Financial Disclosure
November 2018, updated February 2019, updated March 2022
Anyone who thinks we're doing this for the money can bite us.
TL;DR
Consider subscribing to our Patreon for $3+ to support our continued work — and see if you can get a couple other people to do it, too. This isn't a whine. We're now housed in supported housing after being homeless for 3 years. We pay our bills on-time. We do our best to burden no one and we are on Medicaid right now. But our situation is not improving either — and we're hobbled by our situation. The community can help fix that. If 1000 people contribute $1-3+ to support us, it changes everything.
Full Disclosure
We had a 10% donation statement in our books. It's such a gross understatement we've decided to remove it and put this statement up instead and be thoroughly transparent.
Expenses
We have a dedicated server that costs $80/month. Internet access (getting a discount on the $80/month that's supposed to be costing us right now, so it's $50/mo — but that discount may go away at any time), cell phone ($35/mo), utilities - electric to keep the lights on, heat the space, & run the computers (around $150/mo), and that's not counting domain registrations, food etc. This is just bare bones what it takes for us to maintain the website infrastructure we have right now. To balance this, we have 1 web maintenance client paying $100/mo, and a small handful (3?) of website hosting clients ($48/year) — these clients are not related to plurality at all.
Another amusing issue is we have 2 Udemy courses (not related to plurality at all — one on raising chickens, one on English vocabulary) that earned us $680 in 2021 — this is passive/residual income, we don't do much to maintain the courses. Also pet sitting brought in $1683, this helps balance car expenses.
We have plenty other personal & business expenses like fees for running a business, software (transcription, scheduling…) etc. Also all the numbers below do not include any income tax withholding for taxes, nor self-employment tax for social security or medicaid fees.
Our total income for 2021 was about $8000 total — or $667 a month — after expenses & taxes were done. That's from everything, whether or not plural related, such as VA work, dog sitting, coaching, patrons, book sales, course sales, etc.
Book Income & Donation Disclosure
As of November 2018 we've made under $80 on the United Front book project on LeanPub, which we're currently splitting into 3 books as we write this. March 2022 update: the release of the Ship's Log Planner, more visibility for the United Front works after the split & coaching groups/conferences etc, and an uptick of sales on LeanPub have changed this for the better. More updates below.
Our first book, Poetic License — the best-selling book of any we've written to date — had pre-sales from many of our singular buddies and business contacts and made maybe $200 overall after the book purchases of physical copies to deliver. We still have significant inventory/stock of books on hand that we haven't been able to sell (and that we continue to store). We sell maybe 1-2 a year from our inventory, and make about $5-11 if it's purchased as print-on-demand from Amazon.
Giving Back
Generally we donate about $60/year to our local CASA organization, and a varying amount of money ($25-100 minimum, not counting travel expenses, etc.) annually to our local Independent Living, Inc. that helps people with disabilities including trauma, substance abuse issues, physical and mental differences and disabilities. We run fundraisers for our local CASA 3x a year, we are on the Independent Living board of directors and donate a great deal of time helping both organizations, which is a labor of love and we'd do it with or without book sales and the public's financial support.
We also give uncompensated time and efforts directly in the online DID community, physically by being out in the community, by presenting (our trip to present at Healing Together in 2019 was only comped for the conference entry fee — travel, hotel/lodging, food, car wear&tear, time off other income-producing pursuits, etc. are all on us, not counting the prep time for the presentation, etc.), holding meet-ups, by holding plural-safe spaces and events, writing for Kinhost.org & CerberusPlural.com, and so on.
To say we'll give 10% of the income from a book (or the sum total of our books) that hasn't made us much money to speak of is an enormous understatement. Technically we've given back more than 100% but we can't make that promise to you because we have other expenses and today may not be a good day to make a donation. We always give back, time and money. In the long run, in retrospect, we're basically giving everything we have back: we're prioritizing this work over getting a "real" job and having to shut down all of this activity just for selves-care for non-work hours — which has led to us being homeless, couch-hopping, and soon to be probably living out of our car and pet-sitting.
