Denang expressed shock at having the money fall from the sky. “I keep pinching myself,” she told me at the SEED office in Stockton. (Denang asked me not to use her full name, to help maintain her family’s privacy.) The money could not have come at a better time, she said. The native of the Northern Mariana Islands had worked as a certified nurse assistant before health issues prompted her to retire and focus on her volunteer work at a local community center. As of last year, her husband was working in seafood processing in Alaska. The pay was only $9 or $10 an hour, she told me, but with significant potential for overtime.

Then, one day in June, she did not hear from him. Three long, frightening days went by before a nurse called her to say that her husband had been medevaced to Anchorage, suffering from a kind of stroke. When she was reunited with him, she found a profoundly changed man, one still suffering today from ministrokes, paralysis, and problems with his speech and mobility.

This being the United States, the family’s medical emergency fast became an economic emergency. Denang had no income. Her husband had no income. Before SEED, the two were getting by on his $244 a month in state disability payments and her $850 a month in federal disability payments, meaning they were falling below the poverty line.

“It is a blessing,” Denang said of SEED, tearing up as she described how the $500-a-month infusion had helped them cover their bills, given them time to enroll her husband in the Social Security disability program, and let them make a plan for her to become his caregiver. She watched every single dollar, she said: When we spoke, she still had $88 left over from last month, having spent the rest on food and other necessities. She added that she and her husband had not applied for all the government benefits they likely qualified to receive.

For Vargas, the money was less of an insurance policy than a capital investment. A father and husband who works as a manager at a logistics company, Vargas told me he was using it on summer tutoring for his children, and had plans to get another degree for himself and to create investments that would spin off passive income for the family. He said that the money had also allowed him to give up some of the side gigs he took on to keep the family’s bills paid, such as fixing up cars in the evening and acting as a handyman on the weekend. “We have more family time,” he said. “I get to read bedtime stories now, and to find out what the kids did at school. The stuff that’s really important.”

Both Vargas and Denang stressed again and again, openly and subtly, how careful they were with the funds. Both had developed detailed plans for how to use the money and what to do when the payments stopped. Both stressed that they were spending only on necessities or investments. They understood, it seems to me, that there would be public scrutiny of the way people in Stockton used the money—just as there is public scrutiny of many public-benefit recipients. Vargas told me he was eager to talk to the media, to portray Stockton in a positive light and help people understand the experiment. Denang said she supported these kinds of initiatives, but worried that if everyone got this kind of money, some would spend it on things like liquor.