Help Wicked Grounds Reduce Debt, Gain Sustainability

UPDATE!

As of yesterday, we wired funds to settle one of the two big cafe debts. YESSSSS!!!! This will make a big difference in our long-term debt reduction and regular cash flow.

Unfortunately, the other non-community creditor is not willing to come down on their amount, so we'll keep paying that off as normal. Your funds still help for that, but there's less of a "let's do this now!" to it.

I'll keep this open, and all funds raised over $13,500 will be applied to our scholarship fund.

THANK YOU!!!!

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Hi, I'm Mir and I'm the owner of Wicked Grounds.

Some of you know that we've gone through an enormous saga trying to pull our way back out of debt incurred from keeping our old cafe & boutique open much longer than we should have post-pandemic. In the process, we incurred well over $80k in gnarly high-interest debt.

In late June 2023, we pivoted to lean into our role as a leader in kink education. We offer dozens of classes, playshops, and discussion groups every month. We help other kink educators get their word out. We offer multi-week workshops and individual consulting. And we try to improve the lives of kinksters, other venues, and kink communities everywhere. We've done all that while doing everything in our power to pay off that old cafe debt, that keeps chasing us around. (Some of you already know I've taken a side job and I do not personally take any payments from the business. That will continue until this is all solved.)

With community help, we've accomplished a lot. Last January, many of you stepped between us an a particularly bad faith creditor and said "no." We pulled off something amazing.

I've just made an audacious offer to our current biggest creditor. I've asked for a 75% reduction in the remaining debt with them, if we can just get this settled this month. Once they're off our backs, we can turn our attention to getting our patient community creditors caught up, putting our funds firmly back in community. (UPDATE: My attorneys think we have a good shot at this if we can go with a 55-60% reduction amount, which is nothing to sneeze at!)

If we can demonstrate community support, I've asked this creditor to accept $9K (edit: this is now up to $13K or so) to settle a $36K debt. The problem, of course, is that we don't have those kinds of funds sitting around, when we're already behind on a lot. That's where you come in.

If you're as tired as we are of the negative impact this has had on the community, and you'd like to help us retire it for good, I'd love your help to get this bad boy paid off.

Full disclosure: I cannot 100% guarantee these folks will accept this offer. If they don't, I'll keep negotiating for the best deal we can get. For now, I'm setting our goal at $17k for a slight cushion to raise the $13K my attorneys have said they can probably pull off, plus some cushion for immediate cash flow. Every penny we raise will go directly toward reducing our debt, in one form or another.

Will you help us get this off our backs, so we can get back to being on our backs? Every bit helps.

GOAL ONE: $14,000 to make an offer to the worst creditor.

GOAL TWO: I have community folks that have been more than patient on late bills as we get them caught up, and I really want to get them caught up. I've added $3k to the amount to help us get this prioritized.

GOAL THREE: We have a second-worst creditor to whom we still owe $15K. Let's see if we can get them paid off, too?!