Once her parents die, she better pray nothing goes wrong, or she's f-d. Internet begging and social services really will be her only safety net. One rung below that is hobo town.
We really are approaching an unprecedented era of cow study. Although there are art tracers, troonfluencers and podcast men coming up on the lolcow docket, so many of the older cows are in their 40s now, and their parents had them when they were old (hmm). A slow wave of cow parents dying, or having to review their budgets because of their own illness or retirement, is on the horizon.
Not a lot of these people are going to get an inheritance, either. If a parent ends up in long-term care, that's where their estate is going.
Stephanie's level of function is fascinating to me. It's not just that she got failed upwards to an actual advanced degree and legal credentials, it's that it's
in social work, exactly the ways and means she would need to know to get maximum gibs for herself. It would be different if she had an MBA but without the Bush-level networking skills, or an MFA where her capstone project was doing something horrible and naked; she had a practicum in the state where she lives, so she probably even had a tabbed binder at some point with all the contact info for shelters, programs, legal assistance in her ZIP.
She's the professional beggar version of someone who becomes a specialist MD specifically to treat their own illness (...and then quits and doesn't help anyone else). Except it doesn't seem like she's doing that, either.
I think the general consensus is right, though: without her parents to make phone calls on her behalf, and give her money under the table, she's going to have a worse experience. Social workers
do work extra when they can for the hard-luck cases, the people who are genuinely too stupid to fill out forms right or on time, but Stephanie is just lazy, too proud to LARP as retarded (other than her visual appearance) and unpleasant to be around. She's not going to have a personal advocate on-call and while she's unlikely to end up homeless, she's poised to fall through some cracks as a result.
