Asklemmy

Going to be USA centric because I don't need you doxxing yourself, just giving you ideas of what to look for where ever you happen to be.

If you've got solid internet access and enough work/life stability that you can start doing research into any government assistance programs and community groups that help navigate the processes that are in the area.

I live in the USA, and my partner and I finally got poor enough that we could get enrolled in Medicaid (Medicare is for the old folks). Partner found that the Medicaid would pay for a pretty serious surgery they'd kinda been needing for years (the final price that the government paid was a bit more than $30,000).

Back when I spent more time in Reddit, there was a post on in r/AntiWork about some USA government assistance in paying for internet (and possibly a cheap smart phone). I looked into it, found we qualified, and the process wasn't too hard to navigate on my own.

There is a program called LIHEAP (i think that's the name) that is assistance in paying for energy bills. We didn't qualify for it last year when I looked into it but my good paying job last year was temporary and now I'm in a job making about 600~800 less as a part-time but permanent employee. I should probably find the website and see if we're poor(er) enough to qualify for some help paying for electric bills.

Food stamps (WIC, SNAP) for assistance buying groceries. This one can get weird as they tend to be run state by state in the USA and the requirements can often times be super shitty. If you've got a stable job, even if its shitty, that might make things easier.

Look around for local food pantries and see how they work. Don't be surprised if they're run by churches and you've got to sit through a sermon before you get a bag of groceries. You might get lucky and the pantry is funded by a grant and needs part time workers they will be willing to kick a bit of paid work you're way (assuming you have the time).

Its desperation money, but there is Amazon's Mechanical Turk program. Piecemeal work online or doing survey's for a few cents a pop. It can help buy a tank of gas or replace a cheap busted cell phone but I've never made much more than that when I spent a whole lot of time on it. When my anxiety about money gets really bad and I need to put the energy somewhere I'll fire up my account. I'm pretty sure this has an international reach so it won't be geo blocked. FYI, it doesn't play will with VPN's.

I've tried a few "do consumer survey's online for money" websites and the only one that I ever had any "success" with was called InboxDollars. And by success, I mean that a few times over the years, I could spend many hours during a month and scrape together about 30$. Though I think its a USA based company and its geo locked. FYI, it doesn't play well with VPN's.

During the pandemic in the USA, i spent most of the time without work of my own (I live on a working farm with my spouse so one of us had an income) and spent about 18 months out the first three years of the COVID pandemic selling blood plasma. If you've got two days a week that you can spend hooked up to a machine that drains your blood, separates it, and pumps in back into you (and leaves you feeling pretty crappy for the rest of the day) and can handle lying pretty still with a huge needle in your arm, the pay was kinda okay. I'd get kicked in the summer months when it got too hot for my body to recover well enough between visits but I also have to do outside farm work that you might not need to do. If you do this regularly, it does leave some pretty gnarly scars in your elbow pits, which can lead to some amusingly random conversations with strangers in public.

In the USA, its seems like the US Post Office doesn't like to post their open jobs outside of their internal job posting database. Though it seems like USPS jobs are either "work crazy hours, where ever we tell you" or "barely work any hours".

I spent about a year and a half working at a University museum as a museum curation lab technician, no experience needed, didn't have to be a student or plan on going into the field. Which, maybe it was just me being lucky, but it was a pretty sweet job. Flexible hours, chill work environment, chill coworkers, surprisingly decent pay, got to play with old arrow heads and spear points and pottery sherds and sort through boxes and do paperwork about what was in them... the two negatives were that in my case what I found was a temp job and I spent an whole lot of time alone without human interaction (which I'm super cool with, but not everybody else is). This is another one of those things that probably won't be posted on public job search websites so you're going to have to dig around local university/colleges with museum collections and find their internal job posting site.

So yeah, I know in my mind taking advantage of assistance programs feels "wrong" but I've had to start getting over it and the things that I've managed to figure out how to apply to and qualify for have definitely been worth it.