Transplanting a Seattleite

My grandfather (the country doctor) used to get paid in firewood, vegetables, etc., during the Great Depression. His bank had gone bust and so had some of his local investments (there's some story about taking the kids to the river and telling them if they looked closely they could see Daddy's mill stock floating downstream), so he was running short of money, but he wasn't worried too much about day-to-day expenses: "As long as farmers grow food and farmers get sick, we'll be all right." 'Course, that didn't pay the mortgage and the electric bill and what not, but he must have had enough cash patients to muddle through. At any rate they managed somehow. But that wasn't just a question of being given chickens and so forth: it was a question of him being a vital part of a community. There weren't a lot of doctors in that town, and people needed him. In a way there's an advantage to half the people in town owing you money, if it's a small enough town that they can't avoid you: they all have to be nice to you. Needless to say, most people don't live this way any longer (and although my grandfather may have been one of the wealthier men in a very small town, he didn't have the standard of living doctors do today at all).

Incidentally, I don't think he or the patients did a lot of haggling -- they just brought by whatever they could manage, and it had to do. (Goodness knows what it looked like in the accounts, or how he did his taxes.) But again, desperation sometimes simplifies life. As long as everyone ended up with enough to eat and so forth, they could forget the rest.

There used to be a whole economy in people lending each other money by notes of hand (whatever those are), privately held mortgages, etc. It wasn't necessarily a whole lot of fun, as may be seen in many 19th-century biographies (and certainly novels, melodramas, etc.). I must admit I've considered what a good investment it would be to pay off a friend's mortgage and have them pay me a steady five percent or whatever rather than the mortgage company. It would work really well when their remaining principal amount was too low for a bank to refinance (their payments would go way, way down), and just try finding a CD that pays five percent these days. But lending money to individuals is a very fraught business.