Help my family regain some financial security

Hi, I'm Lili. Depending on where you know me from, I may also be Zab to you or if you don't know me at all, my given name is Michel. I am 25 years old and live in Switzerland, a beautiful country as you can see in the cover picture I took on the day this was written, but also one that can and has been quite brutal, in this case to my mother whom I mainly hope to be able to help with this. I live alone with her and she usually handles any of the financial stuff beyond taking what she needs from my funds, so I may not entirely perfectly understand the logistics behind our bills and all that, but I will do my best to explain the situation as well as I can.

Recently, my mother received a bill with additional extra costs amounting to around CHF1350 (~$1377). This includes costs for heating, water, etc. this year for the months from January - April. Previously, these extra costs were CHF160 a month, but our apartment block got bought up last year and is thus now under new ownership. Now they're gonna be something around CHF470 / month by my mother's calculations. According to the new ownership, the reason for these extra costs and why they're as high as they are is that the cost for these things is rising due to the war. We weren't informed about these incoming additional costs, so this in itself already hit my mother like a truck - and in the near future, we'll get another one of those bills, except the next one will encompass the entirety of the costs from May 2022 - May 2023. We don't know exactly how high that will be, but if we use the CHF1350+ 160x4 previously / 4 months as a baseline, we can expect that one to end up around CHF5000, unless the people here somehow get the new owners to change their mind. This is on top of any other bills we're going to have to come up for, including electricity, taxes and whatever else.

The prospect of all that and her not knowing how we're even going to manage to come up for all that blew her away the night she opened that bill. She was about to head to work - she works night shifts as a nurse in a nursing home for disabled people - and, as she told me, she ended up speeding through the forest to work at 160kmh (100mph), hoping to crash. She was at her wits' end.

This is the most important part, why I made this fundraiser in the first place.

With that said, if you want to know more about our life situation, let me give you a little bit of backstory:

This isn't the first time I know about that she was close to committing suicide - the one other time I am aware of, however, was when she was on an emotional low due to the recent death of her own mother, my grandmother. I have never seen her pushed this low from our monetary situation before, even when she thought countless times we might not make it through the month. It has never been this bad. This, more than anything is why I'm attempting this. To let her regain some sense of financial security. To let her feel like everything is going to be alright for once.

This is a woman who's been through countless financial lows with me and my brother. We've always lived sort of on the edge like that, but she has pushed herself time and time again to provide as much as she can for us and brought us through anything so far. On top of all this, my mother is overworked as is without all the additional costs. She can't take more.

Back during the first wave of covid, she caught it from one of her coworkers who brought it back from vacation. She recovered well enough to keep working afterward, but she hasn't felt the same amount of energy she had before that ever since. This is on top of some other untreatable health issues that, even without covid, could possibly cause her to die each and every day out of nowhere. In the same breath she told me about her drive in the woods, she also told me about how that settled in recently and from how she described it, she might have actually gotten very close to dying from her health right there. And it's nothing I could even notice in time unless I were to monitor her 24/7. It's very scary.

My father, her divorced ex-husband, abandoned our family and stopped paying alimonies 10+ years ago. Last I knew he lived somewhere in France and made himself a nice life, leaving behind a single mother with two kids to raise and provide for and no financial support from their father whatsoever.

All that aside, we have taken every single avenue of financial help that we're aware of over here into account and we have dealt with them in the past. My mother is well aware of any regular Swiss helper channels, probably more so than I am myself. If there was a way to help ourselves out of our situation, she'd know about it and I trust her judgment on that. We have made it through every such situation yet. If she's losing hope to this degree, it is very very serious. Unfortunately, a lot of these avenues - if they were even an option anymore - would also drive us further into debt, which is another big issue for us and hopefully one we could also resolve to some extent if this works out.

With all that said, let me address a couple questions that I believe might be a thing for some:

What about me?

I won't pretend I don't have some fault in our situation as well. As of right now, the only financial support I can personally provide is unemployment benefits and whatever money we have put aside from those every month. We will be using parts of that to help pay off this first set of additional costs. So yes, I'm currently officially unemployed. For the previous 3 months and the coming 3 I have been and will be in a sort of program that will hopefully help me make way into a field that suits my strengths. Until I manage that though - or until I get another place -, this program is taking up my week and thus I cannot viably work outside of that.

