Double Your Income, Pay Off Your Debt On ODSP/OW. Louis Shalako

Louis Shalako

Over the last three years, I have almost doubled my income. Without being facetious, I can honestly say I’m getting up near the poverty line. This is by taking a part-time gig and working it, semi-scientifically, as a business. After so many years on ODSP, this is a remarkable achievement, as the basic provincial disability pension runs about thirty-five to forty percent below the poverty line.

In the last year, I have reduced my credit card debt down to approximately zero. Last year, at about this time, I exceeded my $1500.00 credit limit by a couple of dollars. Basically, you check the balance online…see that yesterday’s purchase at the liquor store hasn’t gone through yet…nip down there and grab another pile of booze while you still can. The same goes for smokes and gas as well—

Groceries, even, if you’re not getting too many hours at work. And let’s be honest, that happens sometimes.

There is a $25.00 penalty for that, so that I owed, at that time, about $1,527.00. Now, even on that debt, at 28 % APR, the monthly interest doesn’t seem too bad. At the time of the monthly statement, it’s twenty-five, thirty bucks, forty dollars at most. What’s forty dollars times twelve? Multiply that by twelve months and it seems a bit more significant.

That’s a half a thousand bucks, real money when you’re lining up at food banks and wearing God-damned rags all the time.

Now, in order to avoid ‘overpayments’, due to the fact that on ODSP, one can only earn up to $200.00 per month without penalty, I have reinvested ‘excess profits’ back into my business. 

This is money you cannot live on, presumably, this is why the ODSP accepts it.

This involves the purchase of anything from new keyboards, a new monitor, or a reconditioned computer. So, each and every month, I was jamming some new purchase (hopefully a reasonable one in the sense of developing a business), onto the credit card.

At the end of the month, I paid as much as I could scrape up. Even so, somehow, I must have been chipping away at that balance. Two days before the end of the month, (March), I owe $148.00 on the credit card balance. The other factor is the fact that I did not buy anything for the office, for the business, during the months of January, February and March. On ODSP, the guidelines state that all expenses are to be charged to the month in which the purchase was made—it’s not a year-end sort of deduction, such as any other business in Canada might enjoy. A regular human business person could buy a case of toilet paper for the business, and the revenue people really don’t care in which month the purchase was made.

I actually went a bit over the allowable limit for those three months, a calculated gamble.

I have a reason for taking that risk—

So, in the course of about one year, I will have taken my credit card balance down to zero. I will be paying that last bit off Friday morning, a little after dawn, in other words.

What an interesting feeling it surely is—

To have actual control over one’s finances. To have mastered something. Maybe that’s what it is.

Okay, the monthly interest on $148.00 is not much, a couple or three bucks. It’s not going to make a big difference in my life, however, once the balance is down to zero, I can make a major purchase. I want a drafting table for the business. The base might cost $184.00 and the top, a separate item, $132.00. I can make that purchase over two months, use it as an allowable business deduction, and avoid ‘overpayments’ or charges against my Ontario Disability Support Program benefits. Which, after all, is still the major source of my income. 

If I pay off one hundred percent of the charge at the end of any given month, then there is no interest due at all. This is the ideal, and what every first-time credit-card holder brags about, after all.

So, as things presently stand, clients may earn up to $200.00 per month, after allowable deductions. The new provincial government has announced that in future, clients will be able to earn up to $6,000.00 per year, i.e. $500.00 per month. For Ontario Works, clients will be able to earn up to $300.00 (OW means welfare), the rate of claw-back after that will be seventy-five percent. Presumably the same goes for ODSP. I just haven’t seen that in writing. 

I haven’t been able to find anything as to when that takes effect.

In terms of business planning, it’s still up in the air.

Assuming November 1, just as an example, then the first ten months of the year represents $2,000.00 in allowable income, and the last two months of the year another $1,000.00 of allowable income. This seems like a fair way to deal with a transition year, going from one set of guidelines to another as it were.

I could earn up to three grand, and never have to keep a receipt, mileage log or anything.

Thank you for reading.

Louis has all kinds of books and stories on Amazon.

