month (enough to get by) to $600 a month, which is not enough.

I am going deer hunting this month to see if I can improve the odds any. If it wasn’t for family nearby, that keep my spirits up when we visit, and my stoic native beliefs in the Creator and nature, I probably wouldn’t make it, emotionally and mentally.

I will not seek any public help. My mom did that with us when we were kids. They treated her like —- and I saw it, both at the state office and in the grocery stores. And she was a quiet respectful hardworking woman with 5 kids. I am just a middle-aged man with no kids and no fulltime job (=”loser” in modern American parlance) so I can only imagine what —- I would get.

No thank you. I will live in a cardboard box under a bridge and dumpster-dive, eat rosehips,cattails, and shoot squirrels with a slingshot before I seek any public aid.