Can you build a life from $25?

[roo_ster]

An interesting read.

Homeless + $25 + 1 year + effort = apartment+ truck + $5000 in bank

Homeless: Can you build a life from $25?
In a test of the American Dream, Adam Shepard started life from scratch with the clothes on his back and twenty-five dollars. Ten months later, he had an apartment, a car, and a small savings.
By Peter Smith | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

Alone on a dark gritty street, Adam Shepard searched for a homeless shelter. He had a gym bag, $25, and little else. A former college athlete with a bachelor's degree, Mr. Shepard had left a comfortable life with supportive parents in Raleigh, N.C. Now he was an outsider on the wrong side of the tracks in Charles?ton, S.C.

But Shepard's descent into poverty in the summer of 2006 was no accident. Shortly after graduating from Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., he intentionally left his parents' home to test the vivacity of the American Dream. His goal: to have a furnished apartment, a car, and $2,500 in savings within a year.

To make his quest even more challenging, he decided not to use any of his previous contacts or mention his education.

During his first 70 days in Charleston, Shepard lived in a shelter and received food stamps. He also made new friends, finding work as a day laborer, which led to a steady job with a moving company.

Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in his family. But by then he had moved into an apartment, bought a pickup truck, and had saved close to $5,000.

The effort, he says, was inspired after reading "Nickel and Dimed," in which author Barbara Ehrenreich takes on a series of low-paying jobs. Unlike Ms. Ehrenreich, who chronicled the difficulty of advancing beyond the ranks of the working poor, Shepard found he was able to successfully climb out of his self-imposed poverty.

He tells his story in "Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream." The book, he says, is a testament to what ordinary Americans can achieve. On a recent trip to the Boston, he spoke about his experience:

Becoming a mover and living in a homeless shelter  that hadn't been part of your life before. How much did your lifestyle actually change?

Shepard: It changed dramatically. There were simple luxuries that I didn't afford myself. I had to make sacrifices to achieve the goals that I set out. One of those was eating out. I didn't have a cellphone. Especially in this day and age, that was a dramatic change for me.... I was getting by on chicken and Rice-A-Roni dinner and was happy. That's what I learned ... we lived [simply], but still we were happy.

But surely your background  you're privileged; you have an education and a family  made it much easier for you to achieve.

I didn't use my college education, credit history, or contacts [while in South Carolina]. But in real life, I had these lessons that I had learned. I don't think that played to my advantage. How much of a college education do you need to budget your money to a point that you're not spending frivolously, but you're instead putting your money in the bank?

Do you need a college education? I don't think so. To be honest with you, I think I was disadvantaged, because my thinking was inside of a box. I have the way that I lived [in North Carolina]  and to enter into this totally new world and acclimate to a different lifestyle, that was the challenge for me.

Still, there was that safety net. Were you ever tempted to tap your past work, education, or family networks?

I was never tempted. I had a credit card in my back pocket in case of an emergency. The rule was if I used the credit card then, "The project's over, I'm going home."

So what did you tell people when they asked what you were doing?

That was the only touchy part of my story. I had this great back story on how I was escaping my druggy mom and going to live with my alcoholic dad. Things just fell apart, and there I was at the homeless shelter. I really embellished this fabricated story and told it to anyone who would listen.

The interesting thing is that nobody really cared.... It wasn't so much as where we were coming from, it was where we were going.

Would your project have changed if you'd had child-care payments or been required to report to a probation officer? Wouldn't that have made it much harder?

The question isn't whether I would have been able to succeed. I think it's the attitude that I take in: "I've got child care. I've got a probation officer. I've got all these bills. Now what am I going to do? Am I going to continue to go out to eat and put rims on my Cadillac? Or am I going to make some things happen in my life...?" One guy, who arrived [at the shelter] on a Tuesday had been hit by a car on [the previous] Friday by a drunk driver. He was in a wheelchair. He was totally out of it. He was at the shelter. And I said, "Dude, your life is completely changed." And he said, "Yeah, you're right, but I'm getting the heck out of here." Then there was this other guy who could walk and everything was good in his life, but he was just kind of bumming around, begging on the street corner. To see the attitudes along the way, that is what my story is about.

