Bruce’s Poor Man Survival Bulletin
A Digest of Urban
Survival Resources
ISSN 2161-5543
In This Issue:
1. More
Crowdfunding loan sources
2. How people survived the Great Depression
3. More Free Money resources
4. Restructuring college loan debt
5. Protect
yourself from Uncle Scam’s Internet Snooping Bill
"Alcohol
didn’t cause the high crime rates of the ‘20s and ‘30s, Prohibition did. And
drugs do not cause today’s alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does....
Trying to wage war on 23 million Americans who are obviously very committed to
certain recreational activities is not going to be any more successful than
Prohibition was."
-- Judge James Paine
U.S. District Court
-- Judge James Paine
U.S. District Court
Tidbits on how folks survived during the Great
Depression
During the
worst years of the Depression (1933-1934) the overall jobless rate was 25% (1 out of 4 people) with
another 25% taking wage cuts or working part time. The gross national product
fell by almost 50%. It was not until 1941, when WWII was underway, that
unemployment officially fell back below 10%.
After the initial
crash, there was a wave of suicides in the New York’s financial district. It is
said that the clerks of one hotel even started asking new guests if they needed
a room for sleeping or jumping.
In the mountain
communities of Appalachia, whole families were reduced to dandelions and
blackberries for their basic diet. Some children were so hungry, they chewed on
their own hands.
People who lost their
homes often lived in what were called “Hoovervilles,” or shanty towns, that
were named after President Herbert Hoover. There was also “Hoover Stew” (food
dished out in soup kitchens), “Hoover Blankets” (newspapers that served as
blankets), “Hoover Hogs” (jack rabbits used as food), and “Hoover Wagons”
(broken cars that were pulled by mules).
Chicago gangster Al Capone, in one of his
sporadic attempts at public relations, opened a soup kitchen during the Great
Depression. For millions, soup kitchens provided the only food they would see
all day.
The “Three Little
Pigs“—released May 27, 1933, and produced by Walt Disney—was seen as symbolic
of the Great Depression, with the wolf representing the Depression and the
three little pigs representing average citizens who eventually succeeded by
working together.
Fundraising
during the Depression
A dance marathon
is an event in which people stay on their feet for a given length of time. It
started as a popular fad in the 1920s and 1930s, when organized dance endurance contests
attracted people to compete to achieve fame or win monetary prizes. A 1969 film
about the fad, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, based on the 1935 book of the same name, written by Horace McCoy
Chain letters seemed to have first begun in 1935 as a get-rich-quick
scheme. The source of the letters is unknown, but the letters became so popular
that post offices around the nation had to hire extra help.
Charities often held ‘mystery
cake’ fundraisers. Local society
would pay a fee to attend an afternoon cake and coffee social. Hidden inside the cake were prizes, often
featuring one item of significant value such as a diamond ring, donated by a
supportive jeweler. I don’t know how
many might have choked on one of the mystery prizes but the Little Rascals once
aired a funny episode surrounding this kind of event.
Of course,
bootlegging, making homemade hootch and speak-easies were another means of
generating money for cash strapped citizens.
Bootlegging gave rise to organized crime just as drug smuggling does
today.
Some scholars find the
2009 economic condition more troubling than that of the 1930s' Great Depression
because debt in 2009 includes not only stocks but also millions of homes,
property, local governments, and entire nations. Also, in contrast to the
1930s, the U.S. is now a debtor nation and more households in the U.S.
are in far greater debt and fewer people today are as self-reliant as our
grandparents.
Live on cash - Getting on a cash budget is a simple but highly effective way to get
your spending and personal finances firmly under control. Two popular
variations of the cash budget are the money jar system and the envelope budget system.
PM’s
‘Betty Shocker’ survey of useful resources
Get free money
Finally, did you know
that the web can help you find hidden treasure? Maybe it's an old savings bond
you forgot to cash, a tax return that you never claimed, or a deposit on your
electric bill. The government runs a website called treasurydirect.gov that can help you find your lost money, while unclaimed.org represents state level governments. You have to
search by state on that site, and you should check each one that you've lived
in.
Want to dig even
deeper? You can look for lost tax returns on the IRS' site, or get the money you lost when your bank or credit union went under. If you're owed a pension by a company
that failed, you can try at one or another government agency that says it can help. And if you've got a 401k plan
that you left behind at your last job, unclaimedretirementbenefits.com is your website.
More resources for ‘Crowd funding’ your small business
startup
If you read the newest
Poor Man ebook on becoming self sufficient, we included several resources for
‘mini-angel’ funders. Here are a few
more worth checking out.
PeerBackers.com
IndieGoGo.com
ProFounder.com
These sites allow
business owners to pitch their idea and request funding online. Average money loaned - $10,000. Also, check out Ladieswholaunch.com for daily funding opportunities. Get our ebook at: http://poormansurvival.com/SelfSufficiencyProgram.aspx
SIDEBAR: Need a
quick, short term loan? Asking only a 3% per month plus a $15 fee,
anyone with a steady history of paying bills (good credit not necessary) can
get a 1st time 30-day loan of $225 (more for repeat loans) at:
BillFloat.com
Check
Local Air Quality
A new service from the US EPA (might be good
after grandpa vacates the bathroom)
AirNow.gov
Overwhelmed
by college loan debt?
