Independently Poor

When I was an active member of Metafilter, at some point I put Independently Poor as a descriptor in my profile and I eventually wrote a piece with that phrase in the title. It used to have more articles cited, but link rot is very real.

But it still has the citation for my understanding that Humphrey Bogart is credited with the concept of F*** You Money and his framing of that concept had nothing to do with being obscenely wealthy.

It was about having enough cash in hand at all times to keep the wolf from the door and buy you just enough breathing room to tell anyone where to stick it.

That's probably why he became a legendary actor with a sterling reputation. His idea of F*** You Money was enough money to say no to roles that he didn't think were any good.

He never took a part out of desperation for money. He took parts he thought were good. So people concluded he was amazing because all his roles were associated with successful projects and that's not normal.

In the modern world, ordinary people are more able than ever to live like the Jet Set. It's much more feasible to take your debit card and smartphone and go wherever, confident that there will be familiar stores and your debit card will be accepted and so forth.

When I was a teenager a bit over four decades ago, people paid by check or with cash. Out-of-state checks weren't warmly welcomed, credit cards weren't the norm and debit cards didn't exist.

Today, if you are dirt poor, even homeless, you can get online by smartphone or by a public library computer and research an astounding amount of information about a different place.

If you are an American living in the contiguous Lower Forty-Eight states, you can take a bus or train or start walking and your food stamp card will work at grocery stores in other states, though the rules of what you can buy may change because that's state specific.

Some states let you use food stamps to pay for hot meals from the grocery store deli and some allow you to use them at specific fast food places. That works with your out-of-state food stamp card used locally.

You will need to cancel your old account when applying for a new one in a new state, but poor people have the ability to move around in an unprecedented fashion. Even extremely poor people.

Independently Poor means you have some kind of unearned income, though it's not enough to adequately support you in a middle class lifestyle, and circumstances conducive to moving elsewhere.

If you have alimony, child support, social security, a retirement check or any other monthly income not place based and not dependent on working, you are potentially Independently Poor. (Do keep in mind if you get child support, your custody agreement may state you are not free to up and move at will.)

If you have portable income of some kind, like online freelance income or Patreon, you are potentially Independently Poor.

If you live someplace expensive and are Independently Poor, finding a place with lower living expenses will make your existing funds go further without clipping coupons, tightening your belt, etc. 

I had this conversation with someone telling me to move to New York and get a better paying job. First, the job may not really pay that much better after you account for cost of living. Second, it erodes the value of my unearned income and portable earned income to move someplace more expensive with no guarantee I can get a better-paying job.

I have a Certificate in GIS and I have spent years trying to brainstorm a better method for helping ordinary people research potential places to move. I started a reddit called Relo as one of my many failed projects for trying to help ordinary Americans figure out where they might wish to live. 

I've never come up with a good answer. I've used various online sources of information about local crime and local weather and cost of living and "find your spot" type websites with questionnaires and never liked any of them.

I did my own research and I made a list of commercial establishments I wanted or needed and used their websites or Google Maps to check. See for example How I House Hunt.

I don't know how to turn that into a business that makes me money. I applied for a job offer where some rich guy wanted that kind of research and I was homeless at the time, so he never wrote me back because my current lack of income was apparently more important than my Certificate in GIS for judging me.

But most Ordinary Joe Americans could do similar research and just go elsewhere rather than trying to desperately make HERE work. 

And there's no obligation to leave just because you began looking stuff up. Maybe you decide "THIS is as good as it gets." And stay put for some reason.

Take all the time you like to look around, make lists of stuff you WANT in life, dream a little. Consider it to be a hobby, the way some people fantasize about how they would spend the money if they won the lottery while not really expecting to.

I ended up going to Aberdeen, Washington and staying for nearly six years and in some ways, it worked better than I expected, though I don't recommend anyone else move there. In fact, I strongly suggest you not go there.

It did have me in housing during COVID-19, a time when a lot of homeless services were curtailed and being homeless was especially hard.

I've spent more than two years recovering my health from living there and I sincerely believe it should be classified as a Superfund site. But, some lessons learned from picking a place to go via Internet research:

1. There are limits to what you can find out about a place via Internet search. I'm pretty Internet savvy and was surprised by how much I didn't know before going there.

2. If you know people in an area and have visited it before moving there, that's probably better than what I did. I had extremely negative experiences with the people and the Internet can't tell you that ahead of time.

3. If you drive, you probably have more flexibility than I had. I needed to go someplace I could get by bus and train affordably and that was a large factor in going there.

I ended up there because things were deteriorating on the ground in California and opportunity presented itself. So I left fairly suddenly and was back in housing three days after getting to Washington State after nearly six years of homelessness.

If you are homeless but not completely without income, moving someplace with lower rents may go a long ways towards making your life work. And you don't necessarily need to leave the US and go someplace "exotic" like Mexico or Vietnam where English is not the default norm.