“I am once again asking for your financial support.”

If you own Spirit Airlines stock, do yourself a favor… don’t open your brokerage app. (Unless you enjoy staring into a -40% crater while it passive-aggressively asks, “Are you still there?”)

The bright-yellow flying school bus of American aviation is getting absolutely yeeted after going full Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and saying the quiet part out loud: “We’re not gonna be able to survive unless you can give me a few dollar bills.” Big “alms for the poor?” energy.

And no, this isn’t something Jim Cramer shouted between “boing” sound effects and cursing the stock you just put half your portfolio in yesterday. They literally wrote it in their SEC filing. In big, boring, lawyer-approved “going concern” language, Spirit declared there’s “substantial doubt” they’ll survive the next 12 months without raising more cash. That’s code for: “We might not be alive in a year unless someone Venmos us.” (And knowing Spirit, they’d still tack on a $25 “processing fee” for the Venmo.)

(Source: Reuters)

This is really sad considering just five months ago, things looked… okay-ish. Spirit had just tiptoed out of bankruptcy with $795M in debt erased, promised a $252M profit for 2025, and floated the radical idea that “budget” didn’t have to mean “sit in a plastic lawn chair next to a crying toddler while a guy eats egg salad in row 12.”

But unfortunately for their CEO Dave Davis (yes, his name is the same twice… like his parents copy-pasted it to save time), reality had other plans. The U.S. domestic market is drowning in seats nobody wants, passengers have suddenly developed a taste for “premium” everything (aka “please just let me have legroom and not sit in the middle”), and Spirit’s still dealing with an engine recall that grounded planes. Oh, and thanks to Trump’s tariff rollout earlier this year, half the country canceled their vacations. (Spirit probably still kept the baggage fees, though.)

And get this… Spirit’s credit-card processor is literally holding their survival hostage (you can’t make this stuff up). Unless Spirit throws more cash in a collateral piggy bank, the processor won’t renew their contract after Dec. 31. No contract means no card payments. And no card payments means… welcome to 1994, please buy your ticket in cash at the airport kiosk that smells like wet dog.

So now, Spirit’s only play is to host a company wide garage sale. And everything’s on the table. Selling spare engines. Offloading gate rights. Maybe pawning some office furniture. (Wouldn’t shock me if they list a few planes on Facebook Marketplace: “Gently used Airbus, only 14 emergency landings, $15,000 OBO.”) Live view of Gary Vee right now:

This all comes after Spirit announced it’s furloughing 270 pilots and demoting another 140… because the only thing flying right now is their debt-to-cash ratio. And with bigger airlines warning Q3 profits will be flat or worse, Spirit’s “survival plan” looks less like a business strategy and more like holding a cardboard sign that says “Will Fly for Cash” outside the New York Stock Exchange.

So if you’ve got travel points to burn, you might wanna use them sooner rather than later. Because at this rate, Spirit’s next big route might just be a one-way ticket… straight back to bankruptcy court.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Meta as mentioned in the article.