How would you navigate a severe financial emergency with no help or resources?
post by Tigerlily · 2024-05-02T18:27:51.329Z · LW · GW · 5 commentsThis is a question post.
Contents
Answers 9 Elizabeth 6 RedMan 5 nim 3 Hastings 1 davekasten None 5 comments
Hello, friends.
This is my first post on LW, but I have been a "lurker" here for years and have learned a lot from this community that I value.
I hope this isn't pestilent, especially for a first-time post, but I am requesting information/advice/non-obvious strategies for coming up with emergency money.
I wouldn't ask except that I'm in a severe financial emergency and I can't seem to find a solution. I feel like every minute of the day I'm butting my head against a brick wall trying and failing to figure this out.
I live in a very small town in rural Arizona. The local economy is sustained by fast food restaurants, pawn shops, payday lenders, and some huge factories/plants that are only ever hiring engineers and other highly specialized personnel.
I am not an engineer. The other type of jobs here - the unskilled, customer-facing positions - are constantly full, especially since business slows way down during the springtime when the snowbirds (retirees who come here during the winter months to escape the cold) all start to leave ahead of the brutal summertime heat, and take their money with them. So if anything, local businesses are trimming off their "seasonal" staff and cutting down everyone else's hours right now.
I was a stay-at-home mother for the last several years but a victim of domestic violence by my ex-husband. I finally got out of that marriage but of course not without a huge gap on my resume.
My current partner and I tried signing up to deliver food on DoorDash, but they're not accepting new Dashers in my area right now because there are already too many. I had to sign my partner up for it because my driver's license is suspended for unpaid fines from years ago. I also signed him up for UberEats delivery but I'm not sure his background check will clear because he has a misdemeanor on his record from seven years ago that will probably show up, and if so then his application will probably get denied.
My partner works in asphalt during the summer months, which is when most of the major road projects get underway. We actually were packing up everything a couple weeks ago, getting ready to go to the far northern part of the state where he had a job lined up through someone he used to work for a long time ago, but the guy called him at the last minute and I don't know what happened but the job fell through and now we are so, so broke and have bills coming up and we are going to lose our vehicle if we don't come up with something soon.
I have been selling our belongings on Facebook Marketplace just to get us by. I even sold our washer and dryer.
Luckily, my partner has established a good professional reputation over the years because he is very skilled in his line of work. Many of the people/companies he's worked for in the past would be glad to hire him again, but the available jobs he's found are out of state, like in Seattle and various parts of California, which would be fine except that it costs a lot of money to get there and live until he gets his first paycheck.
LW is great for finding non-obvious solutions to real problems, so I figured it couldn't hurt to ask here for advice. Still, it's hard for me to reveal all of this, but I do trust this community to understand where I'm coming from.
To be clear, I don't expect anyone here to be able to give me some miracle solution that will fix everything, but if anyone has any non-obvious ideas or insights, I'm all ears.
Editing to add: It occurs to me that there is a possibility someone here may have the will and the means to help out directly with money, which I won't say no to (if you are interested in sending a dollar or two to me, my cashapp tag is $audryarizona). Please note that I do not intend for this to make anyone feel harassed, and if you have an aversion to this kind of thing that is perfectly valid and I do not think the less of you. I give my most heartfelt thanks to anyone who wants to help in any capacity.
Answers
https://www.modestneeds.org/ will give one time cash infusions to people with capital intensive problems (like moving costs, or keeping a vehicle). I haven't looked into them in a while; a few years ago there was a requirement that the cash infusion would get recipients on a stable track, I think that might be looser now.
↑ comment by benjaminikuta · 2024-05-03T00:19:56.507Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
"At least one adult member of the applicant's household must be documentably employed at the time of the application"
↑ comment by Tigerlily · 2024-05-04T09:49:50.459Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thank you for this. I'm not eligible for it but I will send it to my sister who is. She needs emergency dental work but the health insurance plan offered through her employer doesn't cover it so she's just been suffering through the pain. So really, thank you. She will be so glad.
Aella has written a bunch on camgirling, including questions to ask yourself about suitability. The advice is probably applicable to twitch streaming or tiktok video creation too.
Content or product creation online and sales has never been easier, but it's hard work with no guarantee of payoff.
