misanthropemom:

finnglas:

I’m going to give you the best piece of Adult Life Is Hard advice I’ve ever learned:

Talk to people when things go to shit.

I don’t just mean get it off your chest, although that’s good. I mean: Something’s wrong with your paycheck/you lost your job/you had unexpected emergency car repairs and now you’re broke so your credit card payment is late. Like, not just 15 days late. We’re talking, shit got crazy and now you’re 90 days late with compounded interest and late fees and the Minimum Payment Due is, like, $390, and you’ve got about $3.90 in your bank account. Call the credit card company. 

I know it’s scary. I know you feel like you’re going to get in trouble, like you’re gong to get yelled at or scolded for not having your life together. But the credit card company isn’t your parents; they’re just interested in getting money from you. And you can’t squeeze blood from a stone or money from someone who doesn’t have any. So what you do is you call them. You explain you’re experiencing temporary financial hardships, and you’re currently unable to bring your account up to date, but you don’t want to just let it get worse. Can you maybe talk to someone about a payment plan so you can work something out? Nine times out of ten you’ll be able to negotiate something so that at least it’s not just taking a constant, giant shit on your credit score.

– Can’t pay your power bill? Call the power company.

– Can’t pay your full rent? Talk to your landlord.

– Had to go to the hospital without insurance and have giant medical bills looming in your place? Call the hospital and ask if they have someone who helps people with financial hardships. Many do.

– Got super sick and missed half a semester of class because flu/pneumonia/auto-immune problems/depressive episode? Talk to your professor. If that doesn’t help, talk to your advisor.

You may not be able to fix everything, but you’ll likely be able to make improvements. At the very least, it’s possible that they have a list of people you can contact to help you with things. (Also, don’t be afraid to google things like, “I can’t pay my power bill [state you live in]” because you’d be surprised at what turns up on Google!) But the thing is, people in these positions gain nothing if you fail. There’s no emotional satisfaction for them if your attempts at having your life together completely bite the dust. In fact, they stand to benefit if things work out for you! And chances are, they’ll be completely happy to take $20 a month from you over getting $0 a month from you, your account will be considered current because you’ve talked to them and made an agreement, you won’t get reported to a collections agency, and your credit score won’t completely tank.

Here’s some helpful tips to keep in mind:

1. Be polite. Don’t demand things; request them. Let me tell you about how customer service people hold your life in their hands and how many extra miles they’ll go for someone who is nice to them.

2. Stick to the facts, and keep them minimal unless asked for them. Chances are they’re not really interested in the details. “We had several family emergencies in a row, and now I’m having trouble making the payments” is better than “Well, two months ago my husband wrecked his bike, and then he had a reaction to the muscle relaxer they gave him, and then our dog swallowed a shoestring and we had to take him to the emergency clinic, and just last week MY car broke down, and now my account’s in the negatives and I don’t know how I’m gonna get it back out.” The person you’re talking to is aware shit happens to everyone; they don’t need the details to prove you’re somehow “worthy” of being helped. They may ask you for details at a certain point if they have to fill out any kind of request form, but let them do that.

3. Ask questions. “Is there anything we can do about X?” “Would it be possible to move my payment date to Y day instead so it’s not coming out of the same paycheck as my rent?” The answer may be “no.” That’s not a failure on your part. But a good customer service person may have an alternate solution. 

Anyway! I hope that helps! Don’t just assume the answer is “no” before you’ve even begun. There is more help out there than you ever imagined.

being nice goes far to get people on your side.

theroguefeminist:

little known fact, once you are older & no longer in school, time stops being real. did that thing happen one year ago? two? five? a few months ago? who knows. 

flowerais:

sometimes you need to do the hard thing. study for your test even if it’s boring and you want to avoid it. get up an hour early to exercise even if you feel like death. go out of your way to help someone else even if it’s inconvenient. do something alone even though you’re afraid of being judged. go somewhere new even if it’s scary and disorientating at first. confess to the person who makes u blush even if it means risking rejection. let go of your old habits even though it feels like you can’t live without them. it’s supposed to be hard. life isn’t going to have amazing rewards if you’re always feeling comfortable.

bitchesgetriches:

Oh my sweet. Hope is not lost while the fellowship remains true! Your credit is NOT irreparable. Your shall be a glorious redemption. It will be long and hard and painful, but it WILL happen and I’ll tell you how.

