Bottom Lines Top Dollars

In this episode the Ladies Who Crunch go deep into the dark topic of dealing with death, both that of the people you are connected to in this life and (eventually) your own. Whether you are terrified of talking about it or you’re that goth kid who loves to talk about it or you’re just that punk for whom living fast and dying young just didn’t happen (yet), this episode gets hella practical about the money issues that intersect with death: funerals, wills, settling an estate, inheritance, and that one other unavoidable aspect of live: TAXES.

In this episode Hadassah and LB talk about:

· What to expect if you are the person (or one of the people) responsible for handling “the arrangements” for someone who has passed away

· What options you have if there’s absolutely no money available to pay for a funeral

· What exactly is an “estate” (yes everyone has one, even if that is just your record collection) and how exactly does it get “settled”?

· Planning for your own death, from the funeral all the way to who gets your shit, especially if you want your not-legally-bound-to-you chosen family to be recognized as your next of kin instead of your potentially problematic blood relatives

· Strategies for making your passing less onerous on your loved ones, including some tips on how to make sure your funeral gets paid for

· Inheritance! Both what to expect if you expect to get some and how to make sure you create some inheritance for others

· Wills, wills, wills! Why you need one, how to make one, mitigating the risk of your family and friends getting into conflict about it, and some tips for adding some final fuck you’s (or I love you’s) in yours.

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This episode is part of our second season. We are calling this season "Punks Not Dead and Capitalism Still Sucks" and it explores the question: how did 90s and 2000’s punk intersect with money, and what can that teach us today? What if you don’t “Live fast die young,” but have to meet needs over the course of your longer-than-expected life instead?

Listeners will hear stories -- from “the punkest way I ever made money,” to “the worst minimum wage job I ever had,” to “magic bullshit I did to try to avoid working” -- as well as learn facts about how the financial systems around us operate.

The show is written and produced by the Ladies Who Crunch: Queer femme artist/organizers turned financial professionals Laura and Hadassah, who explore the alternative ways of being that crafted the bedrock of who they are today to understand what they learned - and had to unlearn - from punk in order to figure out their money lives and to understand financial systems.

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The Ladies Who Crunch are Hadassah Damien and Laura Boo. More information about us and this podcast can be found at ladieswhocrunch.club.

Please follow us on Instagram (@bottomlinestopdollars) and if you want to send us questions or episode ideas, email us at [email protected].

In this episode the Ladies Who Crunch reflect on the coolest and best paid jobs that we all worked (or wanted to work) in our punk days, which were all strangely gigs that involved earning tips (bartenders, strippers, fancy restaurant workers), and ask, "was that shit actually as good as we thought?" And from that starting point, we go deep into the economics of tipping cultures: the good, the bad, the inequitable!

In this episode we discuss: 

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This episode is part of our second season. We are calling this season "Punks Not Dead and Capitalism Still Sucks" and it explores the question: how did 90s and 2000’s punk intersect with money, and what can that teach us today? What if you don’t “Live fast die young,” but have to meet needs over the course of your longer-than-expected life instead?

Listeners will hear stories -- from “the punkest way I ever made money,” to “the worst minimum wage job I ever had,” to “magic bullshit I did to try to avoid working” -- as well as learn facts about how the financial systems around us operate.

The show is written and produced by the Ladies Who Crunch: Queer femme artist/organizers turned financial professionals Laura and Hadassah, who explore the alternative ways of being that crafted the bedrock of who they are today to understand what they learned - and had to unlearn - from punk in order to figure out their money lives and to understand financial systems.

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The Ladies Who Crunch are Hadassah Damien and Laura Boo. More information about us and this podcast can be found at ladieswhocrunch.club.

Please follow us on Instagram (@bottomlinestopdollars) and if you want to send us questions or episode ideas, email us at [email protected].

