I’m in my 30s so I should be used to this by now, but this shit is getting so stressful guys. I have no savings, my checking account is drained every month with rent, and if there’s ever a serious emergency I have no safety net, I’m legitimately fucked. I’m one unplanned expense away from absolute ruin. Those in the same boat as me, how do you deal with this?
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Crime. That’s the answer. I don’t suggest or recommend it, but people who genuinely can’t survive or achieve any meaningful quality of life while participating in the social order will violate it instead. Some people shoplift; others engage in elaborate plots to rip off their landlords and creditors, but there’s no squaring the circle. I’m not in the same boat, but I’ve been there, and it’s only a stroke of good fortune that kept me from a very different road.
I have the same view. People commit crime as they feel they’re not benefiting from the “social contract”, as in it pays to be a civil member of society. Well if you’re not getting what you need then you have to get it elsewhere and hence crime.
I regularly tricked the scales on supermarkets by scanning similar weight items and bagging the expensive thing whilst scanning the cheaper one. Or claiming orders didn’t arrive so I could get it again and then return one. Same for order something expensive and saying they sent a cheaper version. Sony XM4 for cheap for example.
To even more elaborate and long winded scams which I won’t detail here.
Like you, I have had some lucky breaks and I am doing better now, but I will still take what I can from massive corporations as in my eyes, whether right or wrong, they do it to.
Give people a chance at a life and they won’t be criminals. Well most won’t.
Why are you ordering Sony XM4s if you’re “broke”? Sounds like you’re just a scumbag who wants to justify being a scum bag to society.
If I didn’t have a laptop or the money to buy one, I’d steal one because I wouldn’t be able to make money without one. Is a laptop a human right? No, not even close. Am I able to feed myself without access to a computer? Not really, no.
This is absolutely horrible advice. Being financially broke doesn’t mean having to be morally broke. Those who don’t have much money don’t have to become bad people.
Yeah, but unfortunately it’s par for the course on lemmy.
The first line literally says they don’t suggest or recommend it. The Answer was how do people do it. Crime is how some people do it.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
That is to say, the error is to conflate law with morality. They are not one and the same.
Yes, but stealing has been considered amoral in all cultures for all of history.
Stealing is fundamentally wrong, only a tiny fraction of humanity would ever disagree.
Sounds like you’re in the US. Most other Western countries have a much better social safety net to actually address these problems.
Western countries possibly. Not most of the world population has near zero help. Safety nets are a very modern philosophy that has only emerged in about the last 50 years and mainly in in capitalistic societies that have created the excess wealth to support.
I am happy we have those extra resources to support people. But this is not some universal law that dictates the requirement. The universe cars not about our well behind. This is provided by those that work a few extra hours to cover those that can’t.
…I would like to learn more about this
Ew criminal
It ain’t pretty, but here’s how I got through it until I started bringing in good money:
This works but isn’t a great way to live. You need to combine it with a plan to either make more money or relocate to a cheaper area while maintaining your current income.
One caveat with the food tip is that eating absolute garbage like highly processed frozen food is still gonna be cheaper. I guess it’s cause they put so much preservatives and so those have such a long shelf life. Not that I’m advocating for eating that but cooking for yourself is a cheap way to eat something nutritious. But as somebody who’s gone through the same grind, it’s still honestly just cheaper to eat garbage. But, I legitimately just feel better, think better, and overall am better on food I cook myself. And that improvement has knock on effects for the rest of everything you do in life.
I don’t know how to cope because I don’t really but you need to upgrade that resume before you have to take a loan with very unfavorable terms. Maybe get a cert, start a management path, join a union, I don’t know but I hope you can get ahead of the game.
This world is cruel.
To echo what some people have said, if you haven’t changed jobs in the last year or two; you absolutely should do so.
As you’ve realized, there’s only so much you can do on the cost side to have things balance. Cost of living has risen tremendously, but thankfully in many areas wages are finally growing too, and new hires usually get the higher rates.
So not changing jobs frequently, especially in the industries you mentioned, is just leaving money on the table.
Aside from that, definitely look into trades, but also look into local government, healthcare (like being a patient scheduler at a hospital), really any industry you are looking to break into as a career.
They really need the help now, especially for entry level positions, and if you do a good job, you could parlay that into a career in an industry your excited about.
So spend like 30 minutes each day looking for jobs, and don’t stop until you’re hired. Remember, even if you end up hating it, you can always quit and get rehired immediately in industries you’re more familiar with, because they also desperately need help too.
