EoR No. 23: Your favorite moments of poor dumb luck
Plus, anti-budgeting, guaranteed income, creative visions for retirement and more
Top of mind
Being broke or poor sucks. But it often yields some entertaining stories of creativity and resilience! Because life is more than just our struggles, and we have to laugh when it’s funny.
Here’s my favorite, gotta-laugh moment of broke dumb luck.
I married young and got divorced while I was still in college. Suddenly bearing the costs of a whole life on my own while going to school left me hard up circa 2010. I worked at a local video rental store, and I ate candy bars and popcorn for dinner because I got a discount and could charge them against my next paycheck.
The store was open until 1 a.m., which meant a lot of late nights downtown. Sometimes I could catch the last bus back to my apartment about a mile away, free with my student bus pass. Sometimes I missed it, and I’d have to walk the mile through the college town at bar time. Not ideal, but some nights I felt like I could handle it. Some nights I didn’t.
One late night after closing, I missed the last bus and decided to call a cab to avoid the creepy walk home — even though I knew I had no money to pay for it. I was out of cash. My bank account was empty. My best hope was that my debit card would be accepted, and I could get money into my account before the transaction went through and overdrafted. (Card transactions used to take a few days to process, a benefit for those of us with tight cash flow…)
I called the cheapest cab company in town, one that did shared rides and had a terrible reputation. Halfway to my place — while I sweated and crossed my fingers about my debit card and tried to think of what I’d say if it was rejected — we picked up a very drunk young man who, luckily, sat in the front seat and not next to me. Unluckily, he was pretty belligerent.
Just a few minutes down the road, this guy pissed off the driver enough that the driver stopped the cab and told him to get out. The rider refused, so the driver got out of the car, went around to the passenger side and yanked him out. The guy was not pleased, and I, a 24-year-old lady taking a cab home to avoid the chaos of drunken college students at 2 a.m., watched frozen while these two men wrestled in a random yard for about five minutes.
The drunk rider finally walked away, and the cab driver returned to the driver’s seat. He turned to me, apologized profusely and said, “Obviously, your ride is free.”
Phew! Thank you, belligerent drunk man.
Onto this week’s links: Here’s what you might have missed at Healthy Rich and other places online this week!
🥑 ICYMI at Healthy Rich this week
🔗 Things to catch
My latest for Salon: four ways to anti-budget your money management.
- and on why common financial wisdom isn’t always so wise for everyone.
A new report from the Center for Guaranteed Income Research at the University of Pennsylvania shows the incredible boost of a guaranteed income of just $500 a month. (Read this LinkedIn post for the tl;dr.)
- at asked 10 creative women to share their vision for their retirement. It’s inspiring to see the variety in what “retirement” means for folks (including those from different countries.)
We should all be
’s tucked-in cat.- ’s new book is out! Hello, Cruel World! is science-based strategies for raising terrific kids in terrifying times — I’m not a parent, but I love Melinda’s writing for the insights into kids and other humans in my life.
💬 Let’s discuss
What are your favorite moments of poor dumb luck?
Whether you grew up poor or had a moment of being being broke for the first time in grad school, you know what it’s like to get a tiny break just when you need it. What are you favorite memories of stretching a dollar impossibly far, striking it lucky at the right time or beating capitalists at their own game (if only for a second)?
This post contains affiliate links for Bookshop.org, so if you buy a book mentioned here, you support the author, local bookstores and Healthy Rich!
Partner and I were allowed to get a mortgage right before the housing bubble burst in 2008. Small house was purchased in 2004 with a mortgage that we mysteriously qualified for despite both of us being in school at the time and having P/T jobs.
Fast forward to 2007: We of course could NOT pay our monthly mortgage (which was under $1000 a month) since we had student loan debt to tackle. One day our neighbor strolls over and asks would we want to sell our house? Um YES. I've never said yes that fast to anything.
We told him a price. He said fine. 2 months later we sold and starting renting. RIGHT before the housing market crashed. We would have lost that house to foreclosure for sure if our neighbor hadn't wanted to buy our house. Nothing but dumb luck saved us.
Ha! That story gave me such a delighted chuckle! This one's mine (via my grandmother):
My grandma was ahead of her time and voluntarily worked a full-time job her whole adult life, even after becoming a mother in the '50s. At some point, in some decade after that, she had a hysterectomy. She had health insurance both through her own employer *and* my grandpa's. And at that time (a very different time!), BOTH policies paid for the surgery as though they were each, in today's language, the primary insurer. And so the hospital was essentially paid double, and they then cut a check back to my grandma for the overpayment. She took that money and ran off to the jewelry store to buy herself a beautiful ring. She left that ring to me and I still wear it today.