Please Help Us Fix Our House

I've noticed lately that more people are fundraising here not only to get help with lessening the impact of tragedies on their lives but also to get help with improving their already good lives. I think the state of economic inequality in the US is a real problem, so I donate whenever I can to campaigns that are there to help lift people up when they have opportunities to improve their lives, but they can’t quite afford to finance those opportunities on their own.

Our situation is that our house was built in 1954, and needs some major work to help it last, to be more livable, and to be more energy efficient. From the top down: we need the roof rebuilt (not just resurfaced) so that it will stop leaking, we need the original thin and drafty steel windows replaced, we need the whole house re-sided to be better insulated (and fix walls damaged by the leaky roof), and we need new, properly graded concrete in the carport to put an end to some pretty bad drainage issues that sometimes cause basement flooding.

The estimate we have for all of that is somewhere north of $120K.

We have some savings to put toward this, and we can get loans if it comes to that, but what we’re aiming for with this fundraiser is to avoid going into any significant new debt.

We all want to avoid going deeper into debt if we can, right?

It seems to me that while we wait for a new, more fair and equitable economic paradigm to emerge and replace capitalism on a large scale, crowdfunding presents us with an opportunity to relieve people of debt one project at a time and help promote a culture of mutual assistance.

So if you can donate a little something to our project, that would be wonderful, and we would be sincerely grateful to you.

Just as important as donating, though, is sharing this campaign with as many people as we possibly can. The way I figure it, getting a few very large donations isn’t very likely, but if we can drum up a whole lot of small donations then we’ll get to the goal without needing any one person to give up more than the cost of a couple of cups of coffee or a beer and a burger.

Maybe the math is obvious, but just to put it out there:

10 people x $10,000 donation = $100,000

100 people x $1,000 donation = $100,000

1,000 people x $100 donation = $100,000

10,000 people x $10 donation = $100,000

Now, I don’t personally know ten thousand people, but if everyone who reads this shares it with five or ten more people maybe we can get to the goal. If nothing else it’s kind of a fun and interesting experiment that we can all do together.

If it works, then: yay, we did it!

If it works, then maybe that will inspire more people to try it too.

Thanks for reading this, thanks for sharing it on your social media accounts, and thanks for donating.