B-b-based NY Dems?! Critical support?!

Full support to Mao, of course.

There's a lot so I'll try to just condense this down to my most immediate woes. Just before Christmas my transmission went out in my car and then a few days later I was laid off from work and the employer didn't even give me a reason. Promptly found a new job, but at a $4 an hour pay cut.

Cut to last week, my girlfriend (whom I've been together with for 5 years and lived with for 4 years) gave me a hug and kiss and told me she loved me when leaving our apartment to go hang out with her friend, which was 100% normal. A couple hours later I received an email from her and after reading it turns out she's breaking up with me and has already gotten a new apartment lined up for the end of the month (Feb). She disappeared and didn't come back to our apartment or contact me for 3 days after that.

After she finally returned and I had the chance to speak with her about everything, turns out she's been planning this for months and just acting like nothing was wrong to my face. No amount of talking or apologizing or pleading would change her mind, she decided she no longer loves me and is dead set on leaving me no matter what. She will, however, apparently be continuing to live in our apartment for the rest of the month and even sleep in my bed next to me.

Our lease is also up at the end of this month, so I either have to find a new, cheaper apartment and somehow move all my belongings by myself or renew my lease in my name only and then also have to figure out how to pay the full amount for rent instead of the usual half. Plus the rent is almost certain to go up since it will be a new lease.

If it wasn't apparent, I'm not a wealthy person and ever since my recent pay cut I'm only making $10 an hour for my full time job. My inspection sticker on my broken down car goes out at the end of this month also and my apartment complex will waste no time at all to have it promptly towed and impounded on March 1st. Can't pass inspection with a bad transmission. Can't afford to repair or replace the transmission. I also have a 15 year old cat that has diabetes and requires insulin shots and prescription cat food, both of which are quite expensive.

I don't really have any friends to lean on or talk to. Limited family members that aren't nearby and can't really help anyway. Without warning it feels like my life is suddenly crumbling to the ground around me and I have absolutely no control over anything. I haven't slept more than an hour or two in roughly a week or more and my appetite is non-existent so I've had difficulty eating properly. I spent the night in the emergency room several days ago after I had a huge panic attack, blacked out, and stopped breathing in the middle of my apartment. My now ex-girlfriend happened to be there and apparently had to perform CPR on me until the paramedics arrived.

She had been giving me rides to and from work and to buy groceries and such. Now I'm forced to spend way too much money on a bunch of Uber rides everywhere.

Feels like I've suddenly got too many obstacles to cross and my income is far too low to pull myself out of this hole I'm in right now. I'm not having suicidal thoughts or anything thankfully, but I'm obviously in a pretty heavy state of depression after all this. Any encouraging words, real effective advice, or assistance of any kind that could likely help me out in any way would be greatly appreciated.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading my entire sob story.

Thoughts on this?

Video is 13 minutes long.

It seems that there is a lot of government bloat (I know, I know) but it also meshes with non-profits and other businesses involved, which culminates in the state (in the truly Marxian sense of the word) having a lot of bureaucracy to it ("you stay in your role and I stay in mine").

I hope this is an okay comm for this!

So here's the situation, I apologize because it's kind of a mess:

I'm living in a house with my girlfriend, and her mom's name is the one on the house we're staying in. Until recently, she was living here with us, but after an incident we took her to the hospital and learned that she has some pretty well-developed cancer. We began with doing her treatments, but she became so weak that staying at home with us was no longer feasible, and clearly we needed help. So, 3 additional hospitalizations later, we got her into a nursing home.

At first, her stay was supposed to be temporary, but she's only been getting weaker (likely because the nursing home isn't providing her with the fucking physical therapy she's STAYING THERE TO GET but that's a whole other conversation), and her insurance stopped covering her stay after only a couple weeks. We tried to take her home, but she literally could not make it to our car - could barely even get into the wheelchair. At this point we realized she needed to stay, but we couldn't afford it. So we had to apply for medical assistance from the state. When we did so, we were told point-blank by the nursing home's financial advisor that we would not lose our home as long as her daughter (my girlfriend) was living there. Flashforward to now, two months and two weeks later, and that financial advisor has quit her job. We made contact with the new advisor only a couple days ago, who told us that our home is safe only as long as her mom isn't staying there for more than 90 days (about two weeks from NOW), at which point the state considers her stay long-term, and apparently they can force her to liquidate her assets (her only assets being her house and a tiny retirement fund) in order to pay back the state for her medical bills. Her mom is no where near able to come home at this point, unless we can setup at-home care for her, which is currently looking like our only option, I guess.