First, educate yourself on credit and student loans:

Dafuq Is Credit and How Do You Bend It to Your Will? 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Student Loans 

Let’s End This Damaging Misconception About Credit Cards 

Next, take the steps to make an immediate dent in the debt. You will need to ultimately make lifestyle changes to completely kill the debt, at least for a while. But here’s the step-by-step:

1. Consolidate your student loans if possible. Programs like SoFi make this easy, but remember that they are there to make a profit, so research the shit out of them or a competitor before you consolidate. The goal is to lower your interest rate, or, if you’re having trouble making your monthly payments, lower the amount of your monthly payment. https://studentloanhero.com/featured/5-banks-to-refinance-your-student-loans/

2. Apply for income based repayment (IBR) of your student loans. Again, this is an option if it’s hard for you to make your payments because you’re not making ends meet. Your credit score depends a lot on paying your bills on time and in full, so IBR might help with that. https://studentloanhero.com/featured/income-based-repayment-plan/

3. Call the hospital and ask them to audit your bill. It’s actually pretty fucking common for them to find errors in billing that will end up lowering the overall amount in your favor. http://www.medicalclaimshelp.org/medical_bill_auditing0.aspx

4. Find out if the hospital where you received medical care has financial aid. This is literally a thing, but it’s obviously not widely publicized. https://www.onesmartdollar.com/how-to-get-financial-aid-for-hospital-bills/ 

5. Set up automatic payments for your bills. Again, your credit score depends a lot on how consistent you are in paying your bills. Setting up automatic payments can help with this. Schedule these payments either for the day they’re due or the day you receive your paycheck every billing cycle, whichever works better for you. 

6. Pay more than the minimum by rounding up to the nearest $10… or more! Paying more than the minimum every billing cycle will help you get ahead on your debt. And the faster you pay down your debt, the faster your credit score will improve.

7. Use the snowball or avalanche method to eliminate debts. We explain these methods here. 

8. Once you’ve paid off your debt, make yourself an emergency fund. This will help you avoid falling into debt again later. We explain emergency funds here.

Lastly, I just want to remind you that your medical bills are NOT your fault. People get sick and injured. It’s normal. But if you’re living in the U.S. (and something tells me you are, given the size of your medical bills womp womp), then you’re living under a broken system in which we’re over-charged by hospitals for medical care because insurance providers have driven up the prices by ludicrous amounts. You had nothing to do with creating that system, but you still need to survive it. And you shall. 

If you need some motivation where that’s concerned, we got you:

Financial Lessons Learned from a Night in the ER 

I Think I Need to Go the Emergency Room? 

YOU CAN FUCKING DO THIS. AND YOU WILL. We believe in you.

askagamedev:

In a similar vein as my previous series “A Gamer’s Primer to Financial Literacy using Warcraft 3″, given recent events I thought it would be prudent to write a primer for those new to the adulting world to help them through a really rough time for anyone – a job loss.

Losing your job often comes as a shock – you may have heard rumors, you may have had an inkling or feeling in the back of your mind, but few are really ready for it when the time comes. It will take some time for the reality of the situation to settle in – you’ll wake up in the morning and feel like you need to get ready for work before realizing that your schedule is… empty. It may take some time to gather your bearings before you can move on, but there are several key practical issues that come with job loss that each have rapidly-approaching expiration dates. The purpose of this primer is to help you remember to deal with these practical things as soon as you can after a job loss, before it is too late. I can’t help with the emotional and mental trauma that comes from losing your job – that’s something each person needs to work out on her own – but I can help with reminders about the practical side of things.

I’ve broken up these elements into three priority categories – Immediate, Short Term, and Long Term.

1. Immediate means just that – take care of this as soon as possible. Now, if you can.
2. Short Term means take care of it after the immediate stuff is taken care of already.
3. Long Term advice is generally helpful, but should always take a back seat to the Immediate and Short Term things to do.

