If you’re a 30-something making minimum wage.. you have failed at life.

No politics on this site.
Consider this a warning.

 

oh dearie me

 

There is a world of difference between minimum wage as a second (purely supplemental) household income and minimum wage as the breadwinner.

 

Today's nugget from Redneck Butchie Boy:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ytq09jdm98o

"Just show the benefits of a white life, well lived, and it'll connect with people."


Yup, there's nothing like Living While White in Erick Erickson's America.

 

You mentioned "purely supplemental". But for many families, they need that second income to survive.

 

That's another of their favorite routines: They get to decide how badly you need a certain amount of money to live.

(Which also fits right into their pastime of deciding whether the poor are working hard enough, or if they are simply coasting and mooching.)

It's OK to fuck over people on minimum wage, because they don't really need that money to live.

 

As a 33-year-old earning less than $150 a week, stupid enough to get a communications degree and work in newspapers. I'll play along.

1. I've applied for loans and grants for the following: community college vocational programs, a second bachelor's degree, a master's degree, vocational rehabilitation programs, and disability. Some of the stuff I looked into included computer/tablet/smartphone repair, network administrator, post-secondary English instructor, marketing, software/app development, just to name a few. I've been denied for every kind of funding because I still owe too much money for the student loan for my first bachelor's degree. I've also applied for a master's program that would waive tuition and fees should I be selected as a teaching assistant. Also rejected.

2. Unless school or vocational training are free, I have no way to acquire skills absolutely new to me. I can't apply to be a teacher or a network server administrator or anything else with the education or experience I have. I can't even get a minimum-wage call center job because I'm "inexperienced." So I'm still confined to applying for office work, the area newspapers, writing jobs for local marketing companies for SEO click-bait websites, and non-food service retail. I freelance sports tournaments when the postseason comes around. I tried to run a writing/editing service for writers or other business professionals for a year without a single paying job. I worked temp retail last Christmas.

3. My plan is to hope my wife never throws me out on my ass. She makes enough to pay the bills, my medical expenses, and then there's little left over. No vacations. No Christmas presents. No new clothes other than necessities like underwear and socks. No restaurants. No cable. No movies outside of $5 movie night, and no more than twice a month. We get cheap web access because she works for a cell phone company, otherwise we wouldn't have it. We'll never save enough for a down payment on another house. We barely escaped default and foreclosure on the house we had, but we were able to sell it and move to something cheaper. We'll never pay off our credit cards. I haven't made a payment on my student loan in nearly three years. We live month to month with no plan for what will happen to us if we live to retirement age. There's nothing to save after paying the rent, utilities, groceries, gas, transportation to work, etc.

Right now, I've got a temp, part-time job doing page layout for newspaper. The job ends in a month unless management approves me for another fiscal quarter. There is a full-time reporter opening, and I've applied despite my physical limitations. But it's the fifth time I've applied with this company since 2012. They offered me the temp, part-time thing after turning me down earlier this year for a different full-time job.

If I'm laid off in October and don't get the full-time job, my best hope is that I can get a Christmas job. Otherwise, we'll probably have to miss a few payments on some bills. In the long run, I hope my physical condition continues to deteriorate to the point that I'm approved for disability or I just die.

As of right now, I have absolutely fucking failed at a career, if not life. It's okay though. My parents spewed that "if you work hard you can accomplish anything" bullshit when I was a kid like a lot of other parents. But it's just not true. Sometimes the bosses find someone who's better than you. Sometimes, companies eliminate your job even if you're doing a great job. Sometimes your health goes to shit, you wind up in the hospital three times in a year, and you get fired like I did. Not everyone gets to succeed or have that middle class lifestyle seen on TV.

At least I'm still trying. For now.

 

Big fucking deal.

Fucking waste -of-oxygen carbuncles on the ass of society like chubby-cheeked buzz-cut pasty-faced white boy Erick Erickson want to remind you how worthless you are. If you get a minimum -wage grunt job, they get a special little thrill deep in their loins if your bosses can fuck you out of a few more bucks.

Fuckin' sociopaths like that aren't only happy if the corporate class is kicking the lower class into the dirt -- they want the poorest of the poor reduced to absolute economic prostration so they can stand over them and piss on their backs.

 

And for historians stumbling across this fifty years from now... Here is where the revolution began.

 

And of course, people like Erickson want cuts in food stamps and other public assistance.
Maybe if the minimum wage were higher, not as many people would need food stamps.

 

I feel for you, Jack. I can tell you're in a tough spot. And I can relate to the difficulties in getting further training in a timely, cost-contained way. I know I'd once planned on completing a couple of vocational-training programs, with, hopefully, the help of some financial aid that I was told might be offered. Well, I got all through the preliminaries of signing up and was interested in doing the work, and we only had to talk financial aid. They asked if I had a bachelor's degree. Thinking that was a good thing, I, course, said yes, pleased and proud that I already had my journalism degree and could answer the question in the affirmative. Well, it turns out that financial aid was only to be offered to those prospective students who hadn't already completed a degree. So, there went that opportunity.

Anyway, I say all this just so you know that you're not alone in having come up against a lot of this kind of stuff.

All that said, my suggestion for now would be to keep trying to do the temp thing, with maybe the freelance stuff on the side, on a regular basis.

I did that for almost three years in one span from 2008 through 2011, and actually wound up with some good work experience in different areas, and for some fairly substantial lengths of time. And, of course, it also kept some money coming in and kept me in a much better frame of mind than if I were working much less or not at all.

Also, there are people I know who are "temp regulars," and who actually prefer it that way. That is, they just continually keep doing a series of temp jobs, usually through agencies so that they keep looking regularly for them, and so that they keep working, thus moving on from one job to the next, with some being long-term full-time temp positions of between two months and a year or more, and some jobs being part-time, or else lasting for just a few weeks.

They've found that it gives them varied work experience, and usually, they're done with a place or a job before they ever get sick of it, or hate it, or truly just can't get themselves to do it anymore, and yet, they're still always keeping working.

And, if they do want some time off between jobs, they can take it easily, and it can happen faster and more readily than in a regular full-time staff job.

I'd find a good agency and see if they can keep you working as much as possible. Someday, maybe one of these temp positions will turn into something that's more regular and full-time.

 

You want to double your income from minimum-wage level?

Get a second job.

Michelle Obama's dad did, and look how well it worked out for his kids.