Sold two lamps, my signed hardback book collection, and a set of dishes, convinced people to prepay for their holiday baking, and am living without frivolities such as dental floss and medication for the foreseeable future. Added to the few dollars I was saving up for Not This, I was able to scrape together enough for a bare-minimum-utility laptop at Black Friday pricing. Any other time of the year, I’d still be $200 short, so yay for the timing of kicking me in the teeth?
Nothing else can ever go wrong because my net worth is now about 30ยข. Five years ago, I was doing pretty well financially. Nothing lavish, but making more than I needed to live on. Needs were met. There was extra for an occasional treat. I had a year’s income in savings and was finally able to put something in a retirement account for the first time in my life. I had a $2,000 urgent medical problem and was able to pay for treatment rather than saying “oh well, guess I’ll die.” I wasn’t the object of anyone’s envy, but it was several rungs up the ladder from the way I grew up.
And now I have nothing and live in the shadow of the looming threat of homelessness, even lower on the ladder than the way I grew up. There is no such thing as safety. There is no security. And then, when things are so bad you’re confident they can’t get any worse, the tool you need to earn what little money you can freelance out of the aether craps out and costs hundreds of dollars to replace while you’re losing a month of income due to the failure, putting you doubly in the hole.
But fucking bootstraps, amirite?