Under capitalism we are all supposed to be self-sufficient, competitive and selfish individuals if we want to ensure we have (more than) what we need in life. Punk culture has long defined itself in opposition to this, choosing to build up beautiful communal sand castles. But how do we continue to work towards building communal wealth with lovers, partners, friends and our overall community without falling into all the same old conflicts that led the punk houses of our youth to fall apart? 

In this episode of BLTD, the Ladies Who Crunch explore tactics for creating harmonious communal financial systems instead of hostile ones --  finding the middle ground between enduring 3-hr collective consensus meetings and sacrificing one person to become the keeper of the binder bills who everyone will resent and treat really shitty. Whether your goal is to band together with friends to finally afford a home in this nutty housing bubble, to start a business or buy a car you intend to time-share with your bestie or to deeply blend your finances with a life partner (platonic or otherwise), this episode will help you get past the anxiety and learn concrete strategies for making it work. 

Also included in this episode: 

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This episode is part of our second season. We are calling this season "Punks Not Dead and Capitalism Still Sucks" and it explores the question: how did 90s and 2000’s punk intersect with money, and what can that teach us today? What if you don’t “Live fast die young,” but have to meet needs over the course of your life instead?

Listeners will hear stories -- from “the punkest way I ever made money,” to “the worst minimum wage job I ever had,” to “magic bullshit I did to try to avoid working” -- as well as learn facts about how the financial systems around us operate.

The show is written and produced by the Ladies Who Crunch: Queer femme artist/organizers turned financial professionals Laura and Hadassah, who explore the alternative ways of being that crafted the bedrock of who they are today to understand what they learned - and had to unlearn - from punk in order to figure out their money lives and to understand financial systems.

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The Ladies Who Crunch are Hadassah Damien and Laura Boo. More information about us and this podcast can be found at ladieswhocrunch.club.

Please follow us on Instagram (@bottomlinestopdollars) and if you want to send us questions or episode ideas, email us at [email protected].

How do you value your time? Especially when we’re also forced to value our labor time: does anyone really have a grasp on what “enough” money is, when it’s our lives we are trading it for?

This episode grapples with ways to approach understanding whether what we are earning is "enough" (or maybe even too much?) to sustain what we want and need in life, especially if you are struggling to transition from a punk/artist/non-profit or otherwise alternative economic lifestyle to one that doesn't force you into unhealthy precarity. The Ladies Who Crunch walk you thru a bunch of different hands on activities to help you see this problem from different angles so that you can re-set your sense of monetary scale to help empower you to advocate for an income that makes more sense for you in the here and now. And yes, these activities are inclusive of both wage earners and the self-employed! This episode lays essential groundwork to shift your thinking about your income goals when you and everyone you know has always made very little, so that in future episode(s) we can tackle the issue of actualizing those goals. 

Plus! In this episode you'll hear lots of punk stories and random chatter, such as:

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This episode is part of our second season. We are calling this season "Punks Not Dead and Capitalism Still Sucks" and it explores the question: how did 90s and 2000’s punk intersect with money, and what can that teach us today? What if you don’t “Live fast die young,” but have to meet needs over the course of your life instead?

Listeners will hear stories -- from “the punkest way I ever made money,” to “the worst minimum wage job I ever had,” to “magic bullshit I did to try to avoid working” -- as well as learn facts about how the financial systems around us operate.

The show is written and produced by the Ladies Who Crunch: Queer femme artist/organizers turned financial professionals Laura and Hadassah, who explore the alternative ways of being that crafted the bedrock of who they are today to understand what they learned - and had to unlearn - from punk in order to figure out their money lives and to understand financial systems.

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The Ladies Who Crunch are Hadassah Damien and Laura Boo. More information about us and this podcast can be found at ladieswhocrunch.club.

Please follow us on Instagram (@bottomlinestopdollars) and if you want to send us questions or episode ideas, email us at [email protected].

Western narratives LOVE the “hero,” but it’s much more punk to be in touch with the reality of the many people who feel they are losing out.

In this day and age, that means people who have burdensome debt. 13% of Americans expect to be in debt the rest of their lives, and most people with student loans feel confident they will never go away. This experience is in stark contrast to the methodology of leverage that wealthy individuals and well-capitalized organizations employ, using debt as cheap capital and not a life sentence.

In this episode we re-imagine debt from the people’s point of view, offering three ways of dealing with debt: the “drop out and avoid,” the nihilistic “catch me if you can,” and the Debt Collective’s activist “tear it down collectively” approaches.

In this episode, you’ll learn the difference between cancellation and forgiveness and how it plays into larger movements for social justice, as well as options for debt cancellation, like how Iceland responded to the 2008 crisis in a citizen-centered, people’s bailout.

The Ladies Who Crunch started this episode reading The Debt Collective’s book, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay as a jumping off point for reimagining the concept of indebtedness as immoral, and one that should be time-bound, with a guarantee of an end, and we’re indebted to their thought leadership and labor.

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This episode is part of our second season. We are calling this season "Punks Not Dead and Capitalism Still Sucks" and it explores the question: how did 90s and 2000’s punk intersect with money, and what can that teach us today? What if you don’t “Live fast die young,” but have to meet needs over the course of your life instead?

Listeners will hear stories -- from “the punkest way I ever made money,” to “the worst minimum wage job I ever had,” to “magic bullshit I did to try to avoid working” -- as well as learn facts about how the financial systems around us operate.

The show is written and produced by the Ladies Who Crunch: Queer femme artist/organizers turned financial professionals Laura and Hadassah, who explore the alternative ways of being that crafted the bedrock of who they are today to understand what they learned - and had to unlearn - from punk in order to figure out their money lives and to understand financial systems.

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The Ladies Who Crunch are Hadassah Damien and Laura Boo. More information about us and this podcast can be found at ladieswhocrunch.club.

Please follow us on Instagram (@bottomlinestopdollars) and if you want to send us questions or episode ideas, email us at [email protected].

In this episode, the Ladies Who Crunch explore minimum wage, living wages, and the idea of maximum wages. Income inequality in the US and Canada is worse than it was in the 90s, and we were mad about it then, when we worked minimum wage jobs.

Stories you’ll hear include: what minimum wages jobs we’ve had, who was the last person in your family to make minimum wage, and were they able to live off it? You’ll learn how minimum wage relates to living wages [hint: it’s lower than the basic minimum needed] and how maximum wages have been incentivized in the past, and how they show up today.

If you want to learn more about how income inequality negatively impacts society, democracy, and work, check out Season 1 Ep 3, on Billionaires.

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This episode is the first in our second season. We are calling this season "Punks Not Dead and Capitalism Still Sucks" and it explores the question: how did 90s and 2000’s punk intersect with money, and what can that teach us today? What if you don’t “Live fast die young,” but have to meet needs over the course of your life instead?

Listeners will hear stories -- from “the punkest way I ever made money,” to “the worst minimum wage job I ever had,” to “magic bullshit I did to try to avoid working” -- as well as learn facts about how the financial systems around us operate.

The show is written and produced by the Ladies Who Crunch: Queer femme artist/organizers turned financial professionals Laura and Hadassah, who explore the alternative ways of being that crafted the bedrock of who they are today to understand what they learned - and had to unlearn - from punk in order to figure out their money lives and to understand financial systems.

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The Ladies Who Crunch are Hadassah Damien and Laura Boo. More information about us and this podcast can be found at ladieswhocrunch.club.

Please follow us on Instagram (@bottomlinestopdollars) and if you want to send us questions or episode ideas, email us at [email protected].

Kicking off BLTD’s second season on punk and money, Laura Boo and Hadassah go back into their punk origin stories from the 90s to analyze the time-hardened debate: is it more punk to drop out of society and not work, or to “robin hood” your employment and extract from the extractors while doing the minimum?

Outsider experiences have a lot to tell us about the underbelly of our social systems, and for decades punks and other counterculture types have cultivated lives outside the work+spend til death norm. Values like anti-oppression, anticorporate, antiauthoritarian, anti-consumer, anti-globalization, and on drive this worldview.

