MucheDumbre

When I was younger I went to my parents and I asked them to loan me some money. Ok, not really ‘loan’ I mean it was my parents.. so I guess it was more like I asked them to ‘gift’ me the money. I really needed help with my bills because I was being overwhelmed with them.I had fallen on some pretty hard times because of some pretty stupid decisions I’d made. But I knew that if I could just get my bills down to a ‘zero-due’ level I could climb out of the hole I put myself in. My parent don’t like just giving out money to people but they saw that I really was in trouble so they helped me out.

I took their money and went to Florida Power to pay my bill. By that time I was so far behind in my payments that that single payment alone was going to eat a large chunk out of the loan from my parents. As I was standing there in line I realized that I had another 2 weeks before that payment was technically due to be shut off. I knew I’d have the money to pay it in 2 weeks, so I left the line.

Water on the other hand..well they were coming out the next day, so I went to pay them. I didn’t pay the entire bill of course, I didn’t need to. I only needed to pay the minimum due to keep the water on. I did the same for cable and phone. I knew paying the whole bill was better but paying just minimum kept the service on and I could pay the rest in a couple of weeks no problem. I just needed this quick bailout. If I didn’t have the money in a couple of

weeks, well that wasn’t a problem either because I still had the rest of the money my parents gave me, which I was going to save for just this problem. Besides, it just didn’t seem right to pay all of these bills down to a ‘zero-due’ level anymore.

You know what I’m talking about. You have this giant wad of cash and there are so many things you could do with it that you don’t want to waste it all on paying the bills. Hell, doing that is like a crime or something.

A few days later a new movie was coming out and I had to see it! I couldn’t be told what the Matrix was, I had to see it to understand. It was a phenomenal, ground-breaking movie. It’s the movie that birthed CGI. After I had seen it I just couldn’t stop talking about it and some friends of mine wanted to go see it but they didn’t have the cash yet. So I treated them.

It really was a great movie.

My husband and I also went to an amazing restaurant right after that. I remember it was at the same time because the waiter looked just like Keanu Reeves and we were joking with him about blue pills and red pills. The restaurant was a little fancier than the ones we normally eat at but it was worth the $100 check.

Wow, talk about some great steak!

Two weeks went by and during that time we had bought a couple of new things, not things we would have bought with our own money. Since we had this extra money left over from my parents we figured, what the hell might as well buy it now. Nothing big mind you. $5 here, $25 there. We were saving that money to be used later just in case, even though we knew that in 2 weeks we’d have the money to pay all the bills down again.

Image by Nick Slide via Flickr

It was the third week after the ‘gift’ when the power was cut off and then the water and finally the cable.

When I went to get the money left over from my parents, it was all gone. That was a surprise, I mean I had this huge wad of cash that I didn’t totally spend on bills so I could save it for future bills and now it was gone…. I hadn’t even bought anything, so where the hell did it go?

When my mother came over later that day she was pissed that the power was off. She wanted to know what I did with the money she gave me to pay the power. I told her I had paid part of the bill and had saved the rest. She wanted to see all my bills then but I was a grown woman.. I don’t have to show my mother my bills. C’mon… it’s not like I was 12 and trying to hide my report card. She asked where the money was that I had saved and I told her that it was gone. Yeah, she didn’t like that too much either. My daughter was just a baby then and my mother couldn’t stand to see her living in a house with no power or water, I mean what could she do? Just leave her there like that to suffer? Sure I had made the mistake, but it’s not like she could punish the one under me because of my mistake. So she broke out her Discover card and paid the bills off and they were turned back on.

It was about a month later, my brother, who was in graduate school called my parents. He was having some finanicail aid problems and couldn’t make his rent or utilities payment that month. He didn’t want them to just give him the money, he had a decent loan plan laid out. See, he couldn’t work during the school year because he had to devote all his time to law school, so during the summers he would live with my parents and work 3 jobs in order to have enough money to get him through the school year. What had happened though was that his student loan hadn’t come in yet and the registrar wanted him to pay his tuition until it did. When it came in, the school would cut him a check and he’d get his money back.

The plan he laid out to my parents was decent, like I said. He could pay his tuition if they could pay

his rent and utilities. They didn’t have to give him the money, he would give them the account numbers and they could call and make the payments themselves. Then he would have the registrar put the check from the student loan in their name and mail it to them for payment. The whole loan would be in my parent’s control. They would oversee every aspect of it. The registrar had already been told of the plan and had already noted that the student aid would go directly to my parents when it came in and only my parents could change this.

What do you think they should have done in this situation? Wasn’t this a great deal? A deal that pretty much secured the return of their money? A deal that was much better than the one they gave me where I horded and wasted their gift and even needed a 2nd extra gift to pay for what the 1st one should have?

If they didn’t help my brother, is that fair? I mean, they can’t be expected to help everyone right? Where do they draw the line? Me, my brother? My aunt,grandmother… or cousin?

What if you were in a situation where you gave someone money to help pick themselves up, but they didn’t exactly do that. In fact, they kept most the money for themselves and squandered the rest on stuff you don’t know about because they won’t tell you. They squandered it even though they were desperately going to need that money and more in the very near future. But now, here is someone else with their hand out, but he’s got a lot more to lose and he’s got a much better plan. Almost an airtight plan. He may also need money in the future, but you know that you’ll atleast get this money back.

Pop quiz, hotshot. What do you do?

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