I’m assuming not too many people who read my humble substack are Moderna executives or public health authorities, but if anyone got rich in a hopefully ethical manner, do tell!
I unfortunately haven’t done that well since Covid came along. In late 2020 I came back to Thailand with a very modest savings and an uncertain but flexible future outlook. The savings was helped along by some Covid money in the form of stimulus and unemployment, but in the end the lack of work with Factset, my contract job as an editor and publisher for over a decade, had evened the year out. I made about the same amount in 2019 working as I did in 2020, but half of it came from the government in the first Covid year, with a smattering from delivery gigs.
I was confident that my editing and publishing would come back once things returned to normal. I had humble plans that involved perhaps finding a distressed bar or restaurant to try to reopen, figuring out what to do with my husband’s visa to America, which had just started again after an 8 month hiatus, and determining what to do with our land in Isaan in the northeast of Thailand. I was not sure where I wanted to be long term with the Covid landscape, and told anyone who asked me how long I planned on staying in Thailand “Three weeks, three months, or three years. Who knows?” My ticking biological clock also played a role. I had lost almost eight months separated from my husband between age 40 and 41 due to Covid shutdowns. Thailand has some of the best fertility clinics in the world and I was hoping to at least get checked out.
By the fall of 2020 I was hopeful that Covid hysteria would soon be behind us. I wasn’t paying heed to the more cynical and shrill of the antivaxxer contingent, who insisted that the entire exercise would be extended in order to get jabs in as many arms as possible. I was tired of the fearmongering and was thinking that most other people were too.
I got clubbed like a baby seal.
The masks came back with a vengeance in January of 2021. That took out any chance of going to a fertility clinic in Phuket. For reasons involving a brutal assault in my background, I cannot wear a facemask covering my nose for longer than I can hold my breath. My husband and I had talked about getting checked out after New Year’s. It seemed like every time we made plans for our future Covid stopped everything. It became a learned helplessness. Why bother with anything when they’ll just destroy it?
Money was becoming a worry anyways. My publishing at Factset did not come back, and seemed to be on a steady decline, first about 50% of 2019 levels in 2020, then down to 30% in 2021. We looked at a few bar and restaurant ideas but most were a lost cause. It was obvious there would be no tourists for a long time. Naithong Beach looked like a zombie apocalypse had struck in early 2021, with signs warning everyone not to swim due to novel coronavirus. The entire strip was completely abandoned and looked like it had been since the Ides of March 2020. Naiyang beach was holding up best as it always attracted Thais and many jogged facemask free on the beach road. It was clear you would need a lot of capital to hold out.
Then the jabs ramped up in Phuket, followed by waves of Covid and ever increasing restrictions right afterwards. It was so obvious to me that the damned shots were leading to outbreaks that I wanted to scream it in the streets. Instead, as a hated non facemask wearing farang, I was isolated to my little plot of land. Going anywhere was a risky endeavor.
Obviously I wasn’t taking the God forsaken jabs. I couldn’t even wear a facemask, so I wouldn’t be able to work away from home anyways. I wasn’t scared of Covid in the least. I was afraid of the genocide I feared would come as a result of the totalitarian response to it. I was afraid that they were destroying all that was beautiful and kind in the world and replacing it with something brutal and vile. I was terrified of the future especially for my children and I was devoted to making sure that horrific one never happened.
Unfortunately my writing never sold and I got scammed on a few things (question: should I write about that?) and credit card debt started to mount with no way to pay it. One credit card— American Express, shut my card down with a $0 balance. Soon they all cascaded, shutting my credit down to exactly what I had spent on them, even though I had killed myself to make every minimum payment on time. I think all of us feel the bad tidings all around us. Some things I have noticed:
I lost my Bank of America debit card in an ATM some months ago. It was really stupid of me my daughter was trying to count my cash and I was worried she was going to drop it. Nobody retrieved the card, and the ATM machine was removed a few weeks later, one of three to disappear in our area.
