A Casualty of The Great Recession…

I was hanging out with an old friend yesterday
who has been underemployed since May.

With the U.S. economy in turmoil, her job cut her hours to
less than half even though she had been a valued employee
for almost 10 years.

Her attitude was “At least I still have a job.”
Many people in her company were laid off or just terminated.

She admitted to me that things have been rough.
She was behind on her rent, phone and electric bills
(not months, but a couple weeks).

She couldn’t afford to pay her credit card bills anymore.

Originally, she cut down on the monthly payments and eventually
had to stop paying them altogether.

She was getting about 10 calls a day from creditors (7 days/week).

Her savings were depleted. She was down to her last $10 in her
checking account and had some bills which were coming due soon.
She had no idea how she was going to pay them.

She had no food in the house and was literally down to her last dollar.
She had exactly one dollar in her wallet and some loose change.
I offered to help her out with a loan but she refused.

She said “Shakesphere wrote… ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be.’
“Things will work out somehow, they always do” she told me.

She showed me her “piggy bank” which was filled with pennies.

She had been throwing her loose change in a jar for the last 30 years.
When times get really rough, she would go through the coins and
take out the quarters and buy food and groceries.

When times had gotten really, really rough she would spend the dimes
and nickles. But she never got around to spending the pennies.
She told me that since The Great Recession had hit her, she finally
started cashing in the pennies (more than 10,000 pennies so far).

She was down to her last 2,500 or so pennies.

She estimated so she could cash them in and get about $25 bucks
which she could use to buy some groceries which would tide her over
the next couple days until she would get another paycheck.

So, I helped her gather up the last of her penny savings and
we walked together the 8 blocks to the bank to cash them in.
Being the gentleman that I am, I offered to carry the pennies for her.
(Damn… 2,500 pennies get rather heavy when you have to walk 8 blocks).

We go to the TD Bank because they have a machine that counts the pennies
for you, gives you a receipt and then a teller gives you the cash.

We get to the bank, proceed over to the machines and one of the bank’s
customer service reps tells us that the machines are broken.

I could see the pained look of panic on her face.
(I wasn’t too thrilled either because now I would have to lug these
heavy pennies 8 blocks back to her place).

Not to be discouraged, she said she would manage somehow.
I went to the store with her and she spent her last dollar on
chicken backs. (For 99 cents you can buy a big package of chicken
backs (which have almost no meat, all bones and fat).

she found an old pack of dried beans in her pantry and some pasta noodles
and proceeded to cook a large pot of chicken noodle soup.

She went online to check if the $10 bucks was still in her checking
account or if she was in the negative because of auto-deductions.

Lo and behold, like a miracle there was $120 in the account.
She didn’t know where it came from and shed a tear of happiness.

After some investigation, she figured out that one of her websites,
which had been dead with no traffic and no sales and which she had
forgotten about, finally started paying off and she received the
commission money as a direct deposit into her account.

The moral of the story….
Don’t YOU be a casualty of The Great Recession!

Start your own home business. You never know when it will start
paying off the dividends that your savings account doesn’t.

A home business can make money for you, even while you’re sleeping.

If you would like an easy way to get started in your own home business
with step-by-step instructions and people to help you get over the
sticking points, go to:

http://securedtek.onpageone.hop.clickbank.net/

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 4:21 am and is filed under Student Loan Debt Consolidation, Credit Card Debt, Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.