Need help again, could lose my home (also: pretty pictures, of an abstract nature, at end of post)

I think I've said before, I never meant to disappear.  It's been a bad . . . eight and a half years, I'd say, with the five most recent of them being worse than what came before, and the three most recent of those being worst of all.

I hate coming back here to just to fundraise, but... that's where things stand.

So, it's important to state that there's more in play here than money.  There's a lot of work I need to do, some of it hard in the traditional sense, some of it hard for mental health reasons, some of it both.  Some of it just paperwork.

Unless you can physically show up at my door, though, the place you're most likely to be able to help is with money, either by donating money, spreading word of the fundraiser, or both.

I'm at a crossroads where one path leads to my home being sold out from under me and the other leads to me becoming its owner and the financial problems that have been ever present in my life finally being conclusively dealt with.

As in, if I became the owner of this home and I were starting from zero, everything should work going forward.  I am not starting from zero.  At all.  Things are very negative.

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There are smaller problems, but the two big ones are that the house needs some long overdue repairs that, in part because of how long they've been left to fester, are gonna cost a fair amount (by my standards at least) and getting rid of high interest debt that's entirely unsustainable.

There's not a lot to be said about the repairs.  They're extensive, but not complex.  They'll cost money I don't currently have, but by the standards of home repairs (assuming I understand said standards) not that much.  They're doable and shouldn't pose a problem.  If I can fund them.

I guess the the biggest thing to be said about repairs is that them not being done is part of why a home that was going to be given to me free and clear is now at risk of being sold out from under me.  I was supposed to be the one doing them; I didn't.

If I can't prove that I can keep the house in good repair, starting with the overdue repairs, and I can also be financially self sustaining, this place will be sold out from under me.  If I can, it'll be given to me, which given income and asset restrictions for people on SSI disability, is almost certainly the only hope I'll ever have of owning the place I live (wherever that may be.)

I think that covers everything there is to say about the repairs.  While there were a lot of other factors in the past (and I'll talk about some) the big thing currently standing between me and being self-sustaining is the high interest debt, and everything that follows will be about that

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I think I only mentioned this once here before, but the way I used to ask for and get financial help was wrong.  Totally how you're not supposed to do it in terms of SSI.

You're allowed $20 of unearned income in a month, and anything over that is deducted from your next month's supplement.  Because I'm saying here at just the expenses a homeowner would pay, and the SSA has decided that in this neighborhood a homeowner would charge $200 more than expenses per month, I'm already considered to be getting $200 of unearned income in the form of a housing subsidy from the actual homeowner, so that $20 I'm allowed is already accounted for (and then some.)

What that means is that any money I get as donations, as opposed to wages (from an employer or as self-employment income), is deducted in full from my next month's supplement.

For a very long time this wasn't happening because I didn't understand, and the people I was reporting to made bad assumptions.  Short version: when I said I got help paying bills, they assumed I meant that people paid the bills directly.

In almost any context, there's no difference between someone giving money so I can pay to have heating oil delivered, and someone paying the exact same amount of money to the heating oil company to have heating oil delivered to me.  In the end, the person who helped me, myself, and the heating oil company each has exactly as much money in one scenario as they do in the other, and my tank has exactly as much oil as it would in the other.

Under SSI, these two things are completely different.

If I'm given the money to pay for the oil, that's unearned income and (since the $20 wiggle room is already covered) is supposed to be deducted in full from my next month's SSI payment.  If the heating oil company is paid directly, and I never touch the money, that's an "in kind" payment that's not countable as unearned income, and it won't cause a single cent to be deducted from my next month's SSI payment.

So all of those times I fundraised via Paypal?  That was supposed to be taken away from me the next month.  This has two very important consequences.

First, now that misunderstandings are cleared up, someone donating to me via Paypal is only useful if having that money now is worth losing the same amount in a month or if it's more than my entire next month's SSI payment, since I don't think they make you pay them the difference if the amount to be deducted exceeds the full payment amount.

Second, all of the money that wasn't deducted is money I wasn't supposed to get, which means I'm supposed to pay it back . . . sort of.  Nothing is ever simple with these people, but this "sort of" isn't a bad one.

Because it was misunderstanding and miscommunication instead of, like, fraud, there's a window on how much is counted against me, meaning I don't owe the SSA every single cent I ever got in donations over the entire period I've been on SSI.  Likewise, there are other mechanisms in place to make things somewhat less terrible.

The problem is, the $180 that was being deducted from each month's payment--because they thought paying the expenses I would if I owned this home was the same as being given a $200 a month supplement--already had me always skating close to the edge, which is why I needed help so often.

Having even more deducted as part of the repayment plan meant I was almost always over the edge, and my usual means of getting help when I was in the red was a no-go.