There is a lot written/on youtube about retail arbitrage, if you have stores nearby you might be able to do that.
Fully remote entry level call center/sales jobs are pretty much always hiring, they're pretty demanding though. Staffing agencies can potentially set you up, be ready to do things like convince elderly people to give to a charity.
Longer term, professional certifications in healthcare or IT can usually make a big difference in someone's life.
I'm guessing the funding environment for entrepreneurs isn't great right now, but something is always happening somewhere.
Amazon Mechanical Turk used to be a decent way of doing boring work for a little money.
Free money from the government is a thing, but services for people who don't have kids are few and far between.
Starting from zero today is hard, but the best thing you can do is get out there and start trying stuff. You don't have any opportunity cost for trying things, which isn't true for a lot of people. You can go into the unknown knowing that the alternative (your present situation) is complete crap.
Good luck!
↑ comment by Tigerlily · 2024-05-04T09:41:36.634Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thank you for the thoughtful suggestions. Aella is exemplary but camgirling strikes me as a nightmare.
I have considered making stuff, like custom glasses/premium drinkware, and selling on Etsy but the market seems saturated and I've never had the money to buy the equipment to learn the skills required to do this kind of thing.
I am certified in Salesforce and could probably get hired helping to manage the Salesforce org for my tribe (Cherokee Nation) but would have to move to Oklahoma.
I've applied for every grant I can find that I'm eligible for, but there's not much out there and the competition is stiff.
We will figure out something, I'm sure. If we don't, there's nothing standing between us and homelessness and that reality fills me with anger and despair.
I feel like there's nothing society wants from me, so there's no way for me to convince society that I deserve anything from it.
It's so hard out here.
Replies from: RedMan↑ comment by RedMan · 2024-05-04T19:50:41.971Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If you can get a salesforce cert, you can get any of the other baseline IT certs. Being a female and being native is actually massive for hiring at companies that care about that stuff.
Apply for government IT jobs, help desk type stuff, a lot of it is hybrid or remote, if it's a hybrid position, ask to be remote for the first month (two paychecks) to manage moving.
Six months in, open a business, ask your company to switch you to 1099, route the job through your business, work it for another year, this creates a performance history.
Now you are a poor, native american woman owned small business, and you can apply for 8A set aside contracts as the prime. This allows you to take 10% or so off the top when teaming with a large company that will actually staff the thing. Grow to around 40 employees, sell for 5-10mil in 15 years.
It's not honest work, but lots of people have done this. If you think I'm full of it, I literally worked on a contract where one of the companies on the winning team was called "Native American Woman".
Good luck.
You're here, which tells me you have internet access.
I mentally categorize options like Fiverr and mturk as "about as scammy as DoorDash". I don't think they're a good option, but I also don't think DoorDash is a very good option either. It's probably worth looking into online gig economy options.
What skills were you renting to companies before you became a stay-at-home parent? There are probably online options to rent the same skills to others around the world.
You write fluently in English and it sounds like English is your first language. Have you considered renting your linguistic skills to people with English as a second language? You may be able to find wealthy international people who value your proof-reading skills on their college work, or conversational skills to practice their spoken English with gentle correction as needed. It won't pay competitively with the tech industry, but it'll pay more than nothing.
If you're in excellent health, the classic "super weird side gig" is stool donor programs. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i48nw33pW9kuXsFBw/being-a-donor-for-fecal-microbiota-transplants-fmt-do-good [LW · GW] for more.
Another weird one that depends on your age and health and bodily situation, since you've had more than 0 kids of your own, is gestational surrogacy. Maybe not a good fit, but hey, you asked for weird.
For a less weird one, try browsing Craigslist in a more affluent area to see what personal services people offer. House cleaning? Gardening? Dog walking? Browse Craigslist in your area and see which of those niches seem under-populated relative to elsewhere. Then use what you saw in the professionalism of the ads in wealthier areas to offer the missing services. This may get 0 results, but you might discover that there are local rich techies who would quite enjoy outsourcing certain household services for a rate that seems affordable to them but game-changing to you. Basically anything you imagine servants doing for a fairytale princess, someone with money probably wants to hire a person to do for them.