Edit: one last thing, don’t sweat the lack of a degree too much. I’m in a “professional” field, and though I do have a degree, it’s not what I would call “useful” or “related in any way to what I do now”. The main thing is to get in the door. Once you are and gain a few years of experience, companies usually don’t care about college degrees (or lack of them).
I realized that paying rent was like throwing money into a bottomless pit. Obviously buying a house was out of the question so I bought a used RV and moved into that. I added solar panels and all the VanLife type stuff and now my biggest expense is for the storage unit I put all my stuff in. No more rent, no power, water or most other bills. StarLink is expensive but with all the other expenses eliminated it’s not bad at all.
But what about an address? No address, no bank account. No bank account, no job. Or can you get paid another way in the US?
Most places you can request general delivery to a local post office, or rent a PO box
I’m not talking about deliveries. You need to have an address for a bank account in the UK.
While generally also necessary in the US, I’ve heard of ways to get around that. Some banks accept P.O. boxes in leiu of a physical address, some will work with you personally to navigate your circumstances, etc. I’ve also heard of services that will give you a “digital” (i.e. fake) address to juke the verification, which I’d definitely not trust, if for no other reason than you’d never receive your debit card.
General Delivery is a term for when you don’t have a street adress here in Canada, so you still get your mail from somewhere (I’m not talking Amazon “Delivery”.) So when my friend moved to a new province and was living out of a van he contacts a local office and sets up General Delivery, his address was Dude c/o Post Office Address General Delivery. They hold it till you pick up your mail. You give this to the bank or anyone that needs a mailing address. We also have rural communities with PO Boxes at a main PO, and you can rent one. A PO box is all i had as a youth and opened government and bank accounts with it. UK must have something similar no?
I have an account now, if I go disappear my account doesn’t just vanish
There are services for that. I have an address that can scan/forward mail. Packages are also accepted. I use this address for everything.
Where did you park it?
I want to do this. Do you use a gym for showers? The lack of running water is one thing that is making me hesitate.
My RV holds 40 gallons and has a shower. But yeah, many people do a gym membership for showers. Planet Fitness is like 20 bucks a month.
A storage unit is rent. RVs require maintenance and resources similar to a house.
While all that is technically correct, combined it would still be wayyy cheaper than an actual house
Also you can do maintenance the dirty way because you’re probably going to write off the RV/trailer over time, while with a house you want to do it the proper way in order to be able to sell it.
Both true, but storage rent is far cheaper. As for maintenance, I’m far more handy than the average joe so YMMV.
Are you living with a roommate? If not, you can save money by doing this.
Have you thought about changing careers? Look for federal, state, and city programs that will pay you to learn a trade. Or look for a job that has on the job training — like an electronics or factory job, or doing tech support.
Do you qualify for assistance programs — like food pantries or food stamps? There’s no shame in it. Helping you get back on your feet is what these programs are for.
I lived with roommates for like 9 years before I was able to move out on my own. I hate that it’s a luxury to live by yourself and have true privacy.
If you don’t have immediate obligations such as kids, older, or sick family members/friends.
The industry is full of crap but I went from food service to driving a semi. 4 week school paid for by the company(after signing a 1yr contract) do that one year knowing it’s going to suck and then find something local you like or stay on the road and do online school/self study. Most all of the big US based companies have partnered with online colleges to heavily discount the cost.
I did it as an emergency to save for a year and get out but ended up liking it and now work in safety with no school, just experience.
One year is nothing. Even for crap work. It seems like a long time but when you look back it often was a breeze.
I recall signing up for the military that was going to be A 4 year stint. When your 19, that seems like a lifetime. It gave me 4 years to sort myself out. You can have a girlfriend and social life in that period but you do not start a family or great commitments. That year or few years is to get your life started.
You get some space by taking a better job and/or better budgeting
OR
You become numb to the grinding system
I wish I could send you my budget and have you help me sort it out. I spend the absolute minimum. I feel like I’m starving myself, both physically and emotionally. And still I have nothing.
I hope and wish that there is a better job out there for me but I’m an unskilled college dropout with nothing but experience in food service and some retail. There’s not a whole lot out there in my experience that pays above minimum wage.
Not degrading you at all, but have you tried recipes with rice and beans? It’s filling and nutritious. Frankly I love the taste too
I’m doing better now and still include them as staples in my week.