Obviously this is a huge problem, since my girlfriend and I (as well as our several pets) depend on her house as a place to live. Being able to afford somewhere that all of us could stay with enough room is not very feasible - also our plan is still for her to leave the nursing home eventually, meaning if we have to sell her house, then there's no where left for her to go afterwards... which seems preposterously cruel to me, but, y'know,

Sorry for being long-winded, but I'm kind of desperate for advice. I asked my dad, but he's bananas, and essentially just told me to shrug off the bills... which I've done in the past a little bit, but if our actual house is at stake, I don't think that's an actual option. Can anyone give me advice, or at least point me in the right direction to get solid advice about this situation?

I mean like the Gardien type frozen veg or vegan food that's typically a little pricey at other places. I recently moved near to one and I've discovered they have really low prices on that stuff especially. Just thought I'd post it here in case anyone else could benefit from the info.

Not sure why the prices on that are so low. Maybe there's more excess inventory of that stuff?

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/951204

Suburbs are hell.

Trust me: I live in one.

(No, but seriously.)

I really do have some free time from time to time which I usually invest in something useful like studying on my own, but I would like to be able to earn at least $1 a week filling out forms or transcribing texts or doing some simple task, and not as a job because I don't have that much time either.

So far I've had experience as a freelancer and honestly I've had bad luck, in general I've only encountered scammers (in these areas) who wanted ME TO PAY THEM TO ACCEPT THEIR WORK, and then I've tried certain websites and apps that I've read that they recommend (in forums) and personally I've had no luck, I mean, I don't expect to make a full salary filling out forms but $0.25 for a form a day? Are you kidding me? I guess it has to do with my geographic area. (LATAM)

Again, I know money is hard to earn and it's naive to believe that I'm getting paid for doing something easy that anyone can do, but I'd like to at least be able to earn without a joke $1 a week.

Super behind. Long story short, signed a year long lease, had to leave the country in the middle of the lease, sublet it out to two people but one of them ditched halfway through and I couldn't get another subletter. I have some cash on hand but not enough to cover what is essentially a fifth of the entire lease.

I can probably pay the remainder back in installments, but not sure if the leasing company will let me do it, should I even bother reaching out to them or will that just further incriminate me?

I'm also on Cloudresearch, but these sites are only getting me like $5 per day before I burn out. Are there better alternatives with maybe a little more effort or better pay?

I'm about to land/have already landed(?) a fitness related job - think workout craze popular with kids, in a very fragmented industry. Owners seemingly lucked into a profitable business that grew fast enough to have multiple locations within a little over 15 years. Owners seem to have no business sense lol.

Their hiring process is...confusing. Come in, meet this person, do they like you, yes, ok you're basically hired because we really need people...well actually for kids classes there's a new member waiting list so we are essentially leaving money on the table every day we don't hire, yadda yadda yadda. Ok, so I'm hired? Would you like to see a resume? My background check?? I'm SafeSport certified do you care? "Name a character from the Simpsons but name the person who voiced them."

What about pay? How do I negotiate? I looked up "living wage" and I got this link (livingwage.mit.edu - see the "Thanks to Our Supporters" section which is just 😙 👌)

Fuck computers. Also it's $19.80 due to Sunday surcharge

Cringe

I get scheduled prescriptions from in person appointments, but for other prescription needs it just seems so expensive to have a 5 minute conversation with a doc just to get a refill and pay like $50 copay.

I googled up some medication I needed, just hoping for some bullshit to ship to my house somehow. And lo and behold, turns out you can literally do that. There are a bunch of telehealth/generic pharmacies you can order from.

I won’t list a single one or say which one I used because I don’t want this to come off as a shill post, but here’s a list of stuff I found

Generics

All Day Chemist and Reliable Rx

This is a generic drug manufacturer from India. I think they’re both the same companies because the websites are similar and the listings use the same pictures. I haven’t checked to see if scheduled drugs are available but highly doubtful.

Telehealth

A lot of these require subscriptions (lmao) while some offer per visit payment

Plus Health

Lemonaid

98point6

Alpha Medical

Nurx

Can't figure out a goddamn way to send money for food or gift card or whatever to someone using Euros. Insert Stalin quote about hunger not waiting. Anyone got a nice way? Or a way at all? Like do i have to use fuckin Bitcoin?

Any help appreciated

The thought/practice of keeping a regular job makes me want to die. Anyone got any independent work from home tips or ideas?

I was thinking about trying reselling but it seems scummy.

I need income but for the life of me I cannot and do not wish to keep a schedule or have a fuckin’ hierarchy of bosses.

Thanks y’all.

