Friday, December 23, 2011

My financial situation and my home

I've mentioned that if not for the understanding nature of my family I'd be on the street looking for charity to get food. There are limits to how far they'll go though, mostly because there are limits to their finances.  For example, it's one thing to have me live with one of them rent free, it's another to pay for a house for me alone.

For almost my entire life I've lived in the same house. Originally it was my whole family. First my father moved out, then my sister, now my mother is planning on leaving. That will leave me alone in the house. If I can't scrape together enough money to cover the utilities and property taxes I won't be able to keep living here and the house will have to be sold.

This doesn't mean I'll be out on the street, I can move in with my sister. Yes, that sister. I only have the one. I spent more than half my life living with her, I'm sure I can survive doing it again. That's not my biggest concern. My biggest concern is losing my home.

It's arguably not a very good house, but it's my house. It's my home. My home. I don't want to lose my home.

I don't know what I'm going to do, I'm not convinced there's much I can do. It's not a good time to be looking for work, and even if it were I have serious doubts about my ability to do work. I haven't been able to accomplish school work, which doesn't require all that much discipline. Basic tasks can take me very long periods of time with much of that time spent doing absolutely nothing, just staring off into space trying to force myself to move on to the next step. I've already linked to the post above, but it seems worth linking to again, this time regarding how it took me an hour to brush my teeth.

I really don't think that would fly in a workplace, and that assumes that I somehow manage to force myself through the myriad steps needed to get a job in the first place.

So I don't know what I'm going to do.

If I gather together all of my savings and call in every debt that I am owed, I might be able to get a few months wiggle room. Heavy emphasis on might. That debt is leveraged though, I've already promised most of it to a family member in order to make investments that didn't pan out*. On the other hand, I don't think it matters. I'm not worried about being demanded to pay that back, in fact I think the family member I owe it to decided it was a loss ages ago and doesn't think of it any more. (For my part, I still intend to pay it back, some day some how.)

Anyway, even if I get the wiggle room, I don't know what I can do with it. I might be able to get the government to pay for depression treatment for me. That needs to be looked into. If I do, and if it works, then maybe I can hold a job, and depending on the state of the economy maybe I can get a job. But that takes time.

Even if I started seeing a doctor now, it can take weeks to find out if a treatment is going to work. All of the treatments that have been tried before have failed. What are the odds we'd hit a working one on the first try this time, or the second try? Trying various treatments would be weeks upon weeks.

So I don't know what's going to happen, but the most likely outcome seems to be losing my home.


I was going to say that this is unrelated, but that's not entirely true. It is related, just not in terms of whether or not I can keep my home. It's related to the fact that I'm broke, it's related to my finances.

I've been thinking of monetizing the blog ever since I made it, considering following in Ana's footsteps with an amazon affiliate thing, and pondering adding a tip jar via Paypal. None of this would give me anything resembling financial security because I'm pretty sure that the blog's traffic is worth pennies at most. But I like pennies.

The ads might actually make those pennies.

I don't recommend products very often, so the Amazon thing would be unlikely to earn anything. Consider that the books I have mentioned here most often are Twilight and Left Behind. Still, if someone should want to waste their money on those books after I mention them, wouldn't it be nice if I got a cut of that? I don't think it would actually happen, but for some reason I like the idea that it could happen. Of course right now it can't, because I don't have an Amazon affiliate account. Hence the thought of getting one.

As for the tip jar, I've been considering begging you all for money in hopes that I might do a small craft project I've had in mind for a year. I don't know if any of you have money to spare, I assume you don't, but I figured it might be worth a try. I don't actually know how to create a paypal tip jar for the blog though.

So those are things that may come to pass in the future.


* They would have. Years ago I had more than a thousand dollars in orders for products I'd already bought the materials to make (the money I was loaned was mostly for materials), but I got so damned depressed that I never got it done. (Which is why waiting lists are better than accepting money in advance. If you fail to follow through on a waiting list, no one gets ripped off. I'm glad I used a waiting list.) If I hadn't gotten depressed then I could have used some of the money from those sales to make new products and still have most left over.

That was selling something at $100 each (the only reason that I know it was over a thousand dollars in orders was that I had more than ten people on the waiting list when I had my breakdown.) Now more or less the same product is available from China for about ten dollars.

Anyway, you can see how I thought I'd be able to pay back a loan, the market was there. It was a sound investment, I just didn't count on my depression getting worse. I'd already been coping with it for years, how was I supposed to know the bottom would drop out?

Earlier this year, I tried to get back into that field which is, for whatever it's worth, puzzle making (think: Rubik's cube.) This time I had a plan for coping with the depression, I'd take myself out of the equation. When I got depressed 3d printing was both more crude and more expensive than it is today, making a whole puzzle using was only just becoming feasible. Instead what you could do is make one of each part using 3d printing, smooth the parts out by hand, make molds of them by hand, and then make copies of them by hand.

Now it's possible to just print the whole puzzle for the sort of prices one used to sell the handmade ones for. (Which means that even if I should end up depressed into uselessness when someone places an order, they still get their order. I just have to design and test the puzzles, a machine fabricates the actual plastic pieces.) Unfortunately, as near as I can tell, no one pays those prices anymore.

So that didn't work out.

I wasn't hoping to make a living off of it, I was hoping to just make enough money from one puzzle to afford to make a prototype of the next. It didn't happen.

If you happen to know anyone who is willing to pay $300 for a big puzzle or $100 for a small one, by all means introduce them to the previous links, but I don't think such people exist anymore.


  1. I found a bunch of tips on how to add PayPal donation buttons to blogger blogs, but the highest rated was from 2008, and things may have changed since. And I can't test it because I no longer have a blogger blog. (Well, I do, but it's fossalised.)

    On the other hand, it looks easy, and if the process has changed it's become easier, not harder. "PayPal donation button" is the phrase to search for: that's what PayPal calls it. (I currently know more than I want to about how PayPal works. I swear I have never read worse documentation. There's loads of free code which implements PayPal, but I was trying to write my own from scratch and it was a painful experience. My code doesn't cover donation buttons though, sorry.)


  2. I wish I had something useful to offer. All I've got is the sympathy of someone who also suffers from mental health issues and the wish that our country took care of people who struggle to be able to work or who can't work.

    I'm sorry.