You mention that your kids are in the picture. This suggests a couple options:
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Have you contacted social services to find out what options are available to support kids whose parents are in situations like yours? You probably qualify for food stamps, and there may be options for insurance, kids' clothing, etc through municipal or school programs. If your kids are in school, asking whatever school district employee you have the best personal rapport with is an excellent starting point.
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What do childcare prices look like in your area? Do you have friends who are parents and need childcare? Can you rent your time to other parents to provide childcare for their kids at a rate lower than their other options? This may or may not be feasible depending on your living situation.
↑ comment by romeostevensit · 2024-05-03T18:21:26.008Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Oh yeah, food banks for sure!
↑ comment by Tigerlily · 2024-05-04T02:51:34.086Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thank you for your response. I probably should have given a more exhaustive list of things I have already tried. Other than a couple things you mentioned, I have already tried the rest.
Before becoming a stay-at-home parent, I was a writer. I wasn't well paid but was starting to earn professional rates when I got pregnant with my second child and that took over my life. I have found it difficult to start writing again since then. The industry has changed so much and is changing still, and so am I. My life is so different now. I'm less sure of what I write - no longer young enough to know everything, as Oscar Wilde said. I feel like I'm trying to leap onto a speeding train from the ground, like I'm watching for an open doorway or a platform I can grab onto as the train roars past me at 100mph.
My children -- yes, I have children. They are with their dad most of the time. It was his mother's house we were living in when the domestic violence situation got so severe that the courts got involved and separated us, and when that happened it was I who had to leave. His mother was not about to turn out her son and let me stay in her house, especially since he was the breadwinner and the one paying rent to her. And I was not going to drag my children into a precarious housing situation. There are no emergency housing resources where I live aside from shelters which are known for being miserable, overcrowded, prison-like, and difficult to get into anyway. So my children have stayed in the safety of their dad's home. His mother came from across the state to help, and while I'm relieved to see that she is taking the responsibility of caring for them seriously, she is also tenaciously possessive over them. This is still very painful for me to talk about.
Replies from: nim↑ comment by nim · 2024-05-04T14:10:19.828Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Ah, so you have skill and a portfolio in writing. You have the cognitive infrastructure to support using the language as art. That infrastructure itself is what you should be trying to rent to tech companies -- not the art it's capable of producing.
If the art part of writing is out of reach for you right now, that's ok -- it's almost a benefit in this case, because if it's not around it can't feel left out if you turn to more pragmatic ends the skills you used to celebrate it with.
Normally I wouldn't suggest startups, because they're so risky/uncertain... but in a situation as precarious as yours, it's no worse to see who's looking for writers on a startup-flavored site like https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs.
And finally, I'm taking the titular "severe emergency" to be the whole situation, because it sounds pretty dire. If there's a specific sub-emergency that drove you to ask -- a medical bill, a car breakdown -- there may be more-specific resources that folks haven't mentioned yet. (or if you've explained that in someone else's comment thread, i apologize for asking redundantly; i've not read your replies to others)
Replies from: Tigerlily↑ comment by Tigerlily · 2024-05-05T05:24:34.714Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
To be honest, I downplayed much of my situation in my post. After all, it is my first post. I have contributed nothing to this community so far. I feel it's irresponsible and sort of entitled to hose people down with the full weight of my very negative and emotionally draining circumstances as an introductory post. It's not charming. I kept thinking, while writing this post, "do I really want this to be the first thing I say to these people?" I respect this community more than any other one and understand that it can only absorb so many posts that essentially "take" (or seek to take) more than they offer before the quality standards that set LW apart begin to suffer. I feel a sense of duty to be an interesting conversationalist and add value here, and I hate to be tiresome.
I posted anyway for a couple reasons. For one thing, I have read LW for years. It nourishes something in me that I don't get anywhere else in my life - the inquisitive, slow-thinking, human-oriented, analytical, diplomatic part of me that I am constantly forced by my life circumstances to suppress in view of the fact that these qualities are considered unfortunate in the world I inhabit.
In other words, I feel very strongly that I "belong" here and can therefore justify asking the community to afford me the luxury of venting and soliciting its assistance without tweaking people's noses too much. I feel like I can signal in-group membership and long-standing familiarity with LW strongly enough to justify doing this, because it really is my respect for this community's collective excellence that sets it apart for me as the ideal place to seek advice and insight.
