*MorganSurvivalFund

Haven't updated this in a while, but here goes:

My spouse and I have moved to Portland, OR. We love it and finally feel like home, and it's slightly cheaper to live here, but we're still really struggling to make ends meet. We're a little short on rent, and our credit card debt just keeps piling up. Right now, one of my credit cards isn't even working until I pay $300 something for this month and the last month, which bounced because I didn't have enough money to pay it. My spouse works full time, but it's still not enough to even break even. We have food stamps, but the county apparently thinks $60/month is enough to feed two people (one of whom has celiac, which makes many pantry staples significantly more expensive)!

So I'm going to update the fundraiser amount to a low estimate of my credit card debt, in hopes of relieving any of it and getting my monthly interest down (they're currently charging me about $150 a month for the sin of previously buying groceries!)

I've applied for CalFresh and it looks like I should be getting it within the next couple of days, so hopefully I'm good on groceries! I still unfortunately have more in bills than I make monthly, though, so here's the current breakdown of my finances:

Income: +$24/month from Patreon, occasional commissions

Phone bill (necessary for healthcare, food benefits, etc): -$36/month

Credit card bills (minimum payments on two cards I've been using mostly for food before getting CalFresh): -$115/month

Total monthly deficit: $127

My bank account is almost $50 in the negative due to autopay on the above bills. I've been trying to find a job, as I said in the original story, but have been facing discrimination and a job shortage in my area. I hope to be babysitting for my sister soon, but that depends on her getting a job, and she lives in the same area so the job shortage will affect her too. I'll continue the job search, but in the meantime I rely on this, Patreon, and Fiverr (where I've only been able to get commissions from one person so far).

I'm waiting to withdraw the money from this until it will put my bank account into the positives. It may say I have $300 something, but I already withdrew the first $275 a while ago, so as of this update I have about $30 available to withdraw.

I ended up not getting the job (or rather, they haven't contacted me yet, so it's technically still possible but seems incredibly unlikely and I've lost hope). Furthermore, my phone broke and wouldn't connect to the network whatsoever and when I went to Metro for help, they just said my phone was EOL so it was probably that and I needed to get a new one. I needed to get a new phone ASAP in order to receive any healthcare (because US healthcare is based so much on phone numbers nowadays that if you don't have a working phone, you cannot do it) and I had an appointment coming up, so I ended up having to put another $200 on my credit card despite still having less than $200 in the bank (*after* transferring all of my PayPal and SpotFund money to the bank).

The bad part of this (the major part) is that now I need more money more urgently so I can pay anything on my credit card and continue using it for groceries. The silver lining is that now I have a working camera again and can make videos--actually, I have two working cameras (besides my terrible computer camera), because my last resort was performing a factory reset on my old phone, which lost a bunch of my notes and didn't fix the network issue but did fix the camera! So I'm going to try to do some videos to put on PeerTube and YouTube (a necessary evil for networking purposes), and can create more content now.

My financial aid situation seems to be that I just need to fill out my mom's information (because I can't prove that I'm self-supporting, homeless, or at risk of homelessness without literally living in a shelter) and I can get some, so hopefully once she gets back to me with her information and signs the FAFSA I won't have to worry about tuition anymore, and since I'm at a community college that's very cheap I'll hopefully get some extra that I can contribute to living expenses, but that might not be for a while.

I also have an old 3d printer that I never figured out how to get working, but have been offered assistance in using it. If I can learn how to use and fix this machine that I already help, it might be a major help in getting on my feet. We'll see, though, because it was a very cheap machine and all of my filament is probably waterlogged by now. If it ends up working for me, I may put 3d printed products up on my store.