We Need Support — as much as we hate to admit it (March 2022 update)
Support us with your book purchases because you need the books, not because you want to donate.
Amazon affiliate income is about $20/year (when we remember to use our affiliate links on other authors books or products mentioned on the site) - it was $7.83 in 2021. Our royalties from our own book sales on Amazon & Lulu ($126.18 in 2021) are more depending on sales. Thankfully we make a better royalty rate on Leanpub ($217.49 in 2021). Thus our book sales have improved (2021 update) — hovering around $30 a month or so. We also made $7.50 in T-shirt sales in 2021.
If you want to support our other work, or support the podcast, the websites, the blog, or our time directly supporting the community in forums, etc. please use our tip jar (https://paypal.me/crisses) or subscribe through our Patreon link (sidebar). Don't just buy a book because you think it will give us loads of money. But it does add up.
We disabled the tip jar at the top of the page (it only ever got $9 as of Feb 2019 thanks to one generous supporter).
Patreon is doing better around $275-290/month currently (March 2022 update). This is mostly thanks to one extremely generous donor, singular supporter's ongoing contributions and some new plural activist patrons. Please consider some type of ongoing support — this is something we can count on towards keeping the website up, maintaining our Internet connection, and so on. More would help us keep writing (which takes food in the belly, lights on, and not taking side jobs), keep our cell phone on so we can do coaching sessions, our computers up-to-date (thanks to side work & government subsidies we actually updated computers in 2021 — our former computers were getting quite old), or gets donated to these awesome causes.
Better yet, get something of direct value for your money, take a course on https://pluralityresource.org. If you don't have money, the courses there are sliding scale. (If something says $10,000 it's closed to enrollments -- the class has to stay up for students going through the course, so we change the price to prevent new enrollments.) We earned $135 from PluralityResource.org courses in 2021.
Also, you can consider going to our coaching website (link also in the sidebar), and sign up for 1:1 coaching and support us more directly while getting enormous value for yourselves. We earned about $330/month for coaching in 2021 — so it is just a tad higher than our Patreon income.
The Path to Financial Freedom: You Decide
The community gets to decide what's next. Regardless of any individual's decision, we're dedicated to tossing our time/spoons/energy/resources into this ring for the remainder of 2019. [March 2022 update: thankfully this situation has improved with housing and with improvements in visibility and folk purchasing our books, plus some coaching clients.] We're willing to get a gym membership for showers, to rent a desk in a co-workspace or laptop at Panera if we can't afford that, and to sleep in our car to continue to do this work for the rest of this year — and if support improves our situation sufficiently, we're willing to extend that "deadline" past next winter. If someone puts $ in the monthly donation bucket it's like saying "please keep helping us out" (or "please keep helping them out" for friends, allies, spouses, etc.).
During a lucrative petsitting season, we bought an air mattress for our back seat of the car, a cooler that does a decent job of keeping ice, shades for the windows of the car to keep insects and light out, etc. We're ready to do this. Seriously.
March 2022: we did it. We were pretty miserable at times. But housing applications came through March 2020 and we moved into a supported apartment in a program for chronic homeless folk with mental disabilities. We were able to start up our coaching groups again, put up the Plurality Resource website, and continued to dedicate our time to helping people in the community. Lower expenses is an enormous help in this — if we make better income over time we can move into more independent housing and that alone may help free up mental energy for more community work.
It Adds Up - Tweaked in 2022
What happens if we get so many donors — say 1000 plurals at $3 a month, so we're taking in about $3000/month (or more) in donations? It wouldn't be an impossible goal, but we're pretty far from there. But dream with us for a moment! We would be able to move into independent housing, and free up time, energy and spoons spent moving from house-to-house (still doing dogsitting for extra income on the side), doing virtual assistant work, or design work for some straggling clients. If we had regular patron funding in the 4-digits, we could give more coaching scholarships or open up group coaching sessions (aside from the curriculum-based group coaching we do now). Our current housing has some issues that trigger our housing PTSD and upends our life with panic attacks, etc. So housing security is still front-n-center even with a roof over our head. If we get truly stable independent housing, we can spend less spoons managing crisis issues.
