Chasing the American Dream With $25

How’s this for a crazy idea: a guy moves to a randomly selected city with $25 and plans to have a place to live, a car, and $2,500 in the bank—all within one year. Adam Shepard performed this exact feat and then wrote a book about it, titled Scratch Beginnings (SB Press, 240 pp, $13.95). According to Shepard, his experience proves that the American dream can come true. 

In college, Shepard read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, which argues that only government intervention can rescue the working poor from what Ehrenreich portrays as a desperate plight. Shepard doubted her thesis and wanted to test it. So after graduating, he went to Charleston, South Carolina, with a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, $25, and a made-up tale of woe. He spent the first two months in a homeless shelter while he worked as a day laborer. He later found a permanent position with a moving company, which gave him a stable income. This allowed Shepard to buy a (very) used pickup truck, rent and furnish an apartment with a coworker, and start saving. 

During this time, he was on a strict budget, buying clothes at Goodwill and lunching on peanut butter crackers and Vienna sausages. After ten months, he left Charleston due to an illness in his family. By that point, he had saved over $5,000...

...Critics have dismissed Shepard’s claims by pointing to the fact that he enjoyed an array of government services, from food stamps to bus rides to homeless services. But everyone Shepard encountered at the shelter and in the bad neighborhood he later lived in was already using the same services. It wasn’t the public services that lifted Shepard out of destitution—it was his own initiative.

Read the whole thing.

Comments

[Ymarsakar]

Some people are born with the drive to succede at all costs. Others are born to be good for nothing but turning good food into shit.

Unfortunately, the latter constitutes most of humanity.

[ckerst]

The American dream is a junk pickup truck and sharing an apartment while lunching on peanut butter and sausages? How far we've fallen.

[Gail]

Winner of the Rubicon3 "stupid comment of the year award." Congratulations.

[Gail]

Ok. It was the end of a very tough day. I was too abrupt.

You missed the point of the story. The American dream is working hard and succeeding on your own grit and ambition. The gentleman in the story took $25 and grew it into $5000. He was on his way up. He was building his fortune on his own strength of character and a sense of himself as being in charge of and responsible for his fate.

You can ride in a pick up truck and feast on peanut butter and sausages like a king (or queen), knowing you are making your way, working step by step toward your goal, whatever that goal may be.

[Tucson Bass Player]

What a great story. How many people sitting on their tail ends need to read this story.