It is awfully hard to be self-employed. My parents are self-employed, and we lived paycheck to paycheck on the edge of poverty (clothes & shoes that came from garage sales ONLY for the ENTIRE family including both my parents) and if my grandmother hadn't stepped in with money and meat (they lived on a farm had fresh eggs and vegetables & fruit trees such as peaches, plums, pears, & figs, also lots of pecans & butchered cattle & shared the meatvegetables & fruilt with us, we ate beef all the time and ALL of the cow including liver & tongue) and gave us (I have 2 younger sisters) bras & panties every Christmas for the new year I don't know what my parents would have done. We would have had to live with my grandmother in a very tiny house (less than 800 sq feet). My parents also did not have a mortgage to pay because my dad built the house when he was employed for a good company and had actual regular paychecks and only 1 child (me); he got downsized when there was a company merger (which happens in business ALL the time) which is why he then became self-employed. And if you're starving & have to use a food bank for food, often they do not have fresh meat, fresh fruit & vegetables, eggs, cooking ingredients such as milk, butter, oil, flour, sugar, etc. (At least that was the case in all the food banks I used.)

And that was living at a VERY LOW cost of living in the country.