how do we escape poverty ?

Post Reply New Topic

It seems like the best we can do is collect ssdi off our parents ,which for most of us might be $1100 if were lucky and we only get that if the parent is dead .

How?

Earn money. Save & invest vs. spend & consume. Rinse & repeat.

How?

Health is wealth. Get yourself healthy (mentally, physically etc) & you'll have the capacity to earn a lot more money.

A year and a half ago my bankruptcy discharged & I had a few hundred dollars to my name. Today I'm up the better part of $30K and have paid for some other things along the way. I credit getting healthier & healthier via diet and exercise with my ability to work and earn more than I ever have before. I didn't focus on making more money. My focus was on my health first and foremost. Get healthy first and money will come more easily.

_________________
No for supporting trump. Because doing so is deplorable.

For some, the answer is self-employment.

The other day I hired a man to come and shampoo my carpets professionally. Afterwards I offered him a cup of tea and we got talking. He couldn't find a job because of prejudice here against Indian immigrants, he had little money and no family to help him. So what he did was drop off flyers offering carpet cleaning at very competitive rates. Once he got a booking, he hired a machine on a daily basis that you use to shampoo carpets - the hire was very little compared to the fee for doing a house. He got more clients and then with the profit bought his own machine. He expanded from there - hired other people to work for him, kept working himself and so it snowballed into a viable business. Now he gets bookings through a website.

He used his imagination, skill and determination. It's very hard for non-professional Indian immigrants to get a job here as there is a lot of discrimination against them. So you have to be resourceful to survive and then thrive, That's the moral of the story: you have to be resourceful.

I know another person who couldn't get a job so he bought old furniture very cheaply online, refurbished it and sold it at a profit on the same site as where he bought it. He taught himself from books when necessary, how to do professional restoration on old pieces that were derelict but sought after in properly restored condition.

Another person sells lingerie online from home - he buys it cheaper than he sells it, of course, and has no overheads - the buyers pay the courier fee. All he needed was a credit card to buy his initial stock from a third world company and a website, which a friend helped him create.

These 3 people created viable businesses from almost nothing by using their wits and sticking to the knitting. It is possible to survive and thrive even without a basis of having a lot of money, a job with a company, or higher education. But only if you are resourceful and use your imagination to identify possibilities that are realistic and which there is a demand for.

I haven't read this book though it may be useful:


Autism All-Stars: How We Use Our Autism and Asperger Traits to Shine in Life
edited by Josie Santomauro, Tony Attwood

It's available to buy and read online too. Given that Attwood in involved, it's likely to be consistent with his usual understanding and accessible approach to people on the ASD spectrum

Has anyone read it? .

Learning a trade of some type would be helpful. There are grants and stuff that can help with the costs of any schooling needed. I don't know what type of help there might be for being an autistic though.

I got out of poverty by seeking and accepting every form of legal employment available (and few that weren't quite 'ethical'). Dishwasher, line-painter, trash-collector, roofer, telemarketer, septic-tank cleaner, janitor, lawn-mower, storefront 'psychic', snowplow driver, busboy, repo man, toll attendant, ticket-taker, tutor, usher, graffiti remover, ... if it paid, I played.

Sometimes I would show up to a construction site and offer to be a 'gopher' ("go-for this, gofer that, gopher the other thing"), and sometimes loaded and unloaded trucks until my back was screaming agony and my hands bloody and blistered.

The final "up-and-out" for me was military enlistment in my early 30s. After the previous years' worth of abuse and effort, boot camp was easy.

Drill sergeant screaming in my face? No worse that being yelled at by schizos and tweakers!

70 push-ups for sneezing? No worse than lifting and loading 50-pound bags of fertilizer into a semi-truck trailer in July.

Institutional food? Hallelujah! It was FOOD!

One sure cure for poverty is employment. One sure way to stay in poverty is to be picky about where you'll work and what kinds of work you'll do.

I don't see how I'd collect SSDI off my parents...I do however get SSI, but that isn't really 'escaping poverty' beings the income it provides still keeps you in poverty. Aside from that I imagine getting a job and working, or figuring out some form of self employment....of course that can be problematic for some of us.

It's not true that anyone with any degree of executive dysfunction automatically can't succeed in any kind or job nor enterprise or life.

If it was, almost none of us would have had jobs, careers, businesses or other forms of self-generated income. Most of us do have some degree of executive dysfunction - I did too (though not severe, my toughest barriers are the hypersensory stuff), and I had to learn by trial and error what made things more workable for me.

Right, B19 and Goldfish21; although there are many of us who really are unable to obtain or maintain employment, and it is NOT their fault!

Lest we give the impression that we're ablists, let's remind ourselves that not everyone is employable, and that "but for the grace of God" (or "but for a favorable sequence of random events", if you prefer) we would be in the same situation.

I'm on ODSP it;s the disability in ontario, about the same amount. I'm gonna get a job soon, slowly work towards being self-sufficient.

Yes, I understand too - there was no way I could work a few years ago because of cancer treatment and crippled hips; however there is a huge middle ground between being an ableist and disableist. Maybe the Bell curve again - you have those extreme positions at the tails, but almost everyone is distributed between the two tails, with most in the middle at the peak of the curve.