A homeless man who turned his life around by offering book reviews

Congratz on paying down your student loan!

Have you considered coming up with a resource for those paying off student loans? Not so much a pity-party community, but more of financial resources + legal contacts + "life hacks" + community / forum. I'd imagine the potential audience is quite large in the US and the emotional appeal of getting debt collectors off your back is pretty enticing.

I imagine the next generation of resource websites like this will use "brain hacks" (concepts in BJ Fogg's persuasion techniques -- similar to gamification) and may even be able to charge a subscription if it can change habits and encourage positive progress on paying down loan debt.

I paid down A LOT on a family member [A]'s student loan to take the pressure off another family member [B]. I would gladly pay a subscription fee for [A] to learn to take control of their own finances and figure out how to save money on their own.

I recently started this site because I think most money problems are really life problems, but it isn't exactly taking off:

http://notanothermoneyblog.blogspot.com/

I would welcome feedback on it. That would help me figure out where to go with it.

Most of my financial advice stuff ends up here:

http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/p/money.ht...

I don't really plan to create anything with a subscription because the kinds of problems I talk about tend to leave people with too little money to survive. My hope is that as my writing helps people start solving their problems, they will leave a tip when they can better afford it. But I do have a Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/MicheleinCalifornia

That sounds like romanticism/nostalgia, and probably ignores a lot of bad stuff that happened.

If you want another take on more primitive cultures, read "The Better Angels of our Nature" by Steven Pinker. You probably won't want to return to that kind of lawlessness.

That being said, I think we probably have a lot to learn and may have made some wrong turns. For instance, people are probably happier having more close relationships with other people, but separate houses where we don't know our neighbors doesn't allow that.

> Never? Not ever? Not even 1% of the poor? Not even one person?

When you stop reasoning by anecdote, you'll look back and see how absurd your views actually are and how not based in reality they are. It is you who is making the moral argument, not I, and you've done it based on your anecdotal impression of lazy poor people, and you do so because you suffer from the just world fallacy which is again because your reasoning is based on your morality rather than on the facts. You've quite literally projected your own deficiencies onto me, you're suffering from exactly what you just told me not to do.

Poverty isn't caused by laziness or lack of work ethic, your assertion that it is so is not grounded in reality and not backed up by any evidence, it's merely a moral position you've taken because it makes you feel better somehow.

Note: please take the rest of this comment as one input, you'll have to combine it with everything else you know and your interests. it's just my suggestion.

Do you already code? it may help your goals if you learn to code. It might allow you to make some sort of more featureful web app than just blog posts. Then, your talent for clear writing and communication would combine with the functionality of whatever you wanted to code. I'm sure you've felt the frustration of only having whatever options your blogging platform gave you. with code, it does whatever you want.

plus you might get some freelance coding work which should pay well. but above all your clear communication with the ability to make features you want would be pretty killer, I think. don't feel boxed into the idea that you have to only just write and English should be your main or only output. you can output code. you can create features that do something. (from a standing start, from 0.) it doesn't matter how bad it is because if it brings some money then later you can hire coders to redo it. (people call this 'technical debt' but it's a stupid term. it's just a free option to pay only if you find something that makes money, where you can throw it away if it doesn't. if you code 99 different things that nobody uses and the 100th is what takes off, you can just pay someone to rewrite the 100th. you can ignore the first 99th projects. which proves that it isn't technical debt because you can't just ignore debt whenever you don't care anymore. you can ignore technical debt, indefinitely, because it's just a free option to try something.)

So try some small web app. AWS has a free tier. Ignore everyone who gives you a lot of bullshit. in the article I linked from elon musk talking about when he was (my term) homeless, he was coding all day. so you could try it and see if you can find something.

this is just based on my impression of your style of communication, thinking, logic, and also you have shown an ability to collect a pretty large audience. maybe the tiniest amount of code would be all it takes. you say you'd like to work all online so this would fit that criterion. it sounds like you might already have some exposure to the google ads network which is a killer way to bootstrap promoting anything: the first time your users spend $90 on your web app, you can try spending $85 of it on an advertisement (don't know about adwords actual minimums this is an illustrative example) and if it brings in just $89 in revenue for every $85 you spend, in theory you can keep turning that process around until you are at $500, $1000, etc. Facebook ads can likewise be bootstrapped like this.

all this depends on making something that has some kind of functionality you can promote, describe, and code. try setting an AWS free tier and go from there. you write that you're not taken seriously but just ignore it - do it underground. nobody took elon musk seriously when he was taking showers at the Y, and nobody took him seriously when he produced a written paper proposing hyperloop.

ignore all that noise. just do something. You will have to adapt all this to your goals, interests, conditions, I don't know the details. you also have to be very careful because (in my opinion) programmers love to waste each other's time, so stick with popular tools where you can just google what you're trying to do and someone has posted the solution. programmers hate that you don't have to waste weeks to years of your life reading manuals, and getting rid of manuals or making things work is simply not a design constraint for them. I'll give you an example:

This is how long it should take from deciding to make a Rails app (a popular web app framework) on a new AWS instance, to having one up: 47 seconds. I should click "I want a new instance with some super-common stack" and then I should click "Rails 5 with" (whatever is most common.) And I should have it.

Here's how long it actually takes: https://hackernoon.com/how-to-setup-and-deploy-a-rails-5-app...

In 47 seconds you can barely read through the introduction (which starts with "Deploying a Rails app can be a somewhat daunting task to get set up right on new applications, even for seasoned Rails developers.")

Remember that (in my opinion) everything you read about programming is meant to waste horrendous amounts of your time and be a huge sink. These people cannot communicate. Which is why you will have such a huge advantage over them if you deploy any app to do anything, because your version can be clear and precise and your experience with audiences would help you promote it. just ignore the noise. Be super careful of your time and only pick the most common tools and languages.

Note: I didn't adapt this advice to the specifics of your situation, or your interests, so really you're the only one who knows how to use it, if at all. As I said at the top of the comment, just think of it like a point of input.