Immediate: Make a Doctor/Dental/etc. Appointment

If you lose your job, you will eventually also lose any sort of health insurance benefits. Most employers will keep you covered until the end of the month at the minimum since they pay for coverage by the month. Some (if they give you severance) will give you more. In the US, there’s also the COBRA plan for continuing the same health care plan, but it is extremely expensive to maintain and I’ve never seen anyone who isn’t financially secure and in dire need maintain it. You need to get yourself checked out and have any work done while you’re still covered. Mention that you lost your job to the doctor’s office so they understand the situation you’re in and they will try to accommodate you as soon as they can. If you need to get work done after you lose coverage, tell them that you will lose your insurance and they will often offer some sort of cash discount for payment. 

Think of this as making the most out of your expensive buffs while you still have them. You might not be able to pay for the buffs yourself, but you have them now and should make the most of it while you can.

Immediate: File for Unemployment Insurance

Part of working is paying taxes, and some of those taxes go towards funding unemployment insurance. Here in the states, each state has some sort of unemployment office where you can apply for unemployment insurance. Just google “unemployment benefits <my state/province/etc.>”. Once you get it set up, unemployment benefits will pay out some amount of money to you every week or two to help you survive. Most states will provide you six months to a year of unemployment benefits as long as you continue to look for work and you continue to file the paperwork. The money provided won’t be as much as your paycheck was, but it is a great deal better than nothing when you have bills to pay.

Also, keep careful records of this income, because it will affect your taxes. Not all unemployment benefits have income tax withheld (and it is considered income by the government), which means you may be on the hook for the missing income taxes come tax season.

Immediate: Take a hard look at your finances

Without a steady paycheck coming in, your financial situation is almost certainly going to change. You need to look at your monthly expenditures (rent, utilities, food, gas, internet, etc.), your savings, and any income you may have. Subtract your total income from your expenditures and you have your burn rate. Your savings divided by your burn rate is the rough amount of time you have to remain afloat before going into debt. You need to figure out just how long you can stay afloat at your current burn rate, and whether that’s long enough to find a new job. Switching to a new job takes me roughly two months at fastest to complete the entire process going from initial contact to phone screen, design/code tests, on-site interviews, offer, then finally start date. If you have to relocate, add another month at minimum for relocating, house hunting, etc.. If your burn rate puts you in the negative before that much time can pass, you need to reduce your burn rate. This is why you need to take a hard look at those finances. Prioritize what’s absolutely important and cut back on the things that aren’t. It isn’t worth [putting yourself into debt] in order to maintain your current standard of living when you can’t afford it. This isn’t a permanent change, but it is something that’s necessary until you can secure a new job.

Short Term: Resume, Portfolio, Interview Preparation

You need to set aside time to look over your resume and think about how to tailor it to the sort of job you want. You need to update your resume to include what you did at your most recent job, but you also need to make sure that it’s written to best sell you as an experienced professional. Programmers would do well to hit the books and review code and math principles. Designers should review their work and be ready to defend the decisions they made. Artists should select and update new pieces to their portfolios. All job seekers should practice answering common interview questions, like “Do you have any questions for me?” and “Tell me about your greatest weakness”, but you should also practice what you will say if the hiring managers ask about the things on the resume because they will ask about that.

If you were part of a large layoff, I suggest reaching out to your former coworkers and holding review, resume, and interview prep sessions for those interested. Many people aren’t used to writing resumes or preparing for interviews, but your former coworkers are also professionals in the field and often have insight into the process. Not everybody will join up, but I had a lot of success in post-layoff review/practice sessions with other designers and programmers after losing my job to review things I hadn’t touched in a while. 

Short Term: Network and look for opportunities

Be proactive. Tell your friends and social media that you’re looking for work, what you’re good at, what you worked on, and how to contact you. Don’t be too proud to admit you need a job. You never know when someone knows someone who can provide you with an opportunity that might be a perfect fit for you. Get familiar with the various job search engines, as well as industry hiring spots like gamasutra, linkedin, creative heads, the IGDA, polycount, etc. Don’t just fire off applications immediately either – take time to examine each one before preparing and tailoring your resume/CV to the role. You only get one chance per year to make a good impression. Whenever a studio rejects you, it’s not permanent – usually they are ok with a new submission in a year’s time.