I wasn’t too worried about that at the time, because I had a linked US Bank Chime card that used to transfer for free next day and 50 cents instantly. BofA, in an effort to make banking 1984 again, unlinked my Chime account. Now it costs $10 for next BUSINESS day transfer from a US bank to another US bank, and that’s if they feel like it. Business day is only Monday-Friday and excludes all holidays. With the time zone difference even this ridiculously expensive option sometimes takes three or four days.
A cash withdrawal at a Thailand ATM costs 220 baht flat fee on their side (about $7) and $2.50 from Chime. It’s not a good idea if you have say $20 in your account, as I often do. I thank all of my subscribers on substack, who have kept us and our dogs and cats fed on a few occasions. They get really tired of boiled jackfruit and rice.
My checks from FactSet used to clear on the 9th of every month, unless it was a Sunday, then it was the next day. They have switched payment processors to somebody who apparently pays me whenever the Hell they feel like it. Last month money arrived on the 17th. I still haven’t seen anything this month.
I’d ask Mom to mail me a few things (like my new debit card) but I’ve noticed mail has slowed substantially. I used to get a package from Las Vegas to us in Thailand in 8-10 days in 2020 and 2021. The last one took over three weeks.
Progress on my husband’s visa to the USA stalled, and stopped, and stopped again. I last inquired in June and haven’t heard back. Since I have no money I’m not too concerned, but I am starting to wonder if anyone works there anymore.
I sent something to the IRS months ago regarding some uncollected stimulus money for me and my daughter from 2020, when we stayed in the USA most of the year. At the time they said it would process within four weeks of receiving. Now they say it will process within 6 months due to a backlog of returns. And please don’t bother calling them. I’m not eligible for any .gov help that I know of from here. That’s becoming the most compelling reason to come back to the USA: to get on the public dole!
It seems to me that all around, things are getting slower, less efficient, and less reliable. They also cost a lot more.
The sinister game of inflation and debt cycles is just getting started. I went from $20,000 in available credit a few short months ago to being denied for an emergency $100 to $500 balance assist loan from Bank of America (customer since 2005) when my pay was extremely late last month. I still pay my minimum payment every month, in part so I can use the credit cards, but my last $35 in available credit had closed out before I anticipated, and we had no food. My mother has been occasionally helping me out financially but she has all she can do to hang in on her own bills. I have never made anything close to a livable wage from any of my artistic endeavors (writing, art, or singing) and have discovered that I am near incapable of promoting myself or asking anyone for money (shameless subscription drive!).
In 2019 I travelled 41,000 miles according to Google. I’ll just name the cities by airports I was in that year: Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Detroit, San Francisco, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Singapore, Manila, Tokyo, Beijing, Bangkok and Phuket. We also took advantage of my mother’s senior National Park Pass and drove to Lake Mead, Willow Bay in Arizona, Valley of Fire and a few other places (Zion is my favorite by the way but I saw that last in 2020). I didn’t have a lot of money or assets, but we definitely got by and I was happy. I didn’t give a hoot who was in charge of anything as long as they left me to live my life.
In 2021 I was not allowed to leave Phuket (not Thailand—just this island) unless I got a jab that I am morally opposed to with every fiber of my being because I was supposed to have a vax pass to return. This prevented us from selling our land in Isaan to a motivated buyer because we would have had to travel there physically to sign the paperwork. We’ve sold off our car and two motorbikes. I haven’t seen my older daughter in two years. My husband of course can’t come to America unless he gets the damned shots.
Of course, part of what makes me reluctant to tell a sad story is that judgement tends to follow it. Everybody has suggestions for what I should have done and a lot have speculation about where the money went but it’s actually a very simple equation. What I was making making was less than what I was spending, for an extended period of time. This is a direct correlate of lockdowns, shutdowns, inflation, mask and jab policies and other things constraining my choices and making it impossible to do business. Anyone who didn’t play ball with the Covid narrative got thrown to the wolves.
My fear is that this could happen to anyone, anywhere, anytime. I don’t think they need climate lockdowns to reinstitute the beloved digital ID. They just need a food, water or perhaps electrical crisis in the dead of winter, then make rations contingent on their guidelines. It’s a recipe for hell on Earth.
