For the Love of Everything, Please Keep 3-6 Months Worth of Money for an Emergency Fund (If You Can)
I left my job about two months ago, and I applied for unemployment immediately. I got a new job today, but I STILL haven't gotten my unemployment decision. Additionally, my food stamp application was delayed due to personal circumstances. In short, had I not had money saved for an emergency, I would have been mega-screwed.
I know some people are not in a position where they have the luxury of storing away significant amounts of cash but, if you are, I beg of you to do so if you aren't already. I can't imagine what position I'd be in right now if not for my budgeting.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
PS. I posted this here instead of in c/finance because the sidebar there specifies that it's supposed to be for finance-related news.
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I don't think people are okay with it, I think people are probably afraid to lose what very little they have left and like what are we going to do anyway? Protests don't work. We'd have to come together and we have all been incredibly divided and taught to hate each other. We can't even have conversations online without people picking fights for literally no reason.
Yeah, that's why I didn't say “protests”. Our forefathers didn't get a 40-hour work week by asking politely.
I mean that goes back to the point of people are not able to come together at this point and are scared to lose what little they have left. I think we'll have to lose it all at this point to get people to budge but who knows. I agree with you though!
Even that doesn't really explain it. The streets are crawling with people who were evicted from their homes because their jobs didn't pay enough to cover rent. These people have nothing to lose, and yet they still stay quiet.
I think you are vastly oversimplifying things. For starters, who is going to organize this? If you don’t have food or shelter, your only focus for the day is find food and a relatively safe place to sleep at night.
But, let’s say that they did organize. We know what the outcome would be: the police would show up, beat the shit out of them, jail them, and throw away what few possessions they have left. And most people’s reaction to that would be “I’m glad the police finally cleaned up our streets” because, whether they want to admit it or not, most people hate the poor, and especially hate the unhoused and just want them to disappear. I can say that with confidence because that’s what happens in major cities when the unhoused do anything, every. time. Those who have been suffering for a while have had the spirit beaten out of them, and the recently unhoused quickly learn to follow suit if they want to stay alive and have any hope of improving their lives because if you have any criminal record whatsoever, you immediately become unhirable to 90% of businesses. Creating problems for the system is a way to guarantee you will remain unhoused for the rest of whatever life you have left after.
Yeah, that's true. Everyone seems to hate the homeless. And they'll probably continue to hate the homeless even as millions of working middle-class people lose their homes as a result of the housing and job crisis. Hell, the newly homeless will probably hate themselves, too.
But I don't understand why. These homeless people didn't choose to jack up their rent and slash their wages; their landlords and employers did. They're victims, not perpetrators. Why would people hate them? Is everybody's brain malfunctioning from microplastic poisoning or something?
So, they remain docile because they cling to a false hope? As far as I can tell, once you're homeless, you're going to stay that way for the rest of your life, no matter what you do, precisely because everyone hates you for being homeless.
I wish I had a good answer for your first questions. My best guess is some mixture of American propaganda about poor = lazy, puritanical views that hardworking people are morally good, and a refusal to believe that it will happen to them because they are good, hardworking people.
As for your question about the unhoused, I’ll paraphrase something my spouse, who has been unhoused, told me in the past:
“The false hope is necessary. The people who lose that hope are the ones who OD trying to escape (though those who still have that hope may also use drugs as an escapism) or quietly kill themselves and no one but the few unhoused they know will notice, and most won’t have the energy or mental space to care.”
^^ to add a bit to that of my own; we have studies that show the psychological effects chronic starvation and stress cause: increased irritability, impulsiveness, decreased ability to plan or critically think (from their own previous ability, not saying it immediately drops your IQ to like, 70 [also, let’s agree to brush over the issues of IQ as a measure of intelligence since I am just using it as an example]). And that is a permanent effect. It doesn’t rebound if you suddenly become food-and-shelter stable. Your brain is just permanently fucked up.
Also, I don’t know where else to include this, but I feel like it is important if discussing this topic. My spouse was unhoused for approx 1 year. It has taken 5 years of therapy to get them to view themselves as a person again. After 12 months, they had internalized their treatment as subhuman to the point it has taken 5x that to undo. And that’s not like, positive self-esteem. They still have insanely low self esteem and negative views of themselves and their abilities (along with CPTSD). This is them viewing themselves as a person as much as any person walking down the street. I cannot imagine how it is for people who have been unhoused longer.
I mean when you're houseless, the last thing you're doing is planning a riot that isn't going to amount to anything either. The kind of change we need takes community, mutual aid, planning, resources, and making sure everyone can come together and stay afloat, and lots of time. It isn't something that can happen overnight. When you are on the street you're in survival mode, planning your next meal, how to survive, and how to get out of that situation. There's no bandwidth left to do anything more than simply survive.
That's not a far cry from the situation a lot of people are in right now even if they have a roof over their heads. We're all in survival mode trying to make sure the bills can be paid, there's food on the table, and we don't lose everything. We're exhausted, burned out, and we have a huge empathy problem. We're not functioning at full capacity and it's hard to do much about the situation when it is purposefully built to keep crushing us to make sure we are also unable to fight and get out of it.
If you want change, it's up to you, me, and everyone else to start educating ourselves more on our history, how it got this way, and how to come together and build ourselves up in a community so that we can stand together and care for each other and actually make those changes that we want to see. It's not easy but it would definitely help if people would stop blaming each other for the issues and point their fingers at the right people and again, educate themselves. All of this inevitably ties back into politics and too many people can't grasp that concept either and refuse to participate which means they are actively choosing to not even try to understand how to have a better future. Some of us right now don't have a choice because we're targets.
I don't think people are quiet either, there's plenty of discussions and videos even online of people discussing these things and feeling the same way. Things are changing. People are waking up to what's happening but they have to decide to keep moving forward. We're in a really weird place right now.
Anyway I've rambled enough, there's a lot more people who have much more knowledge on this than I do and who are more qualified to speak on it.