From $70K to food bank, one family's struggle - CNN.com
From $70K to food bank, one family's struggle - CNN.com
After reading this story, I am feeling remarkably unsympathetic. I am glad that this family has been able to eat with the help of the food back - I would not want the kids to go hungry because of the grossly irresponsible behavior of their mother. However, I don't think that it is right for the resources of the food bank to be used up just because this woman does not plan well. I mean...at the food bank in less than 2 months after losing her job? Where was her emergency fund - we should all have a minimum of 3 months in savings and her $70,000 salary would seem to provide enough for her to do that if she was living within those means (even in California). But, that family was not living within their means. Instead, she was living paycheck to paycheck with an interest-only mortgage. That is simply not a responsible way to parent two small children. I find it unacceptable that she is taking advantage of charity that was designed for people who do not have the ability to provide for themselves so that she can keep the house she couldn't afford in the first place. As a former loan processor, she does not have any argument to make that she didn't understand the mortgage or that she was taken in by predatory lenders. I expect that there are a lot of people in the same position. And, quite frankly, I am not inclined for taxpayers to bail out people who had the ability and the means to make responsible choices and chose not to. It isn't fair to those people who have limited themselves - bought smaller houses that they could afford, budgeted so that they could build up savings for a rainy day - because those people are now the ones who have to pay for the people who were living it up. It is the Ant and the Grasshopper all over again!