I want to share my thoughts on how we managed for four days without money, but I’m going to save those observations for a later article. For now I am curious how you all have done in the greatest upward wealth transfer in monetary history.
Any stories to share? I’m not exactly kumbaya about it all…
CashApp $AmySukwan
On the financial issue, the company I had worked for for eight years shut down during the lockdown and then made it permanent. Things were okay while I could get Unemployment, but with that run out and hardly any jobs in my tiny and very isolated community, I'm barely surviving. Of course all this is completely By Design to make people desperate and Compliant. Easier to get the population to accept all their Great Reset B.S., except what they are really going to do is push Americans into a civil war. Which is also what the Globalists want, and they expect to establish their "New World Order" out of the chaos. But, realistically, I think they quite underestimate us. I think there are plenty of ex-military and other brave, capable, and patriotic souls who are going to mount a serious counter-attack and go after those damn Satanic motherf**kers and "string them up by the neck until dead"!!!!! Klaus Schwab and his buddies want immortality? They probably don't believe in an Afterlife or they wouldn't have their insane ideas about wanting their "consciousness" to be uploaded into computers to merge with A.I. Well, let's hope they get "sent on their way" very soon so they can meet GOD and get set straight!
I had a four year job (twice my record time for tolerating wage slavery for any single company) when the lockdowns went into effect.
About three years ago, I was lucky enough that there was sufficient demand for me to take a third shift by myself with very minimal customer service requirements, just a majority of time spent doing diagnostics and repairs.
Was laid off for a month after lockdown initiation (march 2020) due to the drop in apple repair demand. (certified independent repair shop, not apple corporate.)
Got Bernie Sanders unemployment pay greater than my normal salary. After the month passed, I was told they'd gotten busy again and I'd have to return to work and give up the unemployment or be fired.
I got two weeks of full time hours catching up the backlog, and then my workload dropped to half time. Was told I could clean and organize the shop and create procedural documents for extra time, but, ugh, gross, and even if I had there wasn't more than a month worth of that busywork in total anyway.
Two years I toughed it out with 20-25 hours a week of what used to be a 35-40 hour job.
Over the 6 years before I quit, I lost over $4000 out of pocket to cover defective apple parts that failed diagnostics after repair or flat out physically broke while using proprietary apple tools for removal. Apple has some seriously predatory policies for authorized service providers like techs are responsible for full cost of any apple defective garbage which fails before the end of a repair, and their 2018 onwards MacBooks are designed to fail. My last month, every penny of my reduced wages went to cover two defective topcase/keyboard/trackpad/battery modules which failed diagnostics during unrelated display replacements (not one connector for the topcase was removed during those repairs and I was grounded as required during every step.) That was the last straw and I quit this April.
All my savings went to pay off the back "debt" the business had already paid to apple so I could walk away clean.
It's been really tight making ends meet since that and I've built up bad debt and maxed my credit with a couple cards being deactivated as a result.
Too bad, since the job aligned so well with my hobby skills that I could literally do repairs on autopilot.
Since the Never Ending State of Emergency was implemented, I also had to put up with BS comments about my well researched views on the dangers of vaccination in general and especially the toxic inoculations du jour, which greatly reduced the good parts of working there as well. When they pushed me to get shots I made it clear in no uncertain terms that if they did, they'd have to fire me first. Since I was apparently their best tech, they backed off, but I was still forced to wear a mask even though nobody else worked my hours. I had bought a serious p500 with enhanced airflow filters to exceed the n95 recommendation even though they only wanted the cloth or flimsy paper masks, so I could lie and say I was protecting myself as well as possible against droplet transmission while they ignored every piece of evidence that respiratory viruses are not stopped by anything short of a HAZMAT suit.
Even though my finances are shaky relying on online remote work, my mindset is more pleasant what with not having to deal with blind idiocy regarding masks and injections and especially not fearing financial liability for every machine I touched for diagnostics or repair.