Starting again from the bottom

In My Humble Opinion
41

[QUOTE=Dangerosa]

If I were homeless, I’d look very hard for a night job. You can sleep on a college campus during the day pretty easy. .
[/QUOTE]

At UCLA you could be arrested for trespassing if you do that, unless you can keep up the appearance that you’re studying, and by sleeping you are by definition failing to do that. They’ve got signs in the study lounges saying they are restricted to students, faculty and staff. I use them on the strength of my being an Extension student, which may not be allowed, but I figure if I’m ever challenged for ID at least I can show them my enrollment receipts.

Of course UCLA might not have the problem it has with study lounge space, if they had not converted the largest study lounge of all, known as the Alumni Lounge, into the Charles E. Young Grand Salon. Damn whippersnappers. Stay off my grass.

42

[QUOTE=Spectre of Pithecanthropus]
At UCLA you could be arrested for trespassing if you do that, unless you can keep up the appearance that you’re studying, and by sleeping you are by definition failing to do that. They’ve got signs in the study lounges saying they are restricted to students, faculty and staff. I use them on the strength of my being an Extension student, which may not be allowed, but I figure if I’m ever challenged for ID at least I can show them my enrollment receipts.

Of course UCLA might not have the problem it has with study lounge space, if they had not converted the largest study lounge of all, known as the Alumni Lounge, into the Charles E. Young Grand Salon. Damn whippersnappers. Stay off my grass.
[/QUOTE]

I was thinking more of the student union, which still looked like a campground in certain spots here at the U of Minnesota a few years ago. We had study lounges as well, but we had plenty of just student lounges, where sleeping seemed to be part of the organized activity list. Library, nope - they’d throw you out. Student Union TV lounge, sure.

43

If you add mental illness into the equation, the basic answer is: you don’t.

But if this was me, I’d beg on the streets for some money. Catch a cab to the nearest Catholic Charities, and ask them to help me get my life back straight. I don’t think you can do it without the help of a foundation to give you an address for a bit.

45

Shit happening overnight and out of the blue is exceedingly rare, don’t you think? What I’ve seen happen instead is warning bells going off and people (i.e., members of my family) ignoring them.

Just today I sent my Dad a box of food and some cash, apparently all he has to his name is a couple of jars of peanut butter and some soup. He got laid off six months ago.

I think the trick is to catch yourself as the slide begins. That is the time to get the second job (paper route in the a.m., cleaning offices in the p.m.), jettison extraneous expenses (cable, second car, crappy food), and apply for a credit card.

If I did wind up with zilch in a couple of years, I’d ask social service agencies and churches for help.

Don Snyder’s The Cliff Walk is a really engaging tale about precisely this dilemma.

46

If I still have my RN and am merely jobless and not fired and suspended, I could get another job really quick and possibly a sign-on bonus and housing. I have a ton of family willing to help----I once explained to my daughter how many people were standing in line to take care of her when she asked, at age 4, “What if you die? Would I go to the orphanage?” It would take California falling into the Pacific to wipe us out and she was disappointed that she’ll never get to be like Little Orphan Annie. Sorry, kid.

47

[QUOTE=Czarcasm]
When I lived on the streets of Seattle, one didn’t exactly “live in a homeless shelter”. I usually had to get in line at 4pm to ensure that I could get in when it opened at 6pm. If I was lucky enough to get in, I had a place on a dirty mat(along with 50 other strangers in a large room) until 6:30am, when everyone was rousted and sent on their way. Has it gotten any better?
[/QUOTE]

I shouldn’t think so. I’ve been there, done that too - long ago. If I had to do it again, well that’s where I’d start. What I think has changed is the help available now for finding work. There are more charities and the like that will assist you with the simple things, like providing you with a phone number, even a set of interview clothes. Even some that will help set you up in a place to live if you seem like a good risk.

I’d stay in the shelter (where at least I could sleep, shit, shower, and shave - if I shaved), and find one of those job assist places, and gradually recover from the disaster. Once I had a job, I could get into a rooming house, get my own phone, and look for a better job, then get a better apartment, etc. etc. etc.

48

I stayed in the shelter in the winter and sold plasma for emergency cash, and got a job running the rides at the Seattle Center come springtime. Unfortunately, the summer job meant that I couldn’t get back to the shelter in time for a place to spend the night, so I would catnap on the park benches and walk the city. By the way, food banks limit how many times you can hit them up, you have no place to store bulk food, and no way to cook it if you did have a place to store it.

49

I’ve never been homeless, but I would have family to stay with until I could get going again. I am extremely close to my sisters and brother.

