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My Story starts out way back in 2021 when i was living on a street in downtown Vancouver called Granville St. I had happily lived in my apartment there for the past year barring the occasional homeless person overdosing in the back alley which my apartment faced. I thought it was living the dream until the stock market started to dwindle. I had my own maintenance company which was somewhat profitable as the building I was living in was one of my contracts and I would pull in close to 10K a month just on repair jobs throughout the building. But in 2021 I had some savings invested in the stock market on micro chips to the tune of about 25K.

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And being that it was just after COVID a lot of companies and manufacturers were almost caught up to what they needed to do for customers the Microchip industry was kind of an anomaly see there were tons and tons and tons of microchips available through COVID and after so that the impact of COVID wasn’t entirely felt until the following year because they moved through their inventory and its not incredibly easy to make microchips in todays day and age so their production was not meeting their demand for microchips which meant that the fall of 2021 there became a shortage in getting them for electronic devices. And my main stock portfolio was in electronic vehicles. And i should have divested more but I did not my eggs were all in one basket so to speak.

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With the decline in EV’s being produced the stock I had started to loose value and my 25k soon became 20K and then 15K and soon after 10K and it was like i woke up in the morning and discovered that my sleep had just costs me another 5K in losses. I would have been able to bounce back some from this by waiting it out for the market to return but I was using this savings to live off of as well and in August of 2021 I had lost the contract for the building I had because it was sold to other owners.

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But that didn’t stop the trio of assholes from thinking I had a lot of money and that they could try to take some from me. It was then that Jon and Todd and Alan decided that they would steal my identity in an effort get money from me because all they knew was that I was according to them “Not Working” and living on my own in Downtown Vancouver and when they would visit my apartment the one time they did I had a lot of stuff which meant i 1. either had great credit and would be perfect to steal. or 2. I had a lot of money from my recent severance package.

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What they didn’t think about was me losing a lot of money in the stock market and my money to live off of was dwindling quite fast. I spent bout 5k a month on rent and bills and living my life as mundane as it was. I mean I did go and by almost anything I wanted to back in those days. That’s a far cry from today let me tell you. But with my savaging’s now gone and it was September of 2021 I had lost the last little bit of my savings and my 25K was now down to 50 dollars after paying my September rent and bills.

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And I had to move at the end of the month because my lease was up and they were selling off my apartment as a condo since it was zone as such. So with that I had no other option but to go to social services and ask for support. I had to jump through some of their hoops to get it but finally they approved me for employment assistance funding to the tune of 989.00 per month and that was to include rent, food, bills and anything else one would need. So without any choice I graciously accepted this. And went on the hunt for my new apartment.

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Luckily I had been telling my friend Joe about the first apartment and then that I had found another apartment and just had to come up with the other 1750 for rent. My options were very limited being that the only person I thought might be able to lend me that kind of money would have been my mother. So I asked her if she could lend me that to get my place until I saved up the money to pay it back which would take a few months but I’d pay it back to her. She then told me that she didn’t have the money and was just living paycheque to paycheque as it was. Which I knew wasn’t true I arranged all my fathers life insurance when he passed away so I knew that she could have lent it to me but just decided she didn’t want to. Not keeping in mind that if i didn’t get that money i would essentially be homeless.

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I confided in my friends what was going on with the old apartment the one i almost moved into and the one i had recently found. And i also confided in them my shortcomings with making the damage deposit. And then all of a sudden out of no where really and much to my surprise Joe told me that if I couldn’t find the money anywhere else he would be able to lend me the money seeing as he had just gotten a settlement from an accident he had been in a couple years prior. So I kept working to try and get the money any other way but when it came to the 30th and i was moving my stuff (which I did by myself) until Joe got off work.

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But I told him I was out of options and out of time and if his offer stood as much as i hate owing someone money I would tackle him up on it. And that night after work he came over and saw that I was moving my belongings into the house by myself and brought over the 1200 i needed still and then proceeded to roll up his sleeves and started picking things up and loading them up on the elevator. See all my belongings were in a parking spot under the building because they needed time to paint the unit and get it ready to move in and me asking to just move things into one room the landlord wouldn’t go for I had to wait in the lobby with Jasmin in her carrier for 3 hours until 5pm when he said the painters were done. And being in the situation i was in i couldn’t really argue it was wait or have no where to move to. So after getting all my stuff moved in and started to unpack and got my place looking somewhat nice it was starting to fell like home.