I also figure this could be useful to someone else at some point, so it may also pull its weight in that sense.
But yes, you're right. There's more to my circumstances. Of course there is. They're much worse than I can justify disclosing.
Reaching out to startups on sites like ycombinator is a great idea. It never occurred to me to market to them. Thank you for suggesting it. Your consideration means a lot to me.
Replies from: nim↑ comment by nim · 2024-05-06T14:49:11.616Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I hear you, describing how weird social norms in the world can be. I hear you describing how you followed those norms to show consideration for readers by dressing up a very terrible situation as a slightly less bad one. In social settings where people both know who you are and are compelled by the circumstances to listen to what you say, that's still the right way to go about it.
The rudeness of taking peoples' time is very real in person, where a listener is socially "forced" to invest time in listening or effort in escaping the conversation. But posts online are different: especially when you lack the social capital of "this post is by someone I know I often like reading, so I should read it to see what they say", readers should feel no obligation to read your whole post, nor to reply, if they don't want to. When you're brand new to a community, readers can easily dismiss your post as a bot or scammer and simply ignore it, so you have done them no harm in the way that consuming someone's time in person harms them. A few trolls may choose to read your post and then pretend you forced them to do so, but anyone who behaves like that is inherently outing themself as someone whose opinions about you don't deserve much regard. (and then you get some randos who like how you write and decide to be micro-penpals... hi there!)
However, there's another option for how to approach this kind of thing online. You can spin up an anonymous throwaway and play the "asking for a friend" game -- take the option of direct help or directly contacting the "actual person" off the table, and you've ruled out being a gofundme scam. Sometimes asking on behalf of a fictional person whose circumstances happen to be more like the specifics of your own than you would disclose in public gets far better answers.
For instance, if the fictional person had a car problem involving a specific model year of vehicle and a specific insurance company, the internet may point out that there's a recall on some part of that particular car and you have the manufacturer as a recourse, or they may offer a specific number that gets you a customer complaint line that's actually responsive at the insurance company. If the fictional person had a highly specific medical condition, there may be a new treatment with studies that you have to know to ask to get into, and the internet may be able to offer that information.
At this point, I don't think it would be wise for someone in your situation to do a throwaway account on lesswrong in particular. However, I would seriously consider using several separate throwaways and asking about various facets of the details on the relevant subreddits. Reddit will get you a lot of chaff in the replies, but if you're sifting the internet for novel ideas, it's also a good way to query the hivemind for kernels of utility as well.
All that is to say, part of your search for insight and ideas should probably involve carving up the aspects of the situation that you cannot justify sharing here into pieces that you can justify sharing elsewhere, and pursue those lines of inquiry. Those topics contain potential insight that cannot be found under the circumstances you've created here, and that's ok -- I just want to make sure not to endorse leaving them un-explored.
If you can get to Seattle for your partner's career, you can likely get a job nannying during the day, which will pay $25 to $30 an hour and doesn't require a car.
This time last summer I was an incoming intern in Seattle and I was unable to pay less than $30 an hour for childcare during working hours, hiring by combing through Facebook groups for nannys and sending many messages. At this price, one of the nannys we worked with had a car and the other did not. I do not know what the childcare market is like near your current location.
↑ comment by Tigerlily · 2024-05-06T20:06:21.814Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It is not that high here, but this is something I will look into if we can get to Seattle. But does this not require a license?
Replies from: hastings-greer↑ comment by Hastings (hastings-greer) · 2024-05-06T23:12:06.681Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
No one we have worked with has had a license. I think you need one to take care of multiple people's kids at your house, but not to take care of one family's kids at their house.
Forgive me if this is obvious, but have you done the following three things:
1. Go through the list of resources on 211 Arizona (Note: 211 is an emerging, but not yet nationally-adopted, standard for a first-point-of-entry on social services, just like 911 is for emergency services) -- see https://211arizona.org/ .
Your goal here is to do a breadth-first search: look for things that you haven't yet applied for, plausibly might get, and can get quickly. Don't go too deep down a rabbit hole, but rather try to quickly sort and validate or reject various ideas on there.
