Are You An Underearner?
If you can answer “Yes” to six or more of these questions, then you may have a problem with underearning:
- Are you ashamed of your job, your career, your lack of income?
- Does your job make no use of your education, your talents or your skills?
- Do people tell you that you are difficult to work with?
- Do you feel that you can never make enough money doing what you love?
- Does the idea of asking for more money or looking for better work paralyze you?
- Do you just seem to move from one financial crisis to another?
- Do you never have enough, no matter how hard you work?
- Can you never afford to go to the doctor or dentist, even when you need one?
- Are your possessions broken, threadbare or embarrassing?
- Are you so busy taking care of other people that you don’t have time for yourself?
- Do you feel invisible or that you don’t have a voice?
- Do you feel you will never achieve your dreams without a miracle?
- Do you have nothing to show for your life?
- Do you feel you’re always running away from problems?
- Have all the efforts you’ve made to change your life come to nothing?
- When you try to tell other people about your earning problems, are you met with blank stares?
Underearning is many things, not all of which are about money. While the most visible consequence is the inability to provide for our current and future needs, underearning is also about the inability to fully acknowledge and express our capabilities and competencies. It is about underachieving, or under-being, no matter how much money we make.
If you are having problems earning and think that you may be a compulsive underearner, we believe Underearners Anonymous can help you. We are a Twelve Step Fellowship of men and women who have come together to help one another recover from underearning.
Getting Started in UA
Find the nearest meeting to you on the New York weekly meeting list or, for meetings around the world, please see the main UA calendar.
We suggest that you attend six meetings before deciding if this is the right program for you. This will give you time to identify with the speakers, begin to absorb the UA concepts, learn more about the program, and talk to other people in UA.
We encourage you to read the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Underearners Anonymous, along with the 12 Tools of UA that we use to help us with our recovery. Additional information and literature, including UA’s official list of 12 Symptoms of Underearning and many other helpful tools, can be found on the main UA website.
Contributions can be made to the UA NY Intergroup by
• PayPal: treasurer@nullua-ny.org
• Payment by Check:
New York UA Intergroup – NOTE! we are getting a new P.O. Box in March 2024. P.O. Box 1836
Madison Square Station
New York, NY 10159
The recordings for the October 2022 Share-a-day, “New Vision – Step Out of The Cave Again,” are now available for viewing! Please click here to access them.