Tue, Nov 24 2009
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Life on $7.75 an hour By CARL E. FEATHER - Lifestyle Editor - cfeather@starbeacon.comStar Beacon “The cable has been shut off; the Internet service has been shut down. We try to cut corners here and there,” she says. “We don’t use the dryer in the summer. I’ve never lived like this. I’d like to recycle again, but I can’t afford the gas to go to the bin, so I can’t even recycle.”
Sherry has tried working various jobs around Roy’s schedule, but her options are limited because of a bad back and her responsibilities to not only Dylan, but also a granddaughter, 4, who has come to live with them. One of the jobs she took was scrubbing toilets for a motel; she made the equivalent of $2.35 an hour. “I got that $60 paycheck, and I said ‘You’re crazy if you think I’m coming back,’” she says. “But I did it. And I cried every night when I came home.” Before dropping her Internet service, Sherry sold items on eBay for extra cash. Now, she holds two or three yard sales to make a few extra dollars off stuff family and neighbors donate. To save money on food, Sherry plants a garden, cans some of the produce and sells the rest. They hit the jackpot when a friend’s vehicle encountered a deer. They strung up the carcass in the back yard, gutted it into a wheelbarrow and used a hacksaw to cut through the rib cage. Sherry makes no apologies for claiming and eating the dead animal. She did it once, and she’d do it again if the opportunity presented itself. “It was something we needed to do because we needed to eat,” she says. The family has no entertainment budget, despite having two young grandchildren in the household. They do budget $2 a week for Dylan’s allowance. Sherry says their grandson saved his money so he could treat the whole family to a night at the movies. “Do you know how hard it is to save $12 on what he makes to take your kid to the movies? You can’t afford to entertain your kids any more. You have to set your kids in front of a television set to entertain them,” Sherry says. In January, Sherry did something she’d never done before: She went to the Conneaut Food Pantry to get an order. “Conneaut is going to fold,” predicts Roy. “They got no fair-paying jobs here, so people are going to leave the area.” At this point in their lives, Sherry feels their only hope is to win the lottery. “But we don’t have the dollar to play it,” she says. Sherry says she used to look down her nose at classmates who had stayed in Ashtabula County after high school and scraped out a living. “I used to say ‘How can they live like that?’ I was snotty at one time because I had it,” she says of her prior life. “Now, I’m walking in their shoes, and it’s not a nice picture.” Roy and Sherry already know what they’ll do with the rebate checks Uncle Sam is planning to send them in May: pay bills, just as they do with their income-tax refund check. The only decision they’ll get to make is what bill will get paid. The couple has no provision for retirement, aside from living in a tent. Roy says it will have to be along a river. 
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