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What Is the Value of a Free Ebook? Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

Last year I gave away probably ten thousand ebooks. In my opinion, any business may promote itself, and any business might claim this expense as a legitimate business deduction.

Yet I have a funny feeling the ODSP (Ontario Disability Support Program) won’t see it that way at all.

I regularly sell ebooks for $0.99, $1.99, or $2.99. I’ve had them priced higher and sold a few books. The reason I don’t do this all the time is that volume suffers, and pretty quickly—and rankings are determined by an algorithm. Lower volume, lower the ranking.

Sales and net earnings drop. This is why I resist the urge, and the overwhelming advice to raise prices. The fact is, they don’t know anything and some of them are also full of shit.

That’s just my opinion after seven or eight years of study—such algorithms are proprietary and rightly so. Otherwise it would be too easy to game the algorithms for the average person, although I do a bit of it myself.

Let’s take a baseline figure of $0.99/ebook, rounded off to the dollar to keep the math simple. 

I gave away 10,000 ebooks, that’s a promotional expense for the calendar year 2016.

Ebooks have perceived and intrinsic value. That’s why people pay money for them and they take them in impressive numbers when they’re free.

It takes effort to produce them, I have to have the internet, a phone, a camera, I have to purchase stock photos for the covers. I have to put the hours in and my time is valuable if not exactly precious sometimes. There are all kinds of expenses involved. Some people spend a lot more than I do, but then, I do all the work around here.

That’s how I learned how—that’s how I trained myself.

That’s how I got all the wonderful skills, ladies and gentlemen.

And yet the ODSP will deny the validity, or more accurately, the monetary value, of an ebook—just as I kind of did myself, over the last seven or eight years. I say that because while I know I’ve given away over 120,000 ebooks since Sept. 2010, I’ve never reported that to the ODSP.

At an estimated royalty of $0.35/per book, mostly for the sake of completing our little math exercise, that would add up to $3,5000.00 CDN in promotion.

At one time, there were a lot of book commentators, traditionally published authors for the most part, blogging and bleating on the subject of ‘devaluing’ literature and especially ebooks by setting them at free or $0.99 or whatever. By the very nature of the product, this is possible. A free print book is much more expensive to produce, I will grant you that.

I saw it for what it was at the time. It was just polemic. They were just trying to destroy all the credibility and all the legitimacy of independent publishing. They were trying to destroy ebooks, ladies and gentlemen. Their own position was threatened by this revolutionary technology.

They had an interest in sapping the confidence not just of the writers, but also of the readers.

They wanted to control the situation. They wanted to keep us out of the market, didn’t they?

The government of the Province of Ontario, not very popular at the moment, has an interest in controlling costs too. They want to control the situation too.

The way they do that with the 750,000 disabled clients of the Ontario Disability Support Program is to make us think that we are stupid. That we can’t do the math. That we are somehow the enemy, and that for whatever imaginary reason, we must be punished.

We live in such fear of our benefits being cut and not being able to pay the rent that we tend to take the easy way out and go with the flow. We don’t ask too many questions, We tend to avoid our social worker rather than seeking them out.

We tend to keep our mouths shut and our heads down. We tend to keep moving.

Well.

Fuck that.

No more.

No more.

Nothing great was ever achieved without risk, without thought, effort, and ultimately, sacrifice.

Hopefully that’s not going to be me, but this government would do well to lower the rate of claw-back on earnings for ODSP clients who work or operate a business to $0.35/dollar rather than the current rate of fifty percent. They would do well to raise the allowable earnings limit, bearing in mind the poverty line in this province and across the country is estimated by this very government to be $22,000.00/year for a single adult.

Your pension pays a bare $13,000.00 or so and that is simply not good enough, ladies and gentlemen.

Not good enough.

This government would be doing the right thing by putting a line for ‘promotional expense’ on the reporting form for business and expenses. Not to do so would appear disingenuous, especially so now that this government has been duly notified of the moral repercussions.

I might have a few other ideas as well, as time goes along.

Naturally, these are suggestions rather than demands, which would presuppose a rather different power relationship than that which presently exists between the disabled and the government of this province.

Thank you for reading.

Oh, and don't be afraid to grab a free ebook once in a while. You might be surprised by how helpful that can be sometimes.

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