Hello friends, this is a bit of a different topic that I want to talk about today. This is coming from a more personal place, but it’s something that I think really needs to be discussed.
The pandemic brought along with it a financial crisis where most jobs were permanently and fundamentally altered. Many jobs became remote, small businesses collapsed, and the shift of workload moved towards online content creation and sponsorships for those content creators. Small businesses now have to rely on the content they make for advertising and to grab the attention of customers, which to me seems like a huge change from pre-pandemic times.
Along with the pandemic came huge waves of inflation with numbers that are still climbing. Food, groceries, restaurants, gas, heating, anything and everything has gotten much more expensive, and I honestly don’t know how anyone is surviving.
Perhaps I’m too isolated, or perhaps I haven’t talked to enough people, but it seems to me that not many people are really talking about how difficult things are.
My wife is disabled. We live off of her meager social security income and the income that I get for being her home care aid. Together with my freelancing jobs, we make very little and we are well below the poverty line. I make almost as much as I did working 40 hours a week at a minimum wage job just 4 years ago. Back then, I was able to afford rent, college out of pocket, car insurance, and food. I didn’t have anything left over each month, but I was able to live paycheck to paycheck easily enough.
Now, my wife and I are both on food stamps and we receive help with heating in the winter through the home energy assistance program. But, they cut the food stamps and they also cut a payment from HEAP this year, and for the first time, I had to pay for fuel oil out of pocket, which wiped out my savings.
I know that my wife and I aren’t the only ones getting help from social services, and neither of us have any idea how other people who rely on that help are managing.
We’re $10,000 in debt to the electric company. We are about the same amount behind on the mortgage. We even received help through the Housing Assistance Fund which granted us over $80,000 to get our mortgage up to date. That still didn’t pay it off. Now, we’re at risk of losing our home again despite the massive help we received, and that’s because everything else is so damn expensive.
We doubled our income when I was approved to be her home health aid back in December 2023, but I’m still not able to pay off the bills. I don’t understand how I could be making more money than in the past but it buys so little. And what I really don’t get is why no one else seems to be struggling with the same severity we are.
Before anyone snarky tells me to go out and find a job, let me remind you that my wife is disabled. She needs me at home. She’s also immuno-compromised and any exposure I have to people is sure to get her sick. She’s currently sick as I’m writing this because of an outing we had where we were exposed to a bunch of people. I’m sick too, but much less severely. Leaving her home 30 plus hours a week is just not something we can manage.
Finding a job online is just as difficult. I’ve put in dozens of applications that have gone nowhere, which I understand is normal, and 3 of those applications were actually high level scammers that thankfully didn’t get far, but did manage to waste many hours of my time, and get my hopes up and then demolished them just as quickly. A lot of the jobs that I would apply for require at least a Bachelor’s degree, which I got a third of the way through before having to stop. I’m sure that any of you who are looking for jobs right now know that it’s rough.
That’s enough complaining from me. What I really want to know is how other people are managing. Am I alone in this struggle? Or are people just afraid to talk about how dire their situations are? How are you managing in this time of financial crisis? Please let me know in the comments. Maybe I’m missing something, so I’d really like to know if it is just me or if there is a silent majority that is too afraid to speak out.