Why we are doing this shit in the first place
We are here to help people, that's our life's purpose — not getting rich. We wouldn't be able to take the toys and money to the grave. What scares us the most? Taking what's in our head to the grave — the combined knowledge and processes and ideas that the world needs to improve the situation for plurals across the planet can't die with this body! And we're 50 now. So we could easily spend the next 10+ years divesting ourselves of what should be community resources and knowledge. Instead, we're selling $10 packages on Fiverr, and moving from house-to-house caring for pets while trying to juggle helping people and writing and recording and editing and…
It frustrates the heck out of some of our friends. "Why are you doing a free coaching program?" "Why don't you get a (real) job?" "Charge more money." and down a whole list of basically saying "You're more important than all those other people we don't know!" — which is really sweet of them trying to nerf-bat us into submission for selves-care and financial solvency for life.
We disagree. We are not more important than the masses we help. We're very aware that we have to put our oxygen mask on before we can help others — and we maintain just enough balance between selves-care and caring for the community to make sure we're not burning out, getting sick, or getting so stressed out that we won't be able to do this anymore. On the other hand, it's not easy to help people when we're constantly changing locations, or unable to cook ourselves a healthy meal because we don't have a place to cook.
Upshot
If you need our promises as to how we'll spend the (cough) "riches" we make off our pile of life's work, it's a very sad day & the harsh reality is that we give way more than 10% of our profits back, in cash and more. The reality is: we're poor, homeless, and basically living out of our car to do this work. We put temporary roofs over our heads by pet sitting and house sitting (with set-up, moving in/out, pet-care, and dealing with new environments always interfering with our time, workflow, and energy/spoons), while doing life coaching, community support, and writing.
Fun news: just before leaving for the conference, we were asked to be out of the main house we've been couch-surfing at by end of April 2019. 2 years is 1 year too many for them (and for us!! lol). This leaves us in our car while in our home base town, and driving 2hrs to visit our partner as our calendar permits. We're on waiting lists for supported housing — with many hundred others without sufficient openings to whittle the list down significantly or quickly.
The more comfortable our living situation gets, the more time and energy we have to give back to everyone. We've decided that our mission (helping others build internal community) is more important than our housing. We're giving this everything we have already.
Other Long-Term Financial Concerns
None of this mentioning that we have around $4K in credit card debt, About $20K in student loans still to pay off, a $4K judgement from our eviction, and zero retirement saving at the age of 50 — which is often the issue for people with a life-long disability. We always chose to work in small businesses with no retirement plans to conserve spoons and maintain flexibility and freedom we needed to cope with working. Not one of the businesses we worked at offered a 401K or other retirement vehicle, and we probably would have had to offload the cash by now anyway to survive. We already went bankrupt once in this life, and are trying not to do so again, but it's definitely a slippery slope to regain our finanical freedom AND to pour everything (literally) that we have into the community.
We also have some serious chronic health issues that are currently mostly in remission and we don't know whether that will always be the case. Maintaining a low-stress life will assist our quality of life. Working strict hours outside the home has historically led to physical debilitation. :(
Staying in New York
It's also a huge financial decision to stay in New York State. We've dug deep roots in NY, including contacts in the mental health sector, business sector, etc. We understand how NY operates, and our ability to be out is governed at least in part by statewide protections and enforcement around those protections in this state. So we have decided for now that leaving NY is not a viable option for us. This is a choice that impacts our finances, and we're aware of this. But we're also paying for legal and human rights protections we would not have in other states, and that allows us to do what we're doing. For example we're a New York State Certified Peer Specialist - Provisional (at least as of March 2022, we need to renew this year).
So this backs up our baseline of $3000/month to consider ourselves totally financially independent. Note that $3000/mo doesn't account for federal or state taxes, whether we'd lose supports such as Medicaid, etc. so that number may need to change anyway. But $3000/mo free & clear of taxes would likely guarantee we could afford housing, food, medical expenses, etc. So we'll keep that as our goal/baseline that we're looking to achieve. It doesn't need to all be from 1 source, but it does have to be something we can count on and does not fluctuate significantly.