on September 24, 2020, 5:05 pm, in reply to "absolutely. grab what you can. but these programs were/are poison to the economy*"
But I just think it's absurd the fed govt was giving out a flat $600 per week to basically every citizen that even had a part time job that they no longer worked at. I can see now why lot of waitresses would not come back to work given that PUA was paying more than their job.
It feels like qualifying for a Federal Grant, a grant that I don't deserve, that very few people actually need. For the first time, I now know what it's like to be an educator dependent on the federal govt research grants.
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Granted, I'll have to pay taxes on it but that's ok. Here's how I did it:
So a few months ago, I started researching what was in the CARES Act. And it turns out, they were giving out unemployment AND additional $600 per week if you were a "gig" worker, meaning Uber/Lyft, etc and was now unemployed due to COVID. Now all you had to do was show your 2020 tax documents that show you did in fact work for Uber (which I had both Uber and Lyft 1099s tax summaries). And I had to provide my ID.
So I filed for PUA in July (Pandemic Unemployment Assistance) thinking the worst that could happen is they just deny it. And it immediately was flagged with an issue called "benefit control". I looked this up and this is the unemployment fraud dept. Lot of independent contractors that filed for PUA were getting heavy scrutiny and their claims were being flagged. Now, I was not lying. I was not attempting to defraud the govt, but rather take advantage of their idiotic free money policies. I did in fact work for Uber/Lyft in 2019, and based on the CARES Act I thought I had a good claim to the money since Uber demand is way down due to Covid especially in Florida (even though I haven't driven Uber since last year).
So it took 2 months, but I looked at my online bank account a few days ago and boom there was 16,000 in there. So they just gave me a lump sum of backdated weekly claims. All for essentially being a part time uber driver in 2019, and the pandemic.
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