How to Survive Being Broke
There’s a lot of information about this out there on the internet. Heaps of Youtube videos as well. The thing that I found with these is that they are written by people who have money, had earned millions of dollars, and are giving advice from the perspective of what they would do again if they lost everything. They don’t actually tell you how to survive being broke right now.
My favourite piece of advice to hate is to get a job – any job – to start earning some money, so you can start your strategy to getting ‘rich’ again. In your fifties though “any job” becomes a much smaller selection of the things you can do.
So how have I survived so far? For the first six months I went back to studying, half thinking that I might need to totally re-qualify in another field to actually get a job. Perhaps I could finally enter the field of Academia – a dream I had had since I first started university in 1984. Starting a course allowed me to qualify for Austudy – student assistance payments – which allowed me to eat and pay some rent. My son was paying the balance of rent at this point which was, is and will continue to be a source of great shame, embarrassment and degradation I may not ever recover from.
The next thing I did was write a list of everything I knew how to do. EVERYTHING. My list had crotchet, sewing – all of my hobbies. Then I added every type of software I knew how to use. I added my social media knowledge. Then I went through my jobs – all of them – from the very beginning of the career and listed my experience and skills.
Then I sat back and looked at all the possible things I could do. All the areas and industries that I might be able to find a job in. I was passionate about healthcare and practice management, but this was not an immediate option. I was applying for 10 jobs a week in healthcare and couldn’t even get an interview so I had to face the fact that I may not get back into this industry. By this time I was getting pretty scared.
I was able to get a client using my WordPress skills – this ended up being a bad decision in the long run, but in the immediate it paid my bills for a few months.
Then I was able to get some casual work answering phones, managing diaries. I got some casual transcription work. I took anything that was going to give me some quick cash to eat. I didn’t accept any of these gigs as what my life is going to look like from now on. These were all quick fixes, hard yards.
I also faced my accommodation. I didn’t need a ‘family’ home anymore. My kids were all living, or about to be living, independently. So where did I want to live? What did I need? How much was my obsession with home ownership actually costing me. You can read about it a bit more here.
I decided to sell my house, downsize, and find the cheapest house as close to the city as I could find. I still had my dogs so it had to be able to house them as well. If I didn’t have my animals I would probably have taken a room in a share house and got even cheaper rent, but I still wanted some quality of life.
My next decision was my biggest mistake in my life so far, but I don’t want it to be for you. I still believe in this strategy, I just chose the completely wrong business. Learn from my mistake, but don’t not do it because you’re afraid of losing everything like I did.
Use the liquidation money from your house or mortgage to invest in a business. Technically you’re buying yourself a job. This is where I found myself. I couldn’t get a job so I have to make my own. In retrospect, this was limited thinking. I should have instead invested the money but I was trapped in an old way of thinking and this was my downfall.
So my recommendation is to think critically about what you can do with the money you have available in terms of liquidating assets – if you have any. If not, there is still a way forward.
Reduce your outgoings as much as possible. Pay off all debts as quickly as possible. Once I was debt free, the weight on my shoulders was physically lifted. Everyone said I actually looked lighter. I was no longer worried about how I was going to pay the debts. They were gone. If you can use your liquid assets to kill off debt I totally recommend it. Without debt, the amount we need to actually survive is so much lower than what we were trying to cover.
So that’s so far. The other things I did was get back to writing, hence the blog, and I’m also starting Youtube as a tie in to it. You can subscribe if you like here. There don’t seem to be too many people talking about financial struggles of 50+ year olds. Plus I want to share with the younger generation that you can do all the ‘right’ things and still end up with nothing and it has nothing to do with the wrong attitude or bad habits.
Hope to see you on Youtube There are no videos up yet. I will be starting to upload in 2020. I’ve made some but I want to debut the channel in 2020.
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