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And I started to work on making my November rent because the 998 from the ministry wasn’t going to cover it. But what I was able to do which i found out in researching the ministry website is ask for an emergency rent supplement and they would only ever offer 3 a year and they were not guaranteed. So I applied and stated my case to them for needed the extra amount that I did not plan on being on assistance for very long and it was just a stop gap while i searched for a job. But it was approved and i got another 998 from them and i had my rent covered but they wouldn’t give it to me unless i had a notice from the building manager about it. So i confided in them that I had just recently lost a chunk on the stock market and was waiting for it to rebound which was lie but they didn’t know that and explained why i needed them to give me the notice in order to make the full months rent but they did it and gave me the notice and I paid the rent in full for November.

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It wasn’t until the end of November when I got the phone call from my bank RBC and they had told me that my device had been cloned and had been compromised in accessing their networks and for security reasons they had to lock my accounts and freeze all my funds until such time as i obtained new devices. This was all on November 29 and my rent and everything was due on December 1st. And they told me that the only wayt to get my accounts back again was to show them that I had obtained new devices and had my decives checked out by an expert to ensure their systems wouldnt be compromised yet again. I to this day do not know what extent their systems got compromised but it must have been pretty bad for them to lock me out of my accounts and blacklist my devices.

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That was really the start of this entire ordeal. I was sitting in my apartment not knowing what I was going to do, or where I would get the money from. I couldn’t ask Joe and I knew what my mothers response would be but I knew I couldn’t sit by and wait for the money fairy to pass by my windows and toss a bag of money in. So I did what I could only do. Seeing as I had to get money for rent I posted everything I had bought over the past two years when I had money on Marketplace I posted my Cell phone, kitchen aid mixer, my televisions, my stereo, even so much as the area rug i had in my Livingroom in hopes of selling it all so that i could make rent, because I would not do well being a homeless person and moving back to Halifax really wasn’t an option then.

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But fortunately there were enough people on marketplace looking for what I was selling that I was able to get enough money to pay that months rent. I wouldn’t have money for anything else but at least rent was paid and me and Jasmine would have a home. So in between getting my rent money and meeting people i also quickly had to get a new bank account because i didn’t have access to my RBC anymore. So i went in the daytime to get an account at the BMO right beside me so that i could still get my assistance payments because i had to have them stop the automatic deposit and issue a cheque. so it took me about a week to get the money together from selling everything and then i went into mode to find out how I would pay January’s rent. So Seeing as it was almost Christmas by now right around the same time that year as when I ‘m writing this this year.

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I was checking out any sort of government or community assistance programs that might help me and sadly there were none. Because I was a middle aged guy who was white, had never been to jail or committed a crime there were zero programs available to help me. Had I been a woman, person of colour, over 65 or under 21 or had committed crimes there would have been a plethora of groups to help me but after calling every single community group in Vancouver i quickly discovered that i currently fell into a completely missed demographic and then i realized and it dawned on me that almost all the homeless people i saw on the streets of Vancouver were people who also fell into my demographic. There were also the addicted individuals who lived on the streets and even with my occasional partying which i wasn’t doing at the time had no money to. I did know I didn’t want to be one of those statistics for someone to read about.

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I would occasionally have some party fun if i was hooking u with someone or if a friend dropped stuff off to me but it was not a regular thing that happened for me at this time at all. and if it did it was usually a shot of G here and there. But the next week went by and it was now Christmas eve and I went over to Joe’s place I think to have some drinks and chat about who knows what, we just wanted to have fun on Christmas eve so that’s what me him, his boyfriend and his mom did and I think his two aunts came over at one point so i was a fun little party. It wasn’t until a few days later that I woke up and was having my bagel and coffee when I noticed that they both tasted the exact same and like cardboard. So i then went to the drug store and grabbed a COVID kit which were still readily available and tested myself and yup I tested positive for covid. .

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So i called joe and told him and sure enough when they got tested they tested positive for covid. So I stayed in bed for a few days and tested myself again and it came back negative this time so i would be cleared to have some fun for New years eve. So joe was having people over again and I went there to have a few drinks but almost didn’t go because I was completely broke except for the $50 dollars my mother had sent me for Christmas. But I bit the bullet and took $20 bucks from my account and grabbed a bottle of wine at the liquor store and went to joes. And we had a good time. I left probably around 1:30 or 2am and went back to my place and left them to continue to party as I wasn’t overly in the celebrating mood seeing how 2021 was exiting for me and i still had to get money for January’s rent.