You made it out of the shelter, got a job, and opened a bank account. Did you meet other people who had similar experiences?

Oh, absolutely. We don't need "Scratch Beginnings" to know that millions of Americans are creating a life for themselves from nothing.... Just as millions of Americans are not getting by. There are both ends of the spectrum.

To meet that guy [in the wheelchair] at the shelter, [makes you wonder] 'Can he get out and go to college and become a doctor?' Maybe, maybe not. I think he can set goals..... You can use your talents. That's why, from the beginning, I set very realistic goals: $2,500, a job, car. This isn't a "rags-to-riches million-dollar" story. This is very realistic. I truly believe, based on what I saw at the shelter ...that anyone can do that.

[/size]

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

 

Attaboy, Adam!

[BridgeWalker]

I more or less did this, although it was not voluntary.

Worked pretty good.

Then I threw it all away to go back to school.

[AmbulanceDriver]

Gee...  Imagine that.  Someone who started with nothing but $25 and the clothes on his back (albeit intentionally) and in *10 months* was in a steady job, in an apartment, driving a pickup, and had $5,000 in savings.........

And yet, we have probably *millions* living on welfare, because they're too $@_(&!+$+_(@*#~((((((()_&+#)*^&#  lazy to get off their asses and GET A $@_(&E$#^_)@*#(_)(&% JOB!!!!!

DON'T TELL ME THERE AREN'T LIVING WAGE JOBS OUT THERE!!!!!  This guy is proof that with HARD WORK, DISCIPLINE, and a little SELF-#_(&#_@)&-CONTROL (more on that in a bit) you can actually have the necessities of life and still sock away an average of $500 a month into savings!

Does he have a big screen TV in his apartment?  I doubt it.  Probably doesn't even have a TV at all in there...  No Nintendo Wii, or XBOX 360, or PS3...  Probably second-hand store stuff for the most part, but it's the necessities.  And yeah, I know that for the first 70 days, he was getting help.  But that was just over 2 months.  Out of 10.  It was TEMPORARY!

Here's a couple of important things I got out of this:

There were simple luxuries that I didn't afford myself. I had to make sacrifices to achieve the goals that I set out. One of those was eating out. I didn't have a cellphone. Especially in this day and age, that was a dramatic change for me.... I was getting by on chicken and Rice-A-Roni dinner and was happy. That's what I learned ... we lived [simply], but still we were happy.

How much of a college education do you need to budget your money to a point that you're not spending frivolously, but you're instead putting your money in the bank?

Would your project have changed if you'd had child-care payments or been required to report to a probation officer? Wouldn't that have made it much harder?

The question isn't whether I would have been able to succeed. I think it's the attitude that I take in: "I've got child care. I've got a probation officer. I've got all these bills. Now what am I going to do? Am I going to continue to go out to eat and put rims on my Cadillac? Or am I going to make some things happen in my life...?"

[CAnnoneer]

The story does not mention his real advantage: He had nobody else to blame.

[crt360]

Then I threw it all away to go back to school.

I've hesitated to tell you that . . . but, now that you mention it. 

Let's see him build a life from -$100,, growing at 12% (and he can use his newly earned law degree).

I have no doubt that you can build a life from $25.  I see people doing roughly that every day - and most of them aren't even legally here.

[wooderson]

The story does not mention his real advantage: He had nobody else to blame.

Also: White. Male. Educated. Not disabled. No dependents. No addictions (which are, mind you, a disease). No apparent medical problems (down to and including a bad back that would keep him from working at the moving company - or costly medical expenses over the life of this experiment). Etc. etc. etc..

It's a great story. And by and large, yes, any college educated white guy with no children in America should be able to bootstrap himself into the lower working class. But the poverty problem has never rested primarily with healthy, single white men. And one story where everything falls into place in no way covers all potential possibilities of a situation.

[Boomhauer]

Wooderson, if you aren't a white, educated male, you've got it MADE. You shouldn't have any dependents- minimum wage jobs and the sparse life isn't suited for raising a family. So don't start one.

Moving companies aren't the only low-level jobs out there. There's also fast-food, taxi driving, janitoring, car washing, retail, etc. If you can't find a low-level job, you ain't looking hard enough. And if you don't pay your hospital bills, ain't nothing gonna happen to you. You aren't going to be denied ER care and the hospital staff isn't going to come break you kneecaps for not paying.

