I can't speak for everyone here, but I feel like it's a pretty safe assumption that everyone has had to pinch pennies a time or two in their lives. Some people carpool, others quit eating out, or if you're my old roommate you cancel your porno DVD subscription and get your fill like the rest of the adult world, fifteen minutes at a time on the internet. You do everything you can to make sure that you're taking care of the necessities in life, but sometimes that's not enough. You might need to find a second job. Selling your car, while not even a thought six months ago, is now a possibility. The brand new set of Titleist irons you just bought for $700 is now sitting on eBay and you're just hoping to get half your money back... Electric bill is due in a week. Your gas tank is empty. Your dog is hungry. You need to think outside the box. Focus: When have you needed to come up with a lot of money, fast? Did you manage to do it? If so, how? If not, how did it all pan out? No one cares about the time you donated plasma to pay for textbooks or asked your parents for a loan. Let's hear about the time you sold your brother's riding lawn mower to pay back a disgruntled bookie. About two years ago I was working six nights a week in two different bars to make ends meet. Living hand to mouth was a concept I was very familiar with. I had been late on rent for the last three month, accruing enough fees that making the full payment was going to be impossible. Sure enough, at the end of the month I wasn't going to make it, I was $600 short. I begged them for leniency, promising that if they could just give me to the 4th that I would have all the money. Nope. Give us every goddamn penny or we're evicting you. Cue nervous farting and me scanning my phone contacts to see whose couch I might want to live on. No way in hell I make $600 in two nights slinging drinks in the shitty bar I was scheduled at those nights. Unlike the other bar I was also working at, this place got no student traffic. It was more of a local hangout, a couple dozen people on off nights, no money to be had. Perfect if you wanted to get paid to come to work stoned off your ass or drink an entire bottle of Jager with the door guy, but that's about all it was good for. I was waxing poetic about my misfortune to my friend, when she came up with an insanely cruel, incredibly brilliant idea... Her: Put an ad on Craigslist. Me: What? No... it's too late to advertise stuff. Her: No, idiot. Make like, an ad looking for sex. Me: I'm not following... Her: We can put an ad up saying you're a girl looking to meet a guy for no strings attached sex. You're going to be with all of your friends, tonight, at the bar. Me: ... Her: You don't really have a choice... Cue her putting the ad up. We did this at about 2pm. By 5pm she had about forty guys who had emailed her, saying that they wanted to meet up, they're going to fuck her silly, their friends are coming too, etc. By 8pm when we opened our doors, there was already a crowd. By 9pm, there were over a hundred guys in the bar, with MAYBE six girls there, none of which looked anything like the girl in the ad. Nervous drinkers abound, lots of older guys with their wedding rings in their pocket ordering top shelf booze, everyone just sticking around....waiting for the pack of girls. I had guys asking if I had seen this girl or that girl, and I'd say "No, why?" and never got a straight answer. Of course I didn't. Surprisingly almost everyone stuck around till about midnight, which by that point people were walking by the bar, seeing it busy, and coming in to see what was going on. The bar ended up doing about five times what it normally did, which we of course skimmed off of to keep everything looking normal-ish. I went home with $1100 in my pocket and a severely altered perspective on how fucking creepy Craigslist is. (And for those who think what I did was shitty to the bar owner, well...it is, but it isn't. He's the worst person I've ever met. Think "Dixie Bandit meets Hitler" and throw in a severe case of halitosis. He had it coming.)
Tee-fucking ell semicolon dee-fucking arr. Anyway good FOCUS though. Over my vacation my DVR recorded like 500 episodes of Pawn Stars, and it is amazing to see how many people will give up irreplaceable items for $125 they will blow at the blackjack table before the sun sets. You gotta want money bad to be selling your shit at a pawn shop - even one on TV. If you haven't seen the show, here's how it goes. Customer: Hi, this is a gold medallion my great-great-great grandfather George Washington wore in the Revolutionary War. It's dented because it stopped a musket ball from killing him. Here's the musket ball. Rick Harrison: So what did you want to do, pawn it or sell it? Customer: I wanted to sell it. Rick Harrison (off-camera): George Washington was the first president of the United States back in the late 1700s. He was also a general in the Revolutionary War. Washington stuff is really, really collectible. I really want this. Rick Harrison (back on camera): So what did you want for this? Customer: I was thinking maybe $50,000? Rick Harrison: Yeah, that's not gonna happen. Listen there's a very small market for this, I'm thinking $100. Customer: Hmm. $200? Rick Harrison: I can do $125. That's the best I can do. Customer: OK, deal. Tell us about your desperate times and desperate measures!