2. Reach out to your local Congressional office for help -- ask them if there are any programs they know of that can help, especially as a survivor of domestic violence.
3. Also, if you haven't gone to your local food bank, please, please consider this SOCIAL PERMISSION TO GO TO YOUR LOCAL FOOD BANK. It literally exists for exactly this purpose.
↑ comment by Tigerlily · 2024-05-14T15:55:02.957Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thank you for your response. Yes, I've done these things. The unfortunate reality is that my state is not very charitable. The decision makers here fund the Department of Child Safety with federal money intended for social safety net programs.
The TANF benefit, for instance, is like $200 per month per family but requires recipients to spend a certain amount of hours every week in an office doing stupid busy work as punishment for not being employed, thus reducing the time/energy they could otherwise be using to find some income generating activity to do for more than $200 per month.
Consequently, no one bothers signing up to get TANF, and the state shrugs and says "no one is signing up for this program, therefore we will spend the money on more important things like separating poor families by force for being plagued with problems we have criminalized."
There are nonprofits and stuff, but they are constantly swamped here since they are effectively all there is. The need in AZ is enormous and festering. Any attempt to address it socially, however, tends to be met with overwhelming contempt.
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comment by romeostevensit · 2024-05-03T02:08:51.170Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Finding a loan to move to somewhere with jobs is probably your best bet. This may devolve to begging amongst any social circles as well, which is a big pride hit. Many probably won't believe you will wind up with the means to pay it back. Minimizing the cost of the move by getting rid of non essential belongings. It is probably somewhat easier these days to line up a far away job via zoom interviewing. Quantity over quality.
One thing that I think is non-obvious: if you lay out the case for the loan in detail, that demonstrates intelligence and conscientiousness and will increase people's sense that you are doing something useful and thus willingness to lend. Basically, treat it as a business case, but the business happens to just be getting you and your partner employed. Show past cash flow, expected future cash flow given salaries of the sorts of places you are applying to, estimates of how many jobs you can reasonably apply to, how much of a monthly payment you could pay back, etc. Use chatgpt for help with outlining this.
comment by Brendan Long (korin43) · 2024-05-02T19:03:13.002Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'm not sure if you have the setup for this, but call centers tend to pay reasonably well, and some are online now and don't care where you work from.
You could try using your partner's connections to get a signing bonus or early-payment of his first few paychecks, then use that to cover moving.
It might be worth getting him to where the work is with a cheap one-way flight and the cheapest hotel you can find (or stay with friends if possible), then follow later when you have enough saved for moving. Or do something similar in Arizona (find a job that's too far to drive and stay in the cheapest motel you can find nearby until you've saved enough to move).
Some jobs provide transportation, room, and board, like cruise companies. If you can get one of those jobs, they'll get you where you need to be and provide somewhere to live during the season. This includes both people on the ships and some people on land (i.e. they don't expect employees to live year-round in Skagway, AK).
comment by DaemonicSigil · 2024-05-07T03:15:01.829Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Other people have mentioned sites like Mechanical Turk. Just to add another thing in the same category, apparently now people will pay you for helping train language models:
https://www.dataannotation.tech/faq?
Haven't tried it yet myself, but a roommate of mine has and he seems to have had a good experience. He's mentioned that sometimes people find it hard to get assigned work by their algorithm, though. I did a quick search to see what their reputation was, and it seemed pretty okay:
- https://time.com/6962608/data-annotation-legit-tech-jobs-ai/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/DataAnnotationTech/comments/16zteat/what_has_been_your_experience_like_working_for/
- https://www.trustpilot.com/review/dataannotation.tech
↑ comment by Tigerlily · 2024-05-08T20:33:50.688Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thanks, I have done DataAnnotation already a few months back. It's true that it's difficult to get assignments there after you finish the first one or two. They supposedly have tons of work for people who specialize in certain tech roles, but that obviously won't apply to most people. There is also virtually no way to contact anyone who works at DataAnnotation if you have questions. But I have made a few dollars there.
comment by Viliam · 2024-05-03T11:22:14.859Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Just some random thoughts:
- are the some kind of summer seasonal jobs? perhaps you could try looking for those
- find opportunities to meet local people, then ask them if they know about a job
- is there anything you could make at home and try to sell?