 

[Bogie]

Maybe black people just aren't capable of doing this sort of thing? They're not able to survive without someone benevolently watching over them, making sure that they receive sustenance and security.
 
Wooderson, you've got one heckuva theory there.
 

[wooderson]

I didn't mention his most valuable advantage: a comprehensive safety net.
If, at any time, his little project goes awry, he can crawl back to the family teat. If he gets hurt, or if he can't hack it, there are no consequences. If there's no risk, you can gamble without worry.

Wooderson, if you aren't a white, educated male, you've got it MADE.

Haha, yes! All available evidence points to educated white males being held back in America - we can see this in a variety of statistical categories, right?

You shouldn't have any dependents- minimum wage jobs and the sparse life isn't suited for raising a family. So don't start one.

What should and should not have happened is irrelevant to the situation at hand. This guy didn't have dependents - that makes bootstrapping infinitely easier. If he did, the situation changes and suddenly

And, of course, your argument assumes that someone in a prior position of relative success couldn't find themself in this situation. Which, as we know, is simply untrue. The homeless and jobless are not individuals who've never held jobs before, fresh out of college. They had (and hopefully continue to have) lives prior to their current situation.

Moving companies aren't the only low-level jobs out there. There's also fast-food, taxi driving, janitoring, car washing, retail, etc. If you can't find a low-level job, you ain't looking hard enough.

Taxi driving - you know a lot of homeless guys with a hack license?
Janitoring, car washing, retail - don't pay as well as moving (the standard referred to by a previous poster was 'a living wage'). They pay less than a labor-intensive manual job precisely because they are easier.  (This ignores self-care requirements for retail that may not be capable of being met by one in a shelter).

If I'm ever in dire straits I could go back to waiting tables and make more than a living wage with ease (it made me homicidal, but I was good at it). But if I'm living in a homeless shelter... who's going to hire me? Where am I going to keep my uniforms? How am I going to get to and from work? I live in a city of 350k without any public transport, the few shelters are miles from employment opportunities.

Have you ever walked to work in the Texas summer? Do you think it's possible to be presentable for retail work after doing so? I don't. (transpose to a Minnesota winter if you so desire)

And if you don't pay your hospital bills, ain't nothing gonna happen to you. You aren't going to be denied ER care and the hospital staff isn't going to come break you kneecaps for not paying.

You will be hounded by creditors and have your failure to pay appear on your credit reports - you know, those things people pull when giving you jobs, apartments, car loans.

And, of course, the immediate medical bills are not the only concern: one's ability to continue working is at stake.

To reiterate my point, is not to say that you cannot improve your lot in life. But there are an infinite number of variables for every individual, up to and including pure, random chance (perhaps chance most of all). It is simply not so easy to say this one guy proves anything, or that his experience is any way relevant to everyone in poverty. Or anyone but college-educated, healthy white males who have no dependents and a safety net to turn to at any second.

[wooderson]

Just imagine me rolling my eyes at whatever Bogie's latest attempt at wit might be. It'll save some bandwidth.

There's another sticking point to the college-educated "but I didn't use my diploma!" nonsense.

How many of you had to hand over your degree to an employer? Or was it, more likely, that the skills you learned - and the ability to carry yourself thanks to formal (or even informal) education - can be seen throughout your person, in the way you speak, in your ability to talk about yourself?

Do college graduates speak in a different manner than those with less education? Is this something an interviewer would pick up on? Do people from the socio-economic class that foots the bill for liberal arts schooling present themselves in a different manner from someone born into poverty? Is this something an interviewer might pick up on.

[Antibubba]

I was never tempted. I had a credit card in my back pocket in case of an emergency. The rule was if I used the credit card then, "The project's over, I'm going home."

Because this "project" wasn't his life.  It's amazing the things you can get away with when you know there's a net.  It's a good story though.  But even without the credit card, he was still in a far better place than most of the people around him.  He had a solid childhood, a great education:

But surely your background  you're privileged; you have an education and a family  made it much easier for you to achieve.