If I could not land a programming job, I would go into PC repair for a while. I know how to live very cheap, I have done it before, but mainly to squirrel away money.

This Op would seem to imply I end up seperated from my wife and kids and lose my job and savings. If something also seperated me from my siblings and parents, I would look into getting a job as a sailor. The pay is terrible, but it provides minimal room and board. I would try to progress from there. Hopefully the Clearwater would have room for me.

I could look for work in five fields of decreasing pay.
Programming
PC Repair/Help Desk Support
HVAC
Handyman / Unlicensed Electrician / Plumbers Helper
Sailor (as in on a large sail boat)

Czarcasm, you’ve mentioned this before, but I never asked, how did you end up on your own and without shelter? Did you have a bad break from your family or were you dealing with addiction?

50

I’d move in with my mother or a friend and use her phone (or ask her for a loan to get a cheap cell phone) to get some scut work and rebuild my translation client list, working from someone’s borrowed computer. Happily, freelance trx is not a field in which youth and vigour are especially prized.

51

Assuming your friends and family are not available to you, step one is you call 211 (United Way) or you go to a church. Many people don’t realize how many resources are really available to them.

52

[QUOTE=WhyNot]
Homeless, broke, *friendless *and without family, and I’d probably just jump off a bridge. I’m not opposed to suicide, and that sounds like a situation I’d just not want to deal with.
[/QUOTE]

Suicide’s pretty drastic. If I were in that situation, I’d hitchhike up to the tropics (Darwin or somewhere), go on unemployment benefits, and sleep on the beach. Plenty of other drifters doing that - you’d make friends soon enough. They might not be firm friends, but you’d be able to get something of a network happening before long.

53

[QUOTE=What Exit?]
Czarcasm, you’ve mentioned this before, but I never asked, how did you end up on your own and without shelter? Did you have a bad break from your family or were you dealing with addiction?
[/QUOTE]
I’d just been forced out of the U.S.A.F. on an honorable discharge(the base commander and I had a slight disagreement on equal rights), going to my family was not an option at the time, and I had a steady job in Bremerton. That lasted until I got a case of pneumonia-lost the job, lost the cheap apartment, owed mucho bucks to the hospital. Bremerton had nothing in the way of a support system at the time, so I snuck over on the ferry to Seattle to sell plasma, and never bothered going back.
On the plus side, my tax bill for the next couple of years was next to nothing.

54

[QUOTE=Czarcasm]
I’d just been forced out of the U.S.A.F. on an honorable discharge(the base commander and I had a slight disagreement on equal rights), going to my family was not an option at the time, and I had a steady job in Bremerton. That lasted until I got a case of pneumonia-lost the job, lost the cheap apartment, owed mucho bucks to the hospital. Bremerton had nothing in the way of a support system at the time, so I snuck over on the ferry to Seattle to sell plasma, and never bothered going back.
On the plus side, my tax bill for the next couple of years was next to nothing.
[/QUOTE]

Wow, thanks for the answer. I’ve never been there and I have never been close.

Many more routes to homelessness than I tend to think about.

Jim

55

[QUOTE=What Exit?]
Wow, thanks for the answer. I’ve never been there and I have never been close.

Many more routes to homelessness than I tend to think about.

Jim
[/QUOTE]
Hell, I had it good. Imagine the families out there in the same situation. Imagine being in that situation and being diabetic. Imagine that a percentage of Dopers here have been in that situation, and another percentage of Dopers will almost certainly be in that situation sometime in the future.
IMHO, gathering information on how to survive when the shit hits the fan might be a public service.

56

[QUOTE=TheLoadedDog]
Suicide’s pretty drastic.
[/QUOTE]

Not when you suspect in (as opposed to “believe in”, 'cause I’ll be the first to admit I’m only guessing) reincarnation. :stuck_out_tongue: More seriously, I live *because *I cherish the relationships in my life. While some of them come and go, if they were *all *to vanish without hope of repair, then there’s no real reason for me to go on. I don’t particularly value any human life, not even my own, just for the sake of being alive.

But now that you mention it, I might start walking until I found a hippie bus and see if I could join up with their crew as cook and chief bottle washer.

57

Put what little I have in storage at my mom’s, put on my stetson, jeans, and hiking boots and start walking east. pick up whatever jobs I could to move on a little more. Eventually make it back to California and worry about it then.

58

I read this tread yesterday, and since then I’ve been thinking how I could find myself in that position. In my current life, I can’t see what type of perfect storm it would take to knock us down to the bottom. That’s probably a good thing, with since my wife is 18 weeks along.

