Good morning from Canada!

Hello SMF,
My name is Ri, I'm a young entrepeneur from New Brunswick. I work full-time for the federal government as a low-level pencil pusher. Since the start of the covid money has been on the squeeze, and with a family of four it is just getting harder and harder to get ahead on one income. Rather than have my wife go back to work I've been doing part-time or cash jobs to get us some extra money. One night while driving home fro0m a friends house I seen a fireplace on the side of the road... Ah frig.. may as well try and bring it to the scrap yard, money is tight, and driving a truck is expensive so may as well use it. Got it up and in the bed on my own thanks to some good mechanical advantage and brute strength (okay maybe I'm just a strong stubborn donkey and less the mechanics lol). Sweet! I'm officially a scrapper (in retrospect, at the time I had no idea what I was getting into, I just run on intuition a lot and go with the flow). So I keeps on driving home, with a lord knows how heavy stove, then I see it! Another thing! My Jove you wouldn't believe it was the night before trash pickup and I filled that bed to the top (thankfully always have 4 heavy duty ratchet straps in the back) and took it home. Hey Hun come outside ands check what I got! Well she wasn't super impressed, but when we went to the metal yard the next day (after unloading a few cords and other choice pieces into my shed, and emptying out the inside of the fireplace full of broken bricks) and got $16, she was slightly less unimpressed bahaha. Well now here I am 2 months later and a few slightly better loads of tin. Gas money I wish I had kept a tab on but I'm def in the red. Saving all my alum and copper for at least a year and hoping to get a trailer for my truck soon to really take advantage (I had a guy offer me a broken snowplow yesterday but no way I can fit it in the truck bed safely). Now we get to bond in the evening after the kids are in bed by learning and taking things apart while making a few extra bucks to support our family!
Thanks for reading and will see you all around!
-Ri

Hey there Ri. Welcome from the coast of Maine.

If i could offer a bit of advise from an old guy to a young fulla just starting out .... ?

There's this whole Zen thing going on with scrapping. A lot of folks find fun and relaxation with it. It's something that you and your wife can do together. It's important to spend time together .... makes for a better marriage. Just make sure that you are both on the same page about it. She may not be as much into it as you are. Maybe it's more that she just wants to spend some time with you. It sometimes gets lonely when you are stuck at home and your spouse is off doing other things.

The term ... "scrapper's widow" has been bounced around here and there over the years.

The money aspect of it is a different matter. Scrapping is not gonna help you make ends meet. You make very very little after you take out all of your operating expenses.

You gotta figure out something different. I switched jobs this year and more than doubled my take home pay. We're holding about even as compared to how we were doing before Covid and inflation started started up a few years ago.

The point is .... you have to do big things just to stay even these days. Scrapping isn't gonna cut it.

My best advise would be to get her back to work part time. My wife and i had a really good setup when we were first starting out with two kids. I would work my regular day job and she would work her part time job in the evenings for three or four hours. That got her out of the house. Working and earning her own money helped build her self esteem. We worked together as equal partners to support the family and raise the kids.

Things are even harder for your generation coming up through. You really need at two full time wage earners to support a family of four now. Anything less is well apt to leave you short on the essentials like food,housing, and heat in the winter.