Long Term: Don’t neglect your mental and physical health

After reality sets in, it’s really easy to slide into a haze of laziness and netflix/video games/etc.. Entire days have disappeared on me without warning because I just didn’t want to think about how terrible my situation was. I would log into the MMOG du jour and the time would just fly by. This isn’t super helpful in the grand scheme of things and can make things worse if it continues unchecked. Take steps to ensure your mental health, don’t let yourself become a shut-in. Go out in public to do things, set aside time to exercise, and do something constructive with your time. Set some sort of mid to longer term goal that you can work towards, like learning to use Unity, designing a card game, or sculpting and skinning a new model in Z brush.

Long Term: Until you get hired, finding a job is your job

You need to treat finding a job as your job.

When you’re employed, you have a set of duties and deadlines. When you’re spending all day at home, it’s super easy to find yourself feeling unmotivated and procrastinate. You should treat finding a new job the same way you treated working. I set a schedule for myself each day – X hours spent working on my indie game title, Y hours prepping resumes/reaching out to recruiters online/applying to job postings, Z hours studying relevant material to refresh my skills and prepare for interviews, with times set aside for breaks. Having a regular schedule that I could follow helped keep me working toward my eventual goal, and I could see the progress I made over time. I took breaks and I made sure the time allotted in the schedule was realistic (including cushion time on estimates), but I tried to stick to it as best I could to keep myself disciplined.

The Takeaway

Dealing with a job loss can be very hard. When I went through it for my first time, I fell into depression and lost myself in MMOGs for months. Rejections can pile up and will sap your motivation to continue. The road isn’t an easy one, but it is one that I and every other veteran dev I know have been through. Remember – the number of “nos” don’t matter because you only need one “yes” to win. Once you get there, you’ll feel great. But until you reach the goal, the game is about damage mitigation and loss prevention. You need to buy yourself the time to reach your goal, and you need to make sure that you’re as well-prepared for that challenge as possible when the time comes. During your prep time, you need to be training and leveling up your skills to take on that challenge. That means taking stock of your health and financial situation, making sure you take care of the things you need to like mental and physical health, and sticking to a plan to prepare yourself to interview and get that job. If anyone needs assistance with resume prep or review, my inbox is open. I wish you all the best of fortune. Cheers.

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The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work too busy.

[What is the FANTa project?] [Git the FANTa Project]

Got a burning question you want answered?

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slightlyaggressiveaffirmations:

MISTAKES HAPPEN!!! YOU’RE GONNA BE ALRIGHT!!! WE ALWAYS JUDGE OURSELVES WAY HARDER THAN OTHER PEOPLE DO, ANYWAY!!! TAKE DEEP BREATHS AND GET BACK OUT THERE TO TRY AGAIN!!! I BELIEVE IN YOU!!!

(ps. apologies are scary, but most people appreciate a genuine one)

topsydead:

tinysaurus-rex:

totallyvalidissues:

wodneswynn:

So here’s the biggest gardening hack that I don’t think I’ve seen anyone talk about before.

Terminator technology has not hit the shelves in most places. If you put these boys in the ground, they will grow and multiply. You can get enough soup beans to seed I don’t even know how much ground for like a dollar.

And man, you need to get on some beans. There’s a reason beans are cheap food: They’re one of the best staples in the whole world in terms of effort versus yield; especially the red ones, which grow in neat little bushes. You can have beans for ages with very little work. What’s more, bean plants are basically magic; they have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which promotes soil health and can help revitalize damaged soil.

Anarchist Santa Claus said that the revolution must have bread; whel’p, wheat can be a tricky crop. Let’s have some soup, too.

I’d like to add that you can do the same for tomatos!! You can slice your tomatos and plant the slices and grow your own tomatos!!!

Beans are great! Sprout them and mix them in your salad! Grow more beans! Great for chickens and pigeons too!

Because of their nitrogen fixing properties, beans will improve the health of basically every plant you plant them together with. If you are considering a food garden but don’t have a lot of energy, beans will make your life easier by basically babysitting the other food.