Assuming you’re in the US, check out the USPS for jobs. They are understaffed and so long as you can jump through the hoops, they’ll hire you. I applied there back in 2013 and when I went in for an “interview” it was more of a walkthrough of if you complete x, y, and z by the deadline you’re hired. It pays well and you can get a ton of hours for overtime pay. I can’t talk to the job conditions, since I ended up going with a different job at the time.
There’s a lot of government positions that require just high school, and pay more than typical.
But they’re annoying to apply to, and often can make you wait a long time. Look into your cities job bank, same with state/province and/or federal level.
Any chance you could retrain in trade school?
It would help if you shared a little more about your income, your expanses, and your location.
There are a lot of remote data entry positions you could get into. You could study some data analysis on the side, using the data entry as a toe hold in the industry. Lots of free content and datasets to work with to learn on.
Just a suggestion, not cutting you down.
I’d be happy to chat more about that topic if you are interested.
If you are good at driving a CDL is a gateway to higher paying jobs as well.
Sales pays the best because you’re in the revenue generating column, not the cost column and also last to get the sack in a downturn
Maybe a side hustle? If you have a good eye, upcycling stuff from charity shops is a way to generate extra income.
I’m not really the correct person to answer this, since I’m not struggling to the same degree as you are.
However I once heard a good tip on how to save money. Most people, when they receive their salary spent it first on the necessities (food, rent, etc) and then save the remainder (if anything is left). But instead you should first save a percentage of your pay before spending on any necessities. That way, your brain will try to make the best use the remaining money to survive the best it can
I’ve tried that, set up my deposits to automatically transfer $25 into savings but I’ve ended up having to transfer it back every time for one reason or another. I’ve never been able to get my savings over a couple hundred dollars at most
A lot of the good answers are already posted. I’ll share my experience.
A bunch of people I know, including myself, rose out of retail hell through customer service jobs. My first one was making $55k/year (in 2023 dollars. This was a while ago because I’m old) and jumped decently after a year. Plus it was steady work at a desk with insurance. I switched to another company doing the same kind of thing after a year or two, and was able to transfer internally to IT. A couple years later I made the leap to engineering. I don’t have a computer science degree. It was all experience and teaching myself.
A bunch of other friends took similar paths, and now have higher paying jobs.
But this was in new york city, where there are a lot of startups looking to hire people. And because the companies were small, the jobs weren’t a cubicle hell where you read from a script. I got to actually help people troubleshoot when I was doing IT. That first job I could just talk to people like people.
I don’t know how different it is now or in other parts of the country. I’m not sure how much the pandemic and AI hype has changed the market. But getting a first foot in the door is really helpful. You can meet people and get on the job experience.
A lot of job listings might require a college degree, but enough experience can be a substitute. Also knowing people helps a stupid, unfair, amount.
Going to be USA centric because I don’t need you doxxing yourself, just giving you ideas of what to look for where ever you happen to be.
If you’ve got solid internet access and enough work/life stability that you can start doing research into any government assistance programs and community groups that help navigate the processes that are in the area.
I live in the USA, and my partner and I finally got poor enough that we could get enrolled in Medicaid (Medicare is for the old folks). Partner found that the Medicaid would pay for a pretty serious surgery they’d kinda been needing for years (the final price that the government paid was a bit more than $30,000).
Back when I spent more time in Reddit, there was a post on in r/AntiWork about some USA government assistance in paying for internet (and possibly a cheap smart phone). I looked into it, found we qualified, and the process wasn’t too hard to navigate on my own.
There is a program called LIHEAP (i think that’s the name) that is assistance in paying for energy bills. We didn’t qualify for it last year when I looked into it but my good paying job last year was temporary and now I’m in a job making about 600~800 less as a part-time but permanent employee. I should probably find the website and see if we’re poor(er) enough to qualify for some help paying for electric bills.
Food stamps (WIC, SNAP) for assistance buying groceries. This one can get weird as they tend to be run state by state in the USA and the requirements can often times be super shitty. If you’ve got a stable job, even if its shitty, that might make things easier.
Look around for local food pantries and see how they work. Don’t be surprised if they’re run by churches and you’ve got to sit through a sermon before you get a bag of groceries. You might get lucky and the pantry is funded by a grant and needs part time workers they will be willing to kick a bit of paid work you’re way (assuming you have the time).