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I've already given a bare bones description of what needs to happen for a donation to be ok under SSI rules, and it probably already sounds kind of like some kind of scam.  The full set of rules is so bizarre, inexplicable, and counterintuitive that it really sounds like a scam.

Even when I get someone who has the potential to be the necessary third party to read things themselves from the government's own website to see that those are the rules, it still feels like a scam enough that people, even people who like me and want to help me, want no part in it.

Since the rules were clarified to me and everything has been done as it's supposed to be done, this is only the second time I've been able to get the help needed to jump through the hoops the SSA requires for people to keep what's donated to them if they're on SSI.

The first time was heating oil.  Someone else raised money on my behalf, once there was enough money, they used it to pay for heating oil for me, and that made everything fine even under the fucked up rules that are in place.

It's been a while since everything started being accounted for correctly, I've spent much of that time in the red because of the need to pay back past donations, and that heating oil is the only help I've gotten in that time.  Things are bad.

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As I said, everything's at a place where it should work out now if I were starting from a neutral position.  There's a lot to that, and some's not quite finished, but it's all in place or on the way in the near future and entirely doable.

But, look at the above.  All of that time in the red when I couldn't meaningfully get any help from anyone except heating oil that one time.

I had to pay for stuff on credit, and then making the payments on the debt left less to pay for regular bills, leaving me even further in the red, meaning I had to pay for even more on credit, and that's a fucking death spiral.

It's reached the point where I'm effectively out of credit.  It's hard to scrape up enough to keep the cards from going over their limits from interest alone.  Some bills are being deferred because there's neither money nor credit to pay for them with.

When it came time to get more heating oil, I couldn't.  It's summer; I'll live.  That was the first because it's an irregular expense, something in addition to the monthly stuff, but it's hitting the point where I won't be able to cover monthly bills (without the fundraiser, which has already raised enough that that won't happen rigtht away even if it fails.)

Two nigh-suicidal depressive spirals didn't help either.
(The "nigh" is important.  I promise you, I'm not in danger.)

Increasingly when I think about the future, instead of staring into the abyss I face I think, "I'll just kill myself."  This isn't actually suicidal thinking, because I don't mean it any more than the average person who says, "Kill me now," is asking to be murdered, and YES I have spoken to a mental health professional about this.  More than once.

It's a maladaptive coping strategy based on the idea that you don't have to worry about what tomorrow will bring if you won't be here tomorrow, but those nigh-suicidal depressive spirals kicked that up several notches.

It didn't kick over into actually meaning it, or actually wanting to die, but at their depths that sense of there being no tomorrow was palpable, and the truth is that I can't blame all of my financial woes on shit that was outside my control.  And I feel so guilty asking for help fixing a problem that's partially self-inflicted.

Also, as an aside, in addition to being a maladaptive coping strategy, that sentence popping into my head unbidden is disturbing as all fuck.  For as long as I've had to deal with depression, I've been afraid it might become suicidal.  Actively afraid it might.

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When trying to put a dollar value to what it'll take, money wise, to do the things I'll need to do to save my house, I came out to about $10,000.  I have literally never had that much money to my name in my life.

Fortunately, the SSA lets you have one house, provided you live in it, that isn't counted against you as an asset, so if I become owner, my net worth increasing severalfold because of the home's value won't pose a problem.  But for that to happen I need to get to a place where I'm financially sustainable, which means getting rid of the debt, and I need to do the repairs, which means paying for the supplies needed to do them.

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To anyone wondering why I just said $10,000 when the GoFundMe says $5,000, it's an automated thing for momentum building or some such.  I considered saying I was trying to raise $20,000, so it would say I was going for $10,000 from the outset, as that felt more honest, and because the $10,000 is my attempted (rounded) minimum estimate, but ultimately went with $10,000 as the final goal.

If fluctuating prices or unexpected hiccups in repairs mean doing what needs to be done costs more, I think those problems are ones I'll be able to absorb on my own going forward if I can get rid of the massive problems I'm faced with right now.

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I actively hate asking for things, especially when I'm not giving anything in return, so I'd like to offer up some pretty pictures.

I don't remember if researching five-fold symmetries led me to quasicrystals or learning about quasicrystals led to looking into five-fold symmetries, but at some point I used sinusoidal functions to experiment with them.

After creating a complex wave function, and deploying it fivefold, I gravitated toward this area of the resulting graph:

Astute observers will note that it only has a single line of reflectional symmetry (it's symmetrical left to right) and only has near-symmetry along other lines or under rotation.

It's only around the origin of rotation that there's true five fold rotational symmetry and true five fold reflectional symmetry.

Recently, I came back to the work I'd done on that, and worked out a way to pull that shape to the origin thus allowing for those true symmetries, here's four color variants on the shape from the center of the image, but with true symmetries: