9/14/21 Recently, I have been working with a newer person in DA. He is struggling with if he should take the SBA (Small Business Administration) loan of $12,000. He was excited because he was approved for it but hasn’t taken it yet. This is an unsecured loan. He works in the film industry, so he is technically self-employed. I could make the argument that this is a secured loan because he is using it to fund his business, but it is not like he is buying equipment with the money. It is just going to be a band-aid to help him live in vagueness a little longer. He asked me to be his sponsor today, which I agreed to do. We spent probably two hours today on the phone, texts, and a zoom. I don’t mind it; it is enjoyable helping him learn how to start tracking his numbers and being able to put it into a functioning tool.
We are using Google Sheets which is neat because we can both work on the spreadsheet live. I showed him how to make a simple sum formula today. I showed him some basics of adding rows and adding gridlines. It is just basic spreadsheet 101. I had sent him the PRG Dashboard template which I created, and it seems to be working nicely. I think I’m on to something with this template. I’d like to have a tool like that also for the Spending Plan tab of my spreadsheet document. I haven’t gone there with him yet because I don’t want to overwhelm him. What works for me is to track the numbers daily in a system that has a column for each day. The days add up to months, months add up to years. Its so much easier to handle and stay on top of if it is done daily.
I want to be able to get a newcomer up and going as quickly as possible. I think this process is streamlining it and is working nicely. I showed him how to list out all his sources of income, including unemployment and food stamps in the first section. Then we went and worked on the expenses plan trying to get out all his monthly expenses. I had him print off and send me PDFs of his bank statements for the past 3-6 months. That was an easy action item, but a critical baby step for being able to group and add up the categories of expenses.
His homework today is to keep working on filling out as much of the PRG Dashboard as possible so that he can then prepare for an emergency PRG. At first, he wanted me to do his PRG, but I offered to take him up on his request to be his sponsor. It would be better for him to get two different people to serve on his PRG. I’ll help get him prepared and organized for it though. I think he would listen to other people’s advice if he heard it from multiple people in multiple ways. Its better to get their opinions along with the sponsor’s opinion. I’m best at helping to get him up to speed on putting the numbers in the right place and organized in a way that they can understand.
He asked what pressures are. Pressures are anything that is weighing on the person. So, his would probably be the fact that he is negative $560 right now and has been for the last 10 days. Plus, I would say the SBA loan option. However, those are just my ideas of possible PRG pressures, but I’m not going to tell him that. He needs to figure them out on his own. You bring 2-3 pressures to the Pressure Relief Group to go over them for about an hour. They need the numbers first to be able to make an unbiased, educated suggestion based on the facts and the numbers. Going into the PRG without numbers prepared is just a big waste of time. The 14 column system that I shared about in a previous blog and podcast is the best method I’ve seen yet.
