Thread. When people say poverty is a cycle that’s reality. As some of you may know I’ve asked for help these last few months and I can’t express my gratitude for those who were able to help and who shared. I really would like to illustrate what the poverty cycle can look like.

At the beginning of the summer my wife was laid off because of Covid and our income was immediately cut by 2/3rds. She applied for unemployment immediately and has ever since. Her application has still not been approved. We immediately applied for any state aid did not qualify

We already had lived pretty close to paycheck to paycheck so things got tight very quick. We had $500 in savings which is just under our monthly grocery budget with 3 children. We used our stimulus money to pay our rent for two months. I started mowing

Lawns and doing side work to try and keep up with our monthly bills. During this time I had to stay home twice (ten days each) unpaid when different co-workers I had worked with got Covid. This was probably the final tipping point. I Started to freak out and reached out

Everywhere for help. We were almost evicted twice. My wife started work again at reduced hours in September and due to the nature of their payroll got her first paycheck for ten hours a month later. At this point our account was almost always negative due to bills going through

Before payday and then subsequent overdraft fees at $35 a piece. Wells Fargo will only reverse up to 5 of these in one year. Fast forward to today and even with the donations I’ve asked for we are still in this hell hole. I scraped together our rent and gave every dollar I had

To my landlord at the beginning of the week knowing full well that my utilities and other bills would come out this week causing my account to go negative plus $300 in overdraft fees. Tomorrow is my payday and my check won’t even bring my account back positive. This is exhausting

And I really don’t know how long we can go on. But the reason I’m posting this is over the last 2 months I’ve received over 20 DMs saying things like, “you shouldn’t have had kids.” “If you would have saved your stimulus you wouldn’t be in this situation”

Please don’t send me these. I’m tired and can’t get out of the hole and I just can’t. Thanks to all the supportive messages and extra thanks to those who were able to donate to help out. I hope this gets better. But it probably won’t without some giant intervention.