> Without wanting to sound as though I'm belittling your situation, can it really be that hard to get a job where you live? I accept that it may be temporarily impossible to get a job in the field you work in, but there's always *some* sort of work going, even if it's just data entry or flipping burgers.

I won't speak for Senvy, but in my case, I would have lost money if I had taken a minimum wage job when I was unemployed. We talked about this before, how New Zealand has a government-hand-out sort of program, roughly like our welfare, but nothing equivalent to our unemployment insurance, which is what we get as a temporary (usually six months max) measure if we unexpectedly find ourselves out of work. The amount of it is impacted by your previous salary, so if you have a high paying job, and therefore perhaps have rent or mortgage or financed vehicle(s) or whatever that is budgeted according to a salary that minimum wage won't cover, you hopefully won't have to sell it all and move just because you're out of work for a few months. The other difference between unemployment insurance and welfare is that unemployment insurance is not really a government hand-out: employers purchase that insurance from the state, so effectively you're really only getting back money that *should* have been part of your salary in the first place.

Anyway, to make a long story short, the unemployment checks I was getting while I was unemployed were roughly what a minimum wage job would have paid me. So to take a minimum wage job and give up the unemployment checks would mean the same or possibly less money, plus a LOT less time to hunt for another job in my field, and I *would* still have to do that, because our rent and bills far exceeds what minimum wage would pay for. Since Senvy appears to be in the tech industry as well, I wonder if this is the case with him as well.