The most severe acts of desperation I've seen are mostly all from one guy. He was moving a fair bit of weight for the local bikie gang, and had no sense of self preservation, selling to strangers, talking openly on phones, etc. Nice guy, but not that bright. He was 18 or so, tiny, and just not threatening in any way shape or form. One night, people broke into his house and ripped off about $20K in cash he had in his bedside table. He borrowed a stack of money from his sister and friends, took up a 2nd job as a trolley boy at Coles, and a 3rd job as a kitchen hand, and worked every free hour he had till he paid the debt off. Then he went back to dealing. Maybe a year later, cops pulled him over for drunk driving and found about 900 pills in his glove compartment, leaving him $30k in debt. Astonishingly he didn't get jailed (although its interesting to speculate on why not), but he came up with a brilliant plan to get him out of debt - deal more. He dropped his prices to drive up volume, and managed to clear the debt in about 6 months. This is the same guy I've mentioned before who ordered a pill press from the internet to his Mum's house, which promptly got raided by the cops. We don't talk much any more, but last I heard, he was still dealing. My housemate racked up $25K worth of credit card debt playing poker when he was 23/24. He was thinking about declaring bankruptcy, but ended up borrowing another $20k and going to the casino. He actually managed to win back his losses. I'm going to Vegas with him next July, and rather than saving he just got approved for a $50K Amex card. I foresee this ending well.
A friend from college didn't have a job right out of college. He made all the money he needed (about 40K / year) in online poker, and that became his full time job. When the government dropped the hammer on Internet poker earlier this year, all the money he had at that point, about 20K, was immediately frozen by the government pending a huge investigation (not into him specifically, but poker in general). With bills stacking up and a decent bank account he couldnt get too, he had a large tag sale and sold off about 90% of everything he owned. All that's left in his apartment is his bed, computer, clothing, a table, 2 chairs, and food. Literally nothing else is in there. The rest of his friends and myself came to find out he had been ignoring his college loan and credit card payments, is now in default, and has collection agencies harassing him every day. What has he been doing to rectify this problem? Taking a loan from mom and dad and playing WoW all day.
About a year ago the bills kept stacking up (books, rent, taxes, etc.) and my hours at work were getting shorted again and again. I needed to cough up about 800 euros. I didn't want to go to my parents for money, because honestly, this was all my fault. So I did what any healthy, young man in his prime would do; I sold me body. To science. I saw an ad about a company that was testing a medicine for the mucus membrane or something. The deal was: spend two weeks in our facility and get 2100 euros, plus some other compensations. The compensations were mostly for travel-costs, and since the facility was at the other end of Holland (about four hours by train...............damn you Americans, it's a big deal for me, ok?) those costs racked up pretty fast. I had to get checked first, and once those days were over the real tests began. It was glorious. For 14 days, I was being fed regularly, and quite good as well. I had a nice comfy bed, my laptop, an internet connection, a couple of books and a great garden to sit in the sun. My group consisted of about 10 other guys, and all we did was play poker, use the X-box, watched movies or play snooker. The doctors gave us some pills each day and checked our vitals thrice a day. We also had to give blood five times a day, but I have some really good veins, so they could tap away. Only problem was that the first check-up was at six in the morning. Having some nice morning wood sucks when there are four nurses next to your bed. All in all, I had a nice, relaxing time away from all my problems, earned some nice money, and all I had to do was piss in a cup, give some blood and swallow some pills. Only problem is that since then I have to sneeze quite often, and sometimes my sneezes smell like honey. Oh well.