So how does someone come to this point of view? And once there, how do you meet your needs and function? The Ladies Who Crunch dive into their pasts to explore how punk identity impacted how they thought then and think today about making and spending money.

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This episode is the first in our second season. We are calling this season "Punks Not Dead and Capitalism Still Sucks" and it explores the question: how did 90s and 2000’s punk intersect with money, and what can that teach us today? What if you don’t “Live fast die young,” but have to meet needs over the course of your life instead?

Listeners will hear stories -- from “the punkest way I ever made money,” to “the worst minimum wage job I ever had,” to “magic bullshit I did to try to avoid working” -- as well as learn facts about how the financial systems around us operate.

The show is written and produced by the Ladies Who Crunch: Queer femme artist/organizers turned financial professionals Laura and Hadassah, who explore the alternative ways of being that crafted the bedrock of who they are today to understand what they learned - and had to unlearn - from punk in order to figure out their money lives and to understand financial systems.

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The Ladies Who Crunch are Hadassah Damien and Laura Boo. More information about us and this podcast can be found at ladieswhocrunch.club.

Please follow us on Instagram (@bottomlinestopdollars) and if you want to send us questions or episode ideas, email us at [email protected].

In our final episode of Season 1, we take a hot minute to reflect on the year that was 2020 and what it might mean for our future. Specifically, we dig into the massive wave of grassroots and hyper-local mutual aid responses to the COVID19 crisis and how these events are both tied to a deep and rich history but also potentially to a better future. We discuss how disasters and moments of crisis can create turning points of change, and how that change grows upward from community responses rather than coming from the top down. We connect this back to tensions we see escalating between pro-democratic movements and the continuing rise of fascism backed by racism and mythological calls to go backward into a past that (actually) never existed. Throughout this episode we ask ourselves and listeners to both reflect on what we all just endured together and dream about how we can collectively respond to what is coming, potentially moving away from hyper-individualistic and competitive economies towards economies that are more caring and sustainable, based on gifting and relationship building.  

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 The Ladies Who Crunch are Hadassah Damien and Laura Boo. More information about us and this podcast can be found at ladieswhocrunch.club. 

Please follow us on Instagram (@bottomlinestopdollars) and if you want to send us questions or episode ideas, email us at [email protected]. 

Special thanks to our researchers Ariel Federow and Handy Levine. ----

In this week's episode of Bottom Lines Top Dollars we discuss  a question that many punks, weirdos, leftists, environmentalists and anti-capitalists ask themselves when they become financially stable: what do I do with my extra money? Investing your excess cash is an important way to save towards retirement, but can it be done ethically? Is it possible to grow your savings without contributing to bad things in the world (massive carbon emissions, pollution, unfair and exploitative labour practices, etc).  Concerns about the ethical implications of investing your money can sometimes keep people from taking action for their own futures. In this episode we discuss all of this and some strategies you can use to feel better about what you do with your savings.  

If any of these questions interest you, then you should listen to this episode: Why does investing our money scare us? What is investing and how do you do it? What are stocks and bonds and how do they make you money? What are RRSPs, IRAs, 401ks? Is investing inherently unethical? If you think of yourself as an anti-capitalist, does your participation in profit from property make complicit in all kinds of horrible shit? If you do decide to invest your money, is there a way to do so ethically? Can you use your investment money for good? To invest in green companies or push for positive change? What are impact funds or ESG funds? What is values-based investing? How do you evaluate an investment firm to know whether their funds actually meet your ethical standards? How much time and effort is required to actually invest ethically? Is it a realistic goal for the average person? 

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The Ladies Who Crunch are Hadassah Damien and Laura Boo. More information about us and this podcast can be found at ladieswhocrunch.club. 

Please follow us on Instagram (@bottomlinestopdollars) and if you want to send us questions or episode ideas, email us at [email protected]. 

Special thanks to our researchers Ariel Federow and Handy Levine.

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