I'm fortunate enough to have good credit and I qualify for a decent apr for a personal loan.

It would help give me breathing room for some time and help me make a career change. Are there any obvious traps to look out for?

Edit - Thanks for the advice, everyone! I'm not planning on taking out a loan anytime soon. I'm just under stress and hate my job. I just wanted to know if getting a loan would be a viable option to buy some time/recharge for a little bit without immediate bills on my ass.

Looking for good reads about living as a bottom feeder, and it occurs to me that one of the hardest things to do is to squirrel away some cash somewhere for those times when ya need it- bank accounts and real estate both being a bit too closely monitored. Is this a case where cryptocurrency is actually useful?

No account required, no fees. They make money from affiliate/commission links, presumably.

Cell phone and ISP plan comparison: whistleout.com Can choose many details about phone and plan & compare.

Textbook/regular book price comparison: gettextbooks.com Can search by author, ISBN, etc. Sorted by price, including new and used on many sites. Shows shipping cost. I always use this when buying books.

So I did a bit more research, it seems that there are tons of loan programs under the USDA umbrella. Lots having to do with farming, but also lots having to do with "rural development".

These loans fall under something called the SFH Direct Loan Program (for nonfarm tracts). Which you can read more about here and see the forms here.

There are multiple tiers of these loans and they are all dependent on income and ability to pay. They work almost inverse of a typical mortgage loan where the only thing that matters is your history with on time payments and having at least an average credit score. They start at 3.25% interest for "Low Income" individuals and families (determined by a chart that's bucketed by county). Seems to be between $45k and $65k on average for "Low Income" and the "Very Low Income" group is anyone below the $20k poverty line.

All these income buckets are determined by number of applicants with deductions disabled or child dependants (about $10k taken off your net income per dependent). You can also deduct medical expenses. So the name of the game is trying to figure out how to structure who in your family will be on the loan to get the lowest mortgage rate (1% with the grants for very low income applicants, but these need to be repaid if the house is ever sold).

All these loans are given out directly by the government meaning you don't owe a mortgage to a bank, but to the USDA itself. You have no down payment if you are accepted and are allowed to purchase any "quality" home that's at or below the loan limit for your area (seems to be around $300k plus or minus in most places).

So if you're really desperate and live outside a major metropolitan area, this might actually be an option to break out of the rental hellscape or if you have a bad mortgage and think you'd qualify this might be a way to refinance directly through the federal government.

I'm by no means offering you any financial advice, and an definitely not a financial advisor, but this program seems to genuinely have some merit and honestly I think it could work as a greatly expanded solution to the housing crisis, directly government issued mortgages with downwardly adjustable rates, long terms, and income based grants.

We're being booted from our rental because the landlord wants to let his daughter move in and we can't find anything else around here for even remotely the same price. Even rotted out single wide mobile homes are going for $1800/month.

I was turned onto USDA loans by someone and it seems like as long as we make under $65k/year we can qualify for like $336,000 in loans with 0% down.

Is there any catch? The rates seem to start at 3.5% of you're under the $65,000 income limit which would put our monthly payments like $300 below renting.

I don't know much of the financial details of how this would work exactly, but it sure seems like ELMU is playing with some serious fire by going ahead with the Twitter purchase to save face, when paying to not do the deal was likely the much more prudent move

Basically, I'm dirt poor. My pay sucks and I'm practically unemployable outside of my shit-tier job. I think I want to eventually get a master's or a BA in Computer Science, but for the time being I have nothing.

From the way I see it, invoosters are the only people anyone gives a damn about and I can think of investing as a method to get some of my surplus value back in a socially acceptable way. If it wasn't obvious enough already, I am American and this country would rather collapse than see the 1% give back even a penny that they looted from the middle class. Even blue places would rather die than have more housing be built, and those lower the ~~homelessness~~...I mean, the investor's value.

My first thing I want to check out is Webull but there is something about the app that feels sketchy, and I can't put my finger on it.

Okay porky, you win. If you like invoosters so much, I'll be one. Happy?

Not sure how many people are aware of this, but VRChat (which is free) on Steam has movie worlds that allow you to stream thousands of movies or tv shows without paying anything (Movie and Chill is most popular I think). VRChat also has a desktop mode, so you don’t need a VR headset to take advantage of this, and I believe (not 100% on this one and it might depend on the world) there’s an option to full screen the movie in desktop mode so you aren’t watching through VRChat, if that makes sense. Also, on your settings you need to check “allow untrusted URLs” for it to work, but most of these movie worlds will tell you this when you go there. Here’s a video of the movie player in action: https://youtu.be/_WQnxMvyC9E