All of this motivational self-improvement talk is nice and motivating, but it fails to address what the guy is really asking.
Guy, nobody is going to give you good investment advice for free.
Why? Are people just dicks?
No.
Well yes, but that's not the reason why they won't offer you investment advice for your one grand.
I'm in a similar position to you except I'm a wage slave instead of drawing social security, same difference really though, I make enough to barely scrape by and end up being able to only put the little bit that I am able to hustle up on the side into these kinds of things. Having so little to invest means one has to put ALOT of careful thought into where they invest it.
So why won't people help?
Because anybody with good intentions wouldn't tell you to where to invest. It's something you really have to figure out for yourself, so you can be responsible for your own losses should your investment tank. Nobody wants to shoulder the burden of being the guy who told you to invest your thousand dollars in Xcoin right before it tanks, at least, nobody with good intentions.
What does leave? People with vested interests who are motivated to convince people to invest in whatever they hold. Obviously you can't trust those opinions, because they're biased.
So here are my biased opinions, and why I decided to form them. You should learn about these things for yourself though.
Bitcoin - The next highest marketcap for a crypto is still like 1/15 of bitcoin's (not counting ripple). With so much riding on it, more people are motivated to make bitcoin succeed than any other cryptocurrency. It has the most infrastructure already in place, and if a crypto were to go viral tomorrow, it would likely be the one just because of precedence. That's not to say that it can't supplanted easily enough, if the right app goes viral, or a more empowered community get behind a different crypto for whatever reason, that's totally a possibility, but so far Bitcoin is arguably the safest (most likely to see increased demand in the near future) investment for your money.
Peercoin - Proof of Stake makes sense to me. In a world where crypto has supplanted the dollar, I see peercoin serving as something of the crypto equivalent to a saving's account. If you don't spend them, you get about one percent back a year from minting proof of stake. Meanwhile, the fixed transaction fee, which will become significant when ppc gains value, would prevent people from using the currency for frivolous spendings. But when they do spend, that fee gets destroyed instead of going back to miners. So the destroyed transaction fees balance out the new money coming in from proof of stake minting. This creates an equilibrium. When too many people horde their money, much more of it gets created from stake, and without fees getting destroyed it loses value from the inflation, giving holders motivation to spend some and destroy some fees. Then when people go spend crazy, it destroys fees, and therefore supply, causing prices to go up motivating people to save more. Because it's not being used for a flajillion little spammy transactions, and because proof-of-stake reduces the need for traditional mining, this makes it the most enironmentally friendly coin I know about. A perfect backbone currency. For buying bread, the same developer made Primecoin, which uses the PoW necessary for a flajillion spammy transactions to also discover prime number chains. Together the two coins create a more environmentally friendly two sided approach: energy reduction (peercoin), and energy multi-use (primecoin).
Bitshares-PTS - Well... I think you know about this one. DACs have the potential to change the way we do business. And angelshares prevent me from being tempted to sell my investment for cigarettes from CVS. That's why I view them as good for people like us who caught the ass end of the social stratum. Anyone who tells you never to invest more than you can afford to lose is someone who can afford to lose something-- the truth is you'll never get ahead in life without taking a little bit of risk.
Those are pretty much the ones I feel strongly about.
By the way, you don't need to justify your position in life to anybody here. Had any of these people caught your circumstances, they'd probably be in the same exact situation give or take a little bit of success. Anyone who would judge you for whatever it is that makes it difficult for you to work just lacks the imagination to fathom the reasons that this might be so, possibly because they come from a more prosperous era where jobs were so abundant and gainful that there was no excuse for not providing for one's self, and they carry these outdated judgements into modern times. Or maybe its because they are so rigidly narrow minded that they were taught one way to live, provided with the means to achieve it, and completely fail to even want to understand how anybody else's life could be different. The fact that those people have to live in their own minds, and that they'll miss out on so much life has to offer for their one sided approach, is punishment enough for them that you can just safely ignore them and feel sorry for them.