part way in they give a financial breakdown
1160 unemployement
1640 salary
115 food stamps
total income 2915 monthly.
major expenses listed are
405 rent
315 food
40 laundry
734 car expenses !WTF really?
658 student loans,credit debt and hospital bills
later they start listing other expenses
$165 parking - paying to park a car they can't afford...
$42 cheque cashing fee - anyone able to tell me what this is?
$280 cable,phone/internet ! holy crap
$181 gym, shoes, entertainment
$50 cat food/litter
$30 loan for medication
$1.50 coffee
$1.50 card
$2 lottery ticket
leaving them with $10 left over.
From the PBS website:
Hard choices
One family in Newark, N.J. keeps a monthly financial diary of expenditures, which demonstrates the difficult choices made each day by Americans living on the outskirts of the mainstream financial system.
It's kind of like my question regarding people who are in the dating world, and consider their pet to be a 'non-negotiable' for whatever reasons. They don't care if their significant other is allergic to no end...that pet will be the last thing to go (including after the significant other) that they would ever give up.
But the sad thing is that when it comes to consumerism, you can substitute waaaaay too many things in our country for the pet above for people that don't even consider that they can live without something, whether it's a cat, cable, or whatever.
As others on the board have pointed out, it's not really a difficult situation that the family finds themselves in at all - people usually create their own 'difficulties' for themselves. And despite keeping their detailed spending logs, they still probably have the attitude of "Pffft - it's JUST a $3 fee to cash my check. That's not holding me down and keeping me poor." The truth of the matter is that they are correct - just a single $3 fee to cash a check is not what's making things difficult. It's the attitude of "_____ is just $2/$3/$6/$10", which will forever shackle them in the bottom quartile of financial net worth (and I'll bet that the PBS correspondent won't bother pointing that out to them because PBS doesn't truly care about them).
So for those that watched the episode, what was PBS's conclusion/wrap-up? My guess is that rather than empowering the family to take ownership of their lives and showing them how they can become financially free, I'm thinking they spun it that they 'need their unemployment compensation for ____ more months - just look at how they aren't making ends meet '.