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To back track a little bit seeing as covid was still rampant in some parts of Canada there was still a government subsidy available to industries hardest hit and still not able to work a full compliment to what they were before covid. And seeing as my job required me to go into peoples house i would qualify for the subsidy and luckily for me I could go right back until the second week in December, which meant I would have enough for January’s rent only it would be a few days late. So I told the building manager on the morning of the 4th about my situation and that it would take a few days to process my payment and could they give me the extra time. But come 3pm that afternoon I was going outside for a smoke as I didn’t smoke inside.

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When I found a noticed tapped to my front door with eviction written on the back in black marker for the entire floor to see. I asked the building guy about it and he said i would have to talk to the building manager about it Sheldon, who was conveniently gone for the day. Seeing as I had no other option available to me I went to the ministry once again for an emergency rent subsidy to get my rent paid again and it took them a week to finally decide but they did approve me and i was able to make my January rent one week late as the COVID subsidy had been sitting open pending for the past week and wasn’t being processed but iu was able to stop the 10 day notice i had received thanks to the ministry. So I wasn’t able to pay all the rent

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So we are now in 2022 and so far the new year was coming in like an asshole for sure. and I didn’t know what was happening with my COVID money and I was calling them every day to find out what the status of my claim was. It wasn’t until the end of that month that I found out that my paperwork was literally sitting on someone’s desk who no longer worked there. So once my paperwork was discovered and processed I started to get money deposited into my bank account. The first amount was 890 dollars which paid off January and then a week later I received a payment for 2200 which paid my February rent and gave me a bit left over to pay my bills. See I claimed on the ministry site the funds I had received from the CRA about getting the covid amount which then disqualified me for the February payment. But that didn’t matter to my landlord they filed another notice this one I disputed and the hearing was on March 14th so it bought me some time.

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With the month’s rent paid i was able to relax some but that didn’t stop my landlord from trying to get me out again with my February rent being 1 week late. He filed another 10 day notice on me and stuck it to my door much like the first one. See in BC there is a rule that if you get 3 10 day notices within a year you have grounds to have the person evicted with the tenancy board and that’s the approach he was taking with his “problem tenant”. But that didn’t bother me so much as I knew it was time for me to leave there and find somewhere cheaper that I could more reliably afford each month. Thinking that I could sustain 1750 a month with only 998 a month coming in was ridiculous. Fortunately my doctor had agreed to fill out the disability paper work with the ministry. Really I filled everything out and had him review and sign it for me which upped my monthly amount to 1450 per month.

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Riding the high of getting the first place we applied for was great. But i had the impending doom of the tenancy board hearing coming up for being a week late in February and it was now march 12 and the hearing was the next day. I prepared as much as one can for those things. I then attended the meeting and it didn’t exactly go in the landlords favor. I now knew that we had a place for April 1 and knew all i needed was a couple weeks and I asked the arbritrator to give me until the end of the month and she did. I was given until the end of march to vacate the unit and thats exactly what I did. At the end of the month I took a cab to the new place from work at the hospital and got the keys and did a video of the place which i sent to Rowan as he was on the island working for a few weeks (or months).

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With the first here and it was time to move and my savior too many times now was Joe and he rented a uhaul to help me move (whcih i still owe him for i think). But out of all my friends he was the one that always was there to help me out which i shouldn’t have needed but life recently dictated that I needed someone on my side and that was him. But anyway we moved all my stuff out of Barclay st and up to bute st. And got it all setup and as i was doing that Joe took the van back. I then took the chance to go around and take pictures of the apartment as well for any damage i noticed do that we didn’t get dinged for anything on that unit. Which was a good thing i did because come the end of the year they tried to bil us for a 14,000 reno they did to the unit except the arbritrator threw it out of the tenancy hearing because I didin’t get my package until 10 days before the hearing and the allowable limit was 11 days.

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so the rest of the day went pretty normal’’’ after moving in I woke up and started unpacking some stuff that wasnt left. Unpacked didnt really do. I didnt really do a whole lot insignificant after moving into the apartment I had spoken and sent an email off to the landlord letting him know that the dishwasher had a little leak in it and needed to be repaired the entire month of April went on very nonchalant. I worked got up at ’7 oclock in the morning out of the door by eight back home by 5:30 and yeah that was my routine in my day for quite a bit my cat Jasmine after we had moved in she had been sick on when I lived on Berkeley and she started to get sick again, so I took her to the vet and had her checked out to see what was going on and if she was getting better or worse or what the deal was and’ tha’s when the vet told me that she had pancreatitis or cancer since bac on february. She was a beautiful little tuxedo, who was the love of my life and I was extremely sad thinking that she might not get better.