I didn't use my college education, credit history, or contacts [while in South Carolina]. But in real life, I had these lessons that I had learned. I don't think that played to my advantage. How much of a college education do you need to budget your money to a point that you're not spending frivolously, but you're instead putting your money in the bank?

Sorry, but if his education was anything like mine in the liberal arts, it taught him to think, and to take the long view.  Because he had a college education, one which he likely had to work through to pay for expenses, he already KNEW what was at the end of the tunnel.

If I lost my job tomorrow, lost my apartment, and couldn't get help from my family, I could do what he did.  At nearly twice his age and a bad back, it would take me longer, but I could do it.  So could most of you.

There are a lot of people out there who cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel, or don't know there is a tunnel, or even realize they're groping blindly through the dark.

The interesting thing is that nobody really cared.... It wasn't so much as where we were coming from, it was where we were going.

But where he came from allowed him to get where he was going.  And if he really thinks that being young, white, educated, and athletic didn't help him at all, then I have to question how much he's learned.  I'm not saying that one can't achieve what he did without his advantages, because we've all seen otherwise.  But it helped him, even if he can't see it.

[The Rabbi]

Just imagine me rolling my eyes at whatever Bogie's latest attempt at wit might be. It'll save some bandwidth.

There's another sticking point to the college-educated "but I didn't use my diploma!" nonsense.

How many of you had to hand over your degree to an employer? Or was it, more likely, that the skills you learned - and the ability to carry yourself thanks to formal (or even informal) education - can be seen throughout your person, in the way you speak, in your ability to talk about yourself?

Do college graduates speak in a different manner than those with less education? Is this something an interviewer would pick up on? Do people from the socio-economic class that foots the bill for liberal arts schooling present themselves in a different manner from someone born into poverty? Is this something an interviewer might pick up on.

One guy, who arrived [at the shelter] on a Tuesday had been hit by a car on [the previous] Friday by a drunk driver. He was in a wheelchair. He was totally out of it. He was at the shelter. And I said, "Dude, your life is completely changed." And he said, "Yeah, you're right, but I'm getting the heck out of here." Then there was this other guy who could walk and everything was good in his life, but he was just kind of bumming around, begging on the street corner. To see the attitudes along the way, that is what my story is about.

Pretty much blows your "theory" all to hell, Wooderson.

[roo_ster]

Because this "project" wasn't his life.  It's amazing the things you can get away with when you know there's a net.  It's a good story though.  But even without the credit card, he was still in a far better place than most of the people around him.  He had a solid childhood, a great education

I disagree about the net.  When I was in the service I performed many tasks that had no net, to speak of.  It was, "perform or die/be crippled/something else bad."

There is something awfully centering about knowing you have a few seconds to perform...or those seconds are all you got left on this earth.

Beyond the basics, the useful parts of his "education" were not in class.  It was more acculturation, soaking in what used to be called the Protestant/Puritan work ethic from family. 

The above is why I harp on culture so much: culture is the real discriminator in this world, between the successful and the losers. 

[mfree]

So... since it was a white man with a "safety net" that never got used, and he had the advantage of being able to think for himself, the whole experiment is a waste of time.

My God, the arrogance. Can't do a damn thing to disprove victimhood of anyone, can we?

If you're saying the majority of poor folks are stupid or shortsighted... well, there's government schooling to blame for that, isn't there?

[Ned Hamford]

I think what we have to do is obvious.  Break his leg, give em a kid, shoot him up with heroin a few times and start him going again... perhaps after spraypainting him to generic minority.  THEN we might learn something.

[The Rabbi]

The point I took from this article is as follows:
Everyone is born with a tool kit.  Some people have more tools, some fewer.  But no one has an empty tool kit.  The successful people make realistic goals and then assess their tools for achieving that, and then execute on that.  The unsuccessful don't.
If the article were about a single mom living in a shelter who had a talent for hair braiding and then borrowed money from relatives to start a hair braiding business, would everyone suddenly point out that she had family with money to help her?  Probably.  But every success story has someone utilitizing what's in his tool box to get where he wants.  You can say "well if he/she didnt have this asset then they wouldn't have been able to do that."  True.  But they would have used other assets to get what they wanted.