If you owe federal loans here are a couple of
options: negotiate an extended repayment
period, allowing you to stretch payments to 25 years or switch to an
income-based repayment plan which caps your payments at 15% of your
discretionary income. Learn more at:
Ombudsman.ed.gov
DIY
repairs...save on cost of hiring a repair man - One of the best investments I ever made was buying
the book Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual
, it has saved me hundreds of dollars in repair bills
Edit your
photos - Free
Even Photoshop
Elements, the basic version of Adobe's software, can cost you almost $100. But
at aviary.com you can find free online software that does the same
things as Photoshop, Illustrator, and even Apple's GarageBand, all on top of
the basic photo-editing tools that you need. It's free and easy to use from any
web browser, and if you want to learn more advanced techniques their tutorials
are waiting to help.
Backup your
files and photos
Free backup apps, like
Apple's Time Machine and Ubuntu's Deja Dup, come with most PCs and Macs. But
what if you want to get to your files on another computer, or make sure you
still have them if your house burns down or your computer gets stolen?
That's what free
online backup services are for. Box.net lets you store up to 5 GBs worth of small files; Amazon Cloud Drive gives you the same amount of space for files of any size, and any
songs you buy from their MP3 store are automatically put into it. Meanwhile,
the major computer and OS makers all have their own services; Apple has iCloud, Canonical has Ubuntu One, and Microsoft runs Windows Live Skydrive, which gives up to 25 GBs of space.
A slice of onion applied to a bee sting will take the
pain away. Vanilla extract works great on insect bites also.
The
Nanny State Updates…
Protecting yourself from Uncle Scam’s Internet
Snooping Bill
US House of
Representatives approved an internet snooping bill that requires internet service providers (ISPs) to
keep records of customer activity for a year so police can review them as
needed. Here's what this bill means for you and what you can do about it.
The lovingly titled Protecting Children From Internet
Pornographers Act of 2011 (PCFIPA of
2011) requires ISPs to retain customer names, addresses, phone numbers, credit
card numbers, bank account numbers, and dynamic IP addresses. It's a record of
your personal information plus the web sites you visit. It's like
handing over a year's worth of browser history plus the contents of your wallet
to the police. The thing is, you're not really handing it over so much as your
ISP is—without your consent.
Essentially, this bill
does nothing more than make the browsing histories of approximately 272.1
million Americans readily available to the police. And that information comes
with credit card numbers, addresses, and more. It not only encroaches upon
personal privacy but is a complete waste of resources
It could be worse. One
nice feature of the PCFIPA of 2011 bill is that it doesn't include cellular
data, so if you've thought about switching to 4G wireless data
at home you'll soon have
another reason. That's not an option for many people, however, but that doesn't
mean you're out of luck.
Your best bet is to find yourself a good VPN provider and hook it up to a good VPN tool to encrypt and route all your internet traffic
through a third-party that isn't your ISP. Virtual Private Networks
creates secure, encrypted connections between your computer and a server on the internet,
then routes all your internet activity through that server. Your ISP would only
really be logging the IP address of your VPN server, which doesn't give them
much of your private info.
You'll also want to read
our guide on protecting your privacy when
downloading for more suggestions.
(Source: LifeHacker.com)
SIDEBAR: A White House trial balloon
suggests the feds want to assign each US citizen an internet ID number so Uncle
Scam can share all your internet activity with its corporate owners. It would appear the aim is to turn the
internet into a public controlled utility.
Prepare a weekly
menu before you go to the grocery store. You will focus on buying only what you
need instead of making last-minute impulse purchase. Plus, you will not be
stumped with what to make for dinner.
The
Parting Thought…Rural America keeps a brave front
Time for a
real “GOVERNMENT 2.0” – an actual democracy, instead of “government by
corporate avatar.”
It’s always good to be
back home and back into my normal routine…did you miss me?
It was interesting to
observe the ‘de-evolution’ of small town America during our drive through three
states. In most cases, there were
obvious signs of a depression; plenty of closed up businesses in each town.
We enjoy antiquing and
there used to be dozens of such shops where we stayed…now, within a 35 mile
radius, we couldn’t find one shop that was still in operation. At least half of the restaurants in the town
we visited had closed their doors too.
Still, most of the
towns we traveled through try to keep up a brave front. Empty stores were often filled with stuff to
make them appear business ready, few were actually boarded up and 99% of lawns
were mowed and yards and homes kept up.
One chamber executive
I spoke with told me with a smile, ‘we’re happy that we might be getting a new
Family Dollar outlet in town.” Whoa, now
there’s a big job creator, selling more Made in China stuff. Most folks I spoke with all agreed Washington
has become a bad joke for the American people.
Disposable
Workers
The Wall Street
Journal covered the trend again recently, in “What’s Wrong with America’s
Job Engine?”
Here’s a key quote: “In a survey of 2,000 companies earlier this year, McKinsey Global Institute, the think tank arm of the big consulting firm, found 58% of employers expect to have more part-time, temporary or contract workers over the next five years and 21.5% more ‘outsourced or offshored’ workers.”
Here’s a key quote: “In a survey of 2,000 companies earlier this year, McKinsey Global Institute, the think tank arm of the big consulting firm, found 58% of employers expect to have more part-time, temporary or contract workers over the next five years and 21.5% more ‘outsourced or offshored’ workers.”
Yours for what’s right with America, the Poor
Man
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1 comment:
Mighty interesting Depression trivia...sure sounds much like today thanks to Washington.
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