When I started this blog, I was fighting for scraps. $1-$2 paid surveys online were saving my bacon—I owed my college fees from dropping out, I had credit card debt from trying to stay in school, a car payment, and gas to even try to go to a job interview was over $4/gallon.
In those early days, sites wanted my story and my knowledge, but they didn’t want to pay me for it. A brand brought me on as their blogger and claimed they couldn’t pay me at all. Another site wanted me to be a full-time content mill for them at $20 per blog post—I was to come up with all the ideas, do all the research, all the writing, and all the editing for that price!
But every little bit that I could scrape together made a huge difference, hence filling out surveys worth a literal handful of pennies. When I did get paid work, I was able to pay my outstanding fees, buy groceries for myself and my mom, go back to school, pay off my credit card debt, pay the accumulating interest on my student loans, and even build a little “getting established” fund to carry me after graduation in the Great Recession.
This blog gave me a voice when I was feeling alone, frustrated, and left completely out of the traditional (and even the new online) personal finance advice. Personal finance blogs were starting to pop up regularly, democratizing the information, but still there were very few from either the perspective of a young woman or someone low income—let alone both. But I hoped that by putting my story out there, it would find the people who needed it to relate to.
A long time coming, I’m now expanding what Poorer Than You is. This site started as my story, but now it will be all of our stories—from across the wide spectrum of people who are low income, unemployed, and underemployed.
And those stories will be paid for. I’ve kicked in my own money, hired an editor, and started crowdfunding to make sure that we have the funds to keep this project going.
The project is called Making Do, and we need your money stories for it. (And again, we’ll pay you!)
What sort of money stories are we looking for?
- Personal stories about what it’s like to deal with your money when you’re low-income, unemployed, or underemployed. Here are some examples (from other sites) of the type of personal essay we have in mind:
- Stories need to be honest and personal to you. Names and inconsequential details may be changed for anonymity/privacy, but we’re looking for the real deal from people who are currently in the thick of it.
- We would especially love to get stories from those who have been traditionally underrepresented in personal finance media (including but not limited to: BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, young women, and people with disabilities)
If you’re a longtime Poorer Than You reader, you may wonder if this means that I, Stephonee, will no longer be writing for the site. First of all, have I really been writing for this site anyway? I kid, I kid—but you may have noticed that the pandemic did not bring out a slew of new posts from me. I do still have a lot of topics I personally want to write about here, though: budget weddings, raising kids on a low income, neurodivergence and mental health finances, first time home-buying, and pursuing financial independence.
If anything, my hope is that bringing new voices onto this blog will also help me to reclaim my own voice that has felt like it has slipped away from me over the past few years. (And yes, maybe I’ll even talk about that part of it!) Alongside essays from the Making Do project, I hope to bring a lot of new content to the table myself.
If you fit the low income, unemployed, or underemployed bill, I encourage you to send in your pitch so that we can get cracking on sharing your story. If you’re more of an artists than a writer, we’re also looking for illustrators and photographers to provide accompanying artwork to the essays (also paid). And if you’re not low income, but you love this idea, please share this blog post on social media, so that we can cast a wide net in finding contributors for this project.