[ilbob]

there are a lot of minorities and women that have made the same transformation from poor to middle class. they used the safety net stuff that was available to them, but mostly it was that they were willing to work and were not addicted to drugs or booze. even women with children have been able to do it.

it is a lot easier if it is just yourself, because being alone allows you to take more risks, and riskier things tend to have a higher payout.

I would never discount the value of an education either. the ability to think things through logically, while it is not taught much any more, is often a byproduct of an education. and no matter where you work, a person who can read, write, and do basic arithmetic is worth more to an employer on average than one who cannot.

sloth, booze and/or drugs seem to be the main things that keeps people in poverty. you can get past most everything else.

[Ben]

The "having a college degree to back him up" line is bullcrap. I have a post-graduate degree that I got after years of working for a living. My first job straight out of High School was as a roustabout in the oil patch. No experience, no connections, no "stash of resources" to run back to. Early 80's and I was making over $20 an hour. And it wasn't all white guys on the rigs.

The Wooderson theories are exactly the kind of crap I heard from my professors in college who went straight from High School to college to teaching.

Edited for accuracy: Just for kicks and nostalgia, I looked up what I was making back then and it actually ran from $16-19.

[Sawdust]

The "having a college degree to back him up" line is bullcrap. I have a post-graduate degree that I got after years of working for a living. My first job straight out of High School was as a roustabout in the oil patch. No experience, no connections, no "stash of resources" to run back to. Early 80's and I was making over $20 an hour. And it wasn't all white guys on the rigs.
Edited for accuracy: Just for kicks and nostalgia, I looked up what I was making back then and it actually ran from $16-19.

Whoa! That's spooky to read, BenW - almost a mirror of me.

I grew-up in Santa Barbara (Goleta), and was working as a roustabout on Platform Holly (right off Devereaux Point) in the early eighties.

That experience convinced me to go to UCSB and get my Mechanical Engineering degree...

Sawdust

[Ben]

Dude! Hondo and the Santa Ynez OST! We were neighbors! 

And the experience also convinced me to go to UCSB.

[wooderson]

Pretty much blows your "theory" all to hell, Wooderson.

How? Because there are a couple of unnamed guys who make good anecdotes?

How the hell does that color the reality of his experiment?

[wooderson]

So... since it was a white man with a "safety net" that never got used, and he had the advantage of being able to think for himself, the whole experiment is a waste of time.

No, it's a good story. But it's not indicative of the 'state of American poverty' or the routes available to those in poverty to escape it - and what I was responding to was the "SEE EVERYONE COULD DO THIS!!!" crap.

The experiment is applicable to: young, white, middle class-born, college-educated, healthy, disease-free and independent white males. How many of those do you see in homeless shelters on a regular basis? How relevant are they to the problem?

[wooderson]

The "having a college degree to back him up" line is bullcrap. I have a post-graduate degree that I got after years of working for a living. My first job straight out of High School was as a roustabout in the oil patch. No experience, no connections, no "stash of resources" to run back to. Early 80's and I was making over $20 an hour. And it wasn't all white guys on the rigs.

What if you don't live near enough an "oil patch" to get that kind of work? What are the similar jobs available in New Orleans? In Baltimore? In Harlem? In Detroit? In Appalachia? Is it physically demanding? What happens if you get hurt and can't work?

(Actually, there were similar jobs in B-more and other large cities once upon a time - union work that let people raise families without a white-collar background. What happened to those jobs?)

The Wooderson theories are exactly the kind of crap I heard from my professors in college who went straight from High School to college to teaching

What theories are those?

[Ben]

What theories are those?

The "it only worked because he was a college educated white guy" theory. Where I worked, nobody cared what color you were or what you looked like. Everyone judged you on how hard you worked, because if you were a slacker, everyone else had to work harder. A hard working Mexican guy with an eighth grade education was much more respected than a lazy white guy with a college degree.

I wasn't in a union when I worked the patch, and you may have missed the news coverage during Katrina, but there's a TON of oil industry related jobs in the Gulf.

And if I got hurt and couldn't do physical work back then, if I didn't decide to go back to school I would have done whatever I could to work myself up in another industry or business. Not a lot of heavy lifting in retail, and I'm sure I could have gotten a job at Dunder Mifflin.