20

Bjorn found a tray in the fridge filled with left over pork, roasted potatoes and vegetables, and served up a large portion for himself which he heated in the micro. He took out the gambling chip from his pocket to take a better look at it while his food was heating. The green chip was clearly marked with "500 MG" in black ink on both sides, and its surface was mildly holographic, changing colours as he tilted it under the artificial light in the kitchen.
Ante had not actually told him how much the thing was worth. All he had said was that it could pay for a night out in Lundby. But for all he knew, a night out in Lundby might be practically free. But on the other hand, Bjorn was in the rather unfortunate situation that virtually all his income was being deducted from his account in the form of taxes and child support, leaving him practically nothing, so a bit of extra money was always welcome.

A series of events had brought Bjorn into serious money trouble from which he was unlikely to ever fully recover, and the whole thing had been so depressing that he had even given up work for several years. It all started with the tragic death of his parents in a car crash in Croatia, where they had been on vacation. Driving along the Adriatic Sea they met an out of control truck that smashed into them, killing Bjorn´s father immediately, and mortally wounding his mother, who died two days later in a hospital in Zagreb.

It was a great shock to Bjorn of course, and being their only child he had to take care of the funeral and inheritance procedures on his own. His parents had a great number of friends, and Bjorn made a point of making the funeral a lavish affair. His father´s business, selling electronic sensors to the oil industry, had been very profitable for years, so Bjorn saw no reason to be stingy with the funeral, and he found some comfort in the knowledge that he would at least be granted a rather large inheritance at the end of it all.

His father´s company was valued at several million dollars, and Bjorn signed the official papers, transferring it to him, not thinking for a moment that he was in fact signing his life away to the state. There was no way he could have anticipated the mess he was getting himself into.

Almost immediately, Bjorn got a letter from the tax authorities, with a claim for two million dollars in inheritance tax. This did not come as a great surprise, but the difficulty in finding someone to buy the company did surprise him. No one seemed interested in buying the business, and Bjorn knew nothing of his father´s business, so he could not easily run it himself. Bjorn realized too late that the sensors that his father had been selling were outdated, and that his father had in fact been in the process of unwinding the business, selling everything of value, putting all his money into a pension fund instead. An investment that became worthless the moment he and his wife were dead.

By the time Bjorn contacted the tax authorities to revoke his claim to the inheritance, the official period allowed to change his mind had expired, and Bjorn was stuck with a tax claim exceeding the value of his personal savings by more than a million dollars. Bjorn tried to argue against the inheritance tax claim based on his discovery that his father´s company was in fact much less worth than had been assumed at the time when the inheritance had been made official, but the government agents were notoriously inflexible, and there was nothing Bjorn could do to stop them from forcibly selling his apartment, and liquidizing everything he owned.

Bjorn was put on the street, together with his wife and two children, and this spelled the end of his marriage. His wife took the children and moved in with her parents, while Bjorn found shelter with some friends before finding a room in a collective in Oslo. The tax authorities were relentless in their claims for the rest of the inheritance tax, laying claim to most of Bjorn´s income and making it difficult for him to make ends meet, even as he was reducing his expenses to a bare minimum, and working extra hours.

When Bjorn´s ex made a claim for child support, nothing changed to Bjorn´s financial situation. His ex got the money she claimed, while the state got less, and Bjorn realized that his situation would be unchanged even if he stopped working altogether. The only thing changing if he stopped working would be his debt to the state which would start growing every month. But the debt was so hopelessly outsized anyway that Bjorn did not care, and pretty soon he gave up on his job, and instead of working for a living, he started living off welfare.

What had seemed like a windfall, had turned to a nightmare, and it took Bjorn several years to recover enough strength to find himself a job. And the job that he had found for himself was pretty much ideal. It required very little of him, and it provided him with food and shelter. His net income after taxes and child support was still virtually nothing. But the fact that he had no expenses to speak of made life in the military a lot more attractive than any alternative. Not even a well paid job as an engineer could compete with the job as a border guard given his current financial mess.

And with this in mind, Bjorn took another look at the green gambling chip. "Tax free income," he thought to himself. "Who cares what this is in real money? It is mine, and I´m going to enjoy spending it all on myself."