Its desperation money, but there is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program. Piecemeal work online or doing survey’s for a few cents a pop. It can help buy a tank of gas or replace a cheap busted cell phone but I’ve never made much more than that when I spent a whole lot of time on it. When my anxiety about money gets really bad and I need to put the energy somewhere I’ll fire up my account. I’m pretty sure this has an international reach so it won’t be geo blocked. FYI, it doesn’t play will with VPN’s.
I’ve tried a few “do consumer survey’s online for money” websites and the only one that I ever had any “success” with was called InboxDollars. And by success, I mean that a few times over the years, I could spend many hours during a month and scrape together about 30$. Though I think its a USA based company and its geo locked. FYI, it doesn’t play well with VPN’s.
During the pandemic in the USA, i spent most of the time without work of my own (I live on a working farm with my spouse so one of us had an income) and spent about 18 months out the first three years of the COVID pandemic selling blood plasma. If you’ve got two days a week that you can spend hooked up to a machine that drains your blood, separates it, and pumps in back into you (and leaves you feeling pretty crappy for the rest of the day) and can handle lying pretty still with a huge needle in your arm, the pay was kinda okay. I’d get kicked in the summer months when it got too hot for my body to recover well enough between visits but I also have to do outside farm work that you might not need to do. If you do this regularly, it does leave some pretty gnarly scars in your elbow pits, which can lead to some amusingly random conversations with strangers in public.
In the USA, its seems like the US Post Office doesn’t like to post their open jobs outside of their internal job posting database. Though it seems like USPS jobs are either “work crazy hours, where ever we tell you” or “barely work any hours”.
I spent about a year and a half working at a University museum as a museum curation lab technician, no experience needed, didn’t have to be a student or plan on going into the field. Which, maybe it was just me being lucky, but it was a pretty sweet job. Flexible hours, chill work environment, chill coworkers, surprisingly decent pay, got to play with old arrow heads and spear points and pottery sherds and sort through boxes and do paperwork about what was in them… the two negatives were that in my case what I found was a temp job and I spent an whole lot of time alone without human interaction (which I’m super cool with, but not everybody else is). This is another one of those things that probably won’t be posted on public job search websites so you’re going to have to dig around local university/colleges with museum collections and find their internal job posting site.
So yeah, I know in my mind taking advantage of assistance programs feels “wrong” but I’ve had to start getting over it and the things that I’ve managed to figure out how to apply to and qualify for have definitely been worth it.
Once you qualify for any assistance program (and you are not exploiting a loophole) you don’t have to feel bad for using it. You are literally the target audience of the program.
Absolutely true.
Its also a bit eye opening to grow up thinking that you’re, “Not rich, but not poor”, and then realizing that, “Nope, I’m poor.” Its a bit of a shock to the system.
Ask for a raise. Find another job.
Keep a separate savings account. This won’t increase your income but it’s absolutely vital that you do this. I fully understand that you don’t have money for this, but here’s the idea: if you’re already broke at the end of the month, then what difference does it make if you’re broke one day earlier every month? Let’s say you have a payout of €3000 monthly. That means you have €100 for each day of the month. Put €100 in a savings account and you’ll go broke 1 day earlier, but you now have €100 saved for unexpected shit. Keep it up for a some months and you’ll have enough saved to deal with moving/changing jobs etc. Eventually you’ll adjust your expenses so you don’t get broke even if you set the money aside. You can figure this out. This is how my wife and I saved up for our marriage. By going voluntary broke before it actually happened.
Okay, once you have some “financial security” saved up, do you have a budget account? Keep a budget account so you don’t overspend. Only transfer the excess to your spending account, so you don’t spend money that was supposed to pay for the rent/electricity/internet/food. Whatever is in excess is safe to spend.
If this is not possible, then your financial life isn’t sustainable. Ask for a raise. Find a different job.
I honestly just take as much care of myself as I can afford and hope for the best.
Something had gotta break soon. Right? Right? How can this go on like this. I look around and how is not everyone collapsing?
I work in automation. I’m doing quite well
(pssst. Wrong place wrong time. That person needs support, not someone saying they don’t personally have issues)
I’m not here to offer support. It’s ask lemmy not /c/oddlecorner
They said "how is everyone not collapsing* and the answer is that a huge majority of adults have jobs that pay well enough
Right? The question was: How do you deal with being broke? And I answered “I got the skills so that I am no longer broke.”
That’s how you deal with broke-ness in the 21st century. Skills. Same as always.
Can you donate plasma or white blood cells to the Red Cross? I go to their main center in Philadelphia and they pay $50 for a presceen appointment (1 hour) and $450 for the donation (3-4 hours).