I grew up in a lower middle class family of seven, on one income and tight expenses, and remember my parents fighting over money. Somehow I must have decided never to be there since I’ve always saved money.

In addition to our savings and investments, we’ve got a good network of friends and family who could help out in the short term. Japan has national health insurance, so we wouldn’t face a crisis there.

Short of a world-side depression, the only thing would could wipe us out would be if we were to start a business and it went under. If we were to start a business, then it’s a good idea to build in a small safety net or a Plan B if everything moves south.

Unfortunately, I think too many people live unnecessarily too close to the edge. In a recent thread, a person wrote about inheriting a small amount of money and debating dedicating it to pay off part of his credit card debts or to just spend it. I was surprised by people who said to spend it on something you like.

While developing survival skills for homeless is good, it may be – perhaps – better to work on getting into a situation where a sudden job loss won’t put you on the streets.

59

[QUOTE=TokyoPlayer]
I read this tread yesterday, and since then I’ve been thinking how I could find myself in that position. In my current life, I can’t see what type of perfect storm it would take to knock us down to the bottom. That’s probably a good thing, with since my wife is 18 weeks along.

I grew up in a lower middle class family of seven, on one income and tight expenses, and remember my parents fighting over money. Somehow I must have decided never to be there since I’ve always saved money.

In addition to our savings and investments, we’ve got a good network of friends and family who could help out in the short term. Japan has national health insurance, so we wouldn’t face a crisis there.

Short of a world-side depression, the only thing would could wipe us out would be if we were to start a business and it went under. If we were to start a business, then it’s a good idea to build in a small safety net or a Plan B if everything moves south.
Unfortunately, I think too many people live unnecessarily too close to the edge. In a recent thread, a person wrote about inheriting a small amount of money and debating dedicating it to pay off part of his credit card debts or to just spend it. I was surprised by people who said to spend it on something you like.

While developing survival skills for homeless is good, it may be – perhaps – better to work on getting into a situation where a sudden job loss won’t put you on the streets.
[/QUOTE]

My life matches yours well enough, family of 6, one income and lower middle-class. I always scrimped and save. Now that I have a good income and a nice home, I still bargain shop, I still look for discounts and we are putting a lot away for retirement and have no debt except our house. Cars are paid and credit cards never carry a balance.

I wrote all this to preface what I will say next.

Your final sentence is unrealistic and I think it will be seen as insulting to many. There are a lot of people that for a variety of reason live near the edge. It is not because the pissed their money away on a $45,000 car or bought a house for more than they could afford or spend like crazy.

My parents were never more than the long time loss of my Dad’s job away from disaster. They could not put money away and they were extremely frugal. If my father’s health had failed when we were young, we would not have been able to make it as a family.

In fact that happen to my Aunt and her four kids. My uncle died when they were between ages 2 and 10. It took her a long time to get through school and land a decent job. Along the way she lost her eldest son to the despair of poverty and the streets of NYC. One of my cousins tracked him down about 15 years ago. He was a strung out junkie with a junkie wife and two screwed up welfare babies. He wanted nothing to do with the family and that was the last anyone saw of him.

It is not always possible to work on getting into a situation where a sudden job loss won’t put you on the streets.

Jim

60

[QUOTE=Saint Cad]
Put what little I have in storage at my mom’s, put on my stetson, jeans, and hiking boots and start walking east. pick up whatever jobs I could to move on a little more. Eventually make it back to California and worry about it then.
[/QUOTE]

I don’t even think hip-waders are going to help if you’re walking east to CA. That is, unless you have some special divine talent. :wink:

61

I agree with what What Exit said. About 14 years ago, I was living paycheck to paycheck in Hawai’i, 3000 miles from my closest family. An employer refused to pay me for my last 30 hours of work and there was basically nothing I could do about it. I was lucky. The Episcopal church I went to paid my rent for me that month and I was able to find another job right away otherwise I might have been SOL. That’s why a few months later I left Hawai’i, moved back east, and built a new life.

If my life were to blow up again somehow and leave me unable to turn to friends, family, or the SDMB, I’d find myself an Episcopal church, explain the situation, and offer programming and/or clerical work in exchange for a phone number and mailing address. I’d also contact as many temp agencies as I could and do clerical work until I could get back to database design. If the temp agencies didn’t come through, there’s always fast food and retail. I’d offer to work free or cheap for a set period of time so I can prove an employer that I know what I’m doing.

I may lose my home, family, and access to my savings. but I can still write out some samples of my coding style, even if I have to use pencil and paper to do it, and explain to non-technical types why it works and why it’s a good thing. Come to think of it, I should also be able to contact the agency I contract through these days and at least get a copy of my resume.