Ragged Riches

When it comes to my bankruptcy, I don’t have an issue being upfront about what happened to me. When Medium collapsed, I just couldn’t make ends meet. Like, I couldn’t get a job. People wouldn’t hire me. I was begging for a job.

It was not that I wasn’t budgeting. I was literally going to food banks. I had cut subscriptions, some of which I needed to do my work well. It’s just that, like 99 percent of the times of my life, no one helped me and I couldn’t keep it together.

Bankruptcy declarations have a lot of steps. There was paperwork to fill, tons of looking at past tax stuff, and similar stuff to do. I was actually surprised that it was as involved as it was.

One of the first ones you get in my state is a financial literacy course.

In order to declare bankruptcy, you have to take a certified course in financial literacy. It used to be done in-person, but now they do it online. If I remember correctly, it took about an hour or two, in two shifts.

Here’s what stood out to me about the literacy course.

I want to point out that the financial literacy course was simple. In fact, it was actually quite handy and would have been the type of thing that I would have adamantly encouraged every single high schooler to have.

I mean, it went over everything from budgeting to taxes to credit card interest, and more. In another life, I would have been absolutely impressed by it. I would have been jockeying for it to be taught in every high school and college. (Erm, actually they still should do that.)

However, there was one major issue that I found the literacy course to be lacking: realism.

The literacy course was using items and rates for a cost of living that didn’t exist since the 90s. The 50 percent that they suggested for rent and necessities, often called the 50-30-20 Rule, doesn’t make sense when you live in a world where half of all people spend 40 percent or more on rent.

If you make $40,000 a year, you can’t spend $20,000 on food, rent, electricity, and car bills. There are no places renting homes for $800 a month in my area. But plenty of us exist. So much like I had to do, you get to choose between eating and rent. Woo hoo!

But you need shelter before you can do anything else, even get a job. Cool, so I guess we should all eat air while living in studio apartments?

You cannot ‘literacy’ your way out of poverty if your income is not capable of making ends meet.

After wrapping up that work, I couldn’t help but feel angry, upset and insulted. This class was treating me as if I was an idiot, but the truth is that it was just the plain old truth: there was literally no money that I could have made at that time.

No one was hiring.

I had been begging for jobs for ages. Heck, I still am looking for full-time, W-2 employment. It’s just not happening. It’s a very tough market and it takes a very special type of someone to see the value in an employee like me.

When the chips are down and there is literally not enough money to go around, there is absolutely no feasible way for a person to dig their way out of that hole. You can’t make $35,000 a year and live a middle-class or lower-income lifestyle without help.

To add insult to injury, it’s not as easy as “get a job,” either.

As someone who wants a job pretty desperately (anything that’s not sales), I’m tired of people acting like getting a job is what I need. Of course, it’s what I need. I’ve been applying because I need a job, often filling in five or six applications per day.

I’ve paid to have my resume rewritten. I’ve done free work with the hope of scoring a salaried position. I’ve done everything humanly possible to prove my worth, even to the point of starting a blog to showcase my copywriting skills.

The problem is, I haven’t gotten a single real offer. Not even a minimum wage offer. Sometimes, the jobs aren’t there. Or the people who could hire you just won’t because the current brand you have is too spicy.

So maybe, just maybe, we should stop telling people to “just get a job.”

The. Jobs. Aren’t. There.

It’s insulting to assume that people haven’t tried to get a job. A growing number of Americans feel gaslighted by the news stories of rosy job opening numbers, to the point that they’re dropping out of the employment hunt. I’m one of those people. I’m working on new projects because I’m fed up with employers not seeing my value.

If you’re stuck in a situation where you can’t “job” your way out of financial peril, you need to make a change.

Here’s the deal: you should never feel bad about being unable to get a job. The chips are stacked against job seekers in more ways than you could imagine. There. I said the thing. Stop feeling like a failure when it’s the actual system that failed YOU.

Declare bankruptcy if you need to, but do something to make your life better.

Start a business with no money. Start cold calling clients if you have to. Get that rolodex of contacts. But don’t allow people to fool you into thinking that personal finance will save you when the reality is often just a blunt, brutal lack of money.