In my last post, I talked about invisible homelessness and how it’s affected me and my life, but it wasn’t just housing that people asked for. They asked for all kinds of things, usually money. Always for a reason, never for drugs. Well not never, but not as often as the reason actually was drugs.

Money problems don’t really exist for me in the way that they do for some of my friends. It’s not because my family is rich or I have my own money. It’s because I work in tech and I make more money than I need. And I’m not on drugs Not being on drugs helps.

Unfortunately this was relatively common knowledge and my other-than-wealthy friends would hit me up to borrow money pretty regularly — and quite honestly it wasn’t always the less wealthy ones who did it. It got so out of hand that at one point I set up a special bank account just for all the people who hit me up on the first of the month asking for money.

I called it “The Bank of Alan.”

My friends abused The Bank of Alan, which is altogether to be expected, but at times it got pretty bad, and I lost a few friendships over money, which I still regret. It turns out that some people are dramatically worse at personal finance than others, and some people are much more adept at emotional blackmail than others.

So as often as not, what would happen is people would ask me for a loan, not pay it back, and then come back and ask for another loan. If it happened frequently enough, I gave them what I called a “buyout offer” where I offered them a single lump sum to just stop being my friend altogether. You would be surprised at the number of people who took it. I was surprised, and maybe a little bit disappointed.

The Bank of Alan was fundamentally a failing venture. As banks go, it was a pretty lousy bank. If they couldn’t pay the bill that they were asking to borrow money for, they wouldn’t be able to pay the loan back either. And so, after enough loaning people money and trying unsuccessfully to get them to pay me back, I came to a not so surprising conclusion: I shouldn’t loan people money anymore…

What I should do is give them the money instead.

I used to think there was a certain type of person that was more likely to use me for money than another. I thought that some people had more integrity than others, and that’s why some people took advantage of me while others didn’t. But that’s not true.

The truth is that anyone — even you or me — when they are pressed far enough and they feel their situation is bad enough will sacrifice a social relationship if it’s necessary to get out of a bad situation. When someone’s back is against the wall, any social relationship that can help is worth using, even if it costs the relationship. It wasn’t about me. It wasn’t about them. It wasn’t a reflection of how close we were as friends. It was about their situation. It was a measure of how desperate they were.

Social relationships are a form of currency.

I stopped taking it personally and started asking design thinking questions to try to address the problem systemically instead of just removing the current pain point. What in their life has lead up to this moment? Is there another situation that has lead up to or caused this one? Why did they choose me specifically to ask for help and not someone else? Is it because my name starts with A and they would move on to B next and C after that? Anything I could ask to try to uncover the truth of the situation.

What I saw was that for some people, one payment was enough. I helped with one thing, it changed their lives for the better, and I was done. For others it was like a bottomless pit. I could dump my techie entire salary into their lives and it would never solve the problem.

More than anything, I wanted to know is which expenses of the Bank of Alan were productive and helped people move forward, and which expenses just went into a black hole and didn’t help people advance their lives.

This is where $0$ comes in.

Obviously I can’t help everyone. I can’t give loans, and I can’t give money to everyone that needs it. But at the same time I don’t want to say no when someone asks me for help. I want to say yes. So many times when people are at their most desperate and they ask for help, what they hear is “no.” That’s part of the reason they were coming to me in the first place. I didn’t say no.

And I still don’t. Now when people ask me for money what I say is this: I’ve set up a non-profit to help people in exactly your situation. You need to talk to them. Here’s their card. Just send them a text message, tell them I sent you and they’ll help you. And I give them an $0$ card. And you can say that too. Just give them our card and tell them that we’ll help them, and we will.

For the person you give an $0$ card to, it’s a lifeline, a light in the darkness. We will offer to help them for entirely free and do our level best to do what we can for them, which right now is helping them apply for existing government assistance programs but will expand as we find other ways to say yes.

For you, it’s a way out. It’s a way to say, ok I’ve helped. I’ve done my part. Now you need a professional organization to help you. We are that organization.