I have always struggled to find my way in work life. I had to break off my first apprenticeship and I made it through my second one, but I do not feel comfortable that I'd be actually able to work in the field I learned for my second one. Along the way since then I have taken some temporary jobs here and there, but unfortunately my body is fairly weak, so I cannot actually work these very well. My body tends to start crumbling after a couple hours of physical stress, especially if I can't take some time to sit down sort of regularly. This rules out a lot of job opportunities for me that I could otherwise viably get into, and a lot of temp job opportunities wouldn't even yield much more than what unemployment benefits include (until those run out).

My strengths primarily lie in writing and my command of English and German. Unfortunately, jobs for that aren't easy to come by over here and are also often connected to years of studies or diplomas that I do not have, but it's part of the field I am attempting to get into and I might have a real chance of it with this program. It just needs time.

That aside, people who know me will know I can keep up a sub in Final Fantasy XIV as well as get a new game here and there. I will not pretend that that isn't the case, but those are small expenses and in the case of my sub, I have financed a lot of that time from money I made proofreading German novel translations for very low rates for some indie authors here and there. They wouldn't make or break my household's ability to make it through any of these situations. I am relatively cheap to maintain outside of that - gaming is my one big hobby and the opportunities you have with an appropriate PC make it fairly cheap if you don't overspend. I don't really go out or party or anything like it, which would cause me to spend a lot. I also regularly forego any lunch to save a bit where I can.

My brother is a different case and I won't go too into detail on him, as he doesn't live with us anymore regardless. I don't have the best grasp on his situation, but I do know he's also in a good amount of debt and it would be very nice if we could end up helping him out of that as well. He learned in the same field I made my apprenticeship in and he's far more capable at it than I am, but even he has a lot of trouble finding a place for himself again. Job searching is hard out here and even with our best attempts, sometimes life just hits you and you can't find anything regardless of how good you are.

Why CHF20,000?

Quite frankly, I'm not entirely sure on the *exact* amount we'd need to find a good amount of security. I did, however, ask my mother about how much 10-20k on the spot would potentially help us. I framed it to be more out of curiosity and a need for perspective, but I asked her and 20k seems to be a good spot where we would have to worry a lot less, at least for a couple months. It's around 4-6 monthly salaries worth of money so it isn't the world, but it would be very helpful regardless.

In the end, the reason why I set it to 20k though is just that it's the upper goal I am considering reaching. As far as I'm aware, you get whatever people funded regardless of whether you reach the goal or not, so I'm not too worried about reaching a goal as much as just reaching whatever we can reach. Really, any little bit helps and I will be eternally grateful for it, regardless of where we end up. I just want to help my mother out with however much I can.

All the money that will be donated to this will be managed by my mother and I can give you my word, she'll use it wisely and to help our family situation out the best she can.

Lastly...

If you're still reading this, thank you very much for even giving our issues this much attention. Truthfully, this isn't the first time I have considered making a fundraiser. Years ago we had many a case where my mother thought we wouldn't make it through and I thought of it, but I never went through with it. Quite frankly, I really do not like putting myself out here so much. I am revealing a lot about my life here that I never wanted to reveal to anyone. Maybe we'd get through without it once more. But I am not risking having my mother take her life on a chance that things *might* end up being alright if I can help it.

My mother doesn't know about this yet and she only will if it bears fruit. So if this somehow ends up reaching people that know us in real life, please do not tell her about it. I will tell her about it and give her the money if we get that far. The only thing worse than having no hope is having a glimmer of hope be snuffed out in front of your face.

I know we aren't necessarily an extraordinary case. A lot of people are in the same or a similar boat. As I said, I can still afford some things here and there and thus I struggled a lot with thoughts on whether this is even justified. It also kinda scares me because I have never done this and I don't actually know much about the process from here on out.

But this isn't about me. This is about my mother, a woman who has spent nearly 29 years giving every ounce of herself to her two children. A woman who has gone through depression, health issues, possibly every bad feeling in the world, all because she knew her children need her. She has given her all for us every step of the way and she will continue to do so. This woman deserves to feel good. She deserves to feel like everything will turn out alright in the end.