NONE of these accomplishments EVER trickled down even to the middle class, certainly not to the lower class.
My husband worked like a dog long hours 6-days a week for 35+ years without fail, without whining, without breaks. I worked hard for 13 years before I had to leave my career to advocate for kids with disabilities. We were supposed …
NONE of these accomplishments EVER trickled down even to the middle class, certainly not to the lower class.
My husband worked like a dog long hours 6-days a week for 35+ years without fail, without whining, without breaks. I worked hard for 13 years before I had to leave my career to advocate for kids with disabilities. We were supposed to be at a point in our lives right now where we could finally enjoy the rewards of all that devotion and hard work and maybe breathe a bit easier and finally start to help our kids financially way more than we could when they were younger. But at 57 and 59 we are worse off today than we were in our 20s! That’s a fact! We haven’t had ANY debt but a mortgage for over 18 years and here we are living paycheck to paycheck today. We can’t save a dime, we haven’t had any vacations in over 29 years, we own no assets whatsoever, drive a 2000 automobile that’s on its last leg but can’t afford a car payment, can’t afford to help our son pay for college so we have to watch him struggle. We have a fully disabled son that keeps getting denied SSDI while billions of money goes to Ukraine and our family falls deeper into despair. The whole thing got exponentially worse during the past 4 years and now we can’t afford the 100% increase to our grocery bill. What used to cost us about $250 a week just four years ago now costs us $480 every week.
Accomplishments?? Surely you jest? Or you’re an out of touch elitist yourself. It can only be one or the other.
In an effort to keep my post shorter earlier and not glaze over the readers eyes I didn’t include all the whys. I know it’s hard to imagine but that’s the problem, people can’t see beyond their own experiences.
When you leave your career to take care of three children with disabilities, you lose the required 2nd income this economy imposes on you. In addition to having less income we also had much higher medical expenses than an average family of five: for doctors, PT, OT, psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, medical devices, and over $350 a month out of pocket for all the medicine. We had on average 28+ doctor appointments every month for quite a few years. That alone cause stress and depression. We never had money left over. Then the institutions overrun and destroyed by the democrats such as the department of education forced us to have to hire advocates and attorneys (expensive) to fight public schools that neglected to implement clearly written IEPs for our children for over 7 years. Free services never were able to help and were mostly inept in our circumstances. After trying four long years to work with the system to get the timely help our kids needed, we saw it was impossible. They were incompetent and it was destroying our kids’ education and spirit. We had to deplete the savings I had from when I worked and my entire retirement account to place them into private schools to protect them (advice of two attorneys and four different doctors.) Despite having hoards of tangible proof of negligence and violations of the IDEA Act and confidentiality laws, and all the letters by doctors stating they had advised we move them years before we ever did, and that it was indeed medically necessary, the IRS still took away ALL our deductions, including our mortgage interest and property taxes, husband’s work expenses, and all charitable donations that we had ample receipts for, because we tried to deduct the special education expenses under our medical. We couldn’t afford private school nor could we afford the $30,000+ it would have cost to win the public school paying our tuition via Due Process (justice is only for the wealthy,) so our accountant explained that while not much of a help we could get minor relief by deducting the medical expenses. The tax code is clear that if private school is necessary for the health of the child and doctors are recommending it and they get what they need in such a school when the public school failed to provide that, then the tuition, travel, materials, and meals are deductible. We only deducted tuition because I was so stressed out from fighting the schools that I couldn’t handle finding every single penny spent on travel, materials, etc. I just had no time. Still - the tax lady stated tuition is never deductible. She violated the tax code. Queue another $7,000 tax attorney bill that verified she was wrong and we were right but we ran out of money to finish. He was able to protect us from what she was doing but not able to get back the $12,000 they took from us. Every minute on the phone with the attorney costs a ton of money. Now there were other things happening just as egregiously and out of our control at the same time draining our checking and savings so we really hadn’t a penny to continue. We couldn’t win Due Process with the public school because in our democratic state less than 1% of ALL cases brought by parents without an attorney win.
Pro Bono is only for politically sensationalized cases too. They take less than 5% of the cases that come across their desk. Ours was certainly an intriguing one to them because of how egregious it was and I document better than anyone they had ever met, even had recordings and email evidence that were fully incriminating, but they passed in our case due to caseload. Our sons weren’t in wheelchairs or weren’t with the kinds of disabilities that make the best headlines I guess. People with cases like ours that do end up in the judicial files and win can afford the legal fees to fight it, and in our area that “starts” at about $30,000 for just the first year.
When we finally were past the hell of high school and our kids were out of school we could have started to finally save and start getting ahead. But this economy the past four years has prevented that completely. One of our sons is totally disabled and unable to work. He is now 26 and supporting a third adult is not cheap on one income, especially in Biden America. I’ve not been able to get a job in the past four years because I’ve been out of my career for so long, no recent experience or references, and I am only seen as a “privileged” white woman, which oddly doesn’t fit DEI wokeness. And I’m far from privileged. My parents were poor as were my husband’s. We own nothing but a house and a beat up car. I just “look” upper class because I take care of myself, but one only has to glance down at my clothes to see I’m anything but.
I had $12,000 left in my retirement account after all that hell we went through, and over the past 5 years it has been as low as $9,000 and never went above $12,400. Anything it actually earned in that time seems to go to fees. Middle to lower class families cannot build income with only $10,000 to work with and the best investors don’t see us as worth their time.
I should mention that our state took two years to deny our son SSDI. Thankfully the attorney helping us doesn’t get paid unless my son does. Still we keep getting denied despite overwhelming proof of disabilities.
NONE of these accomplishments EVER trickled down even to the middle class, certainly not to the lower class.
My husband worked like a dog long hours 6-days a week for 35+ years without fail, without whining, without breaks. I worked hard for 13 years before I had to leave my career to advocate for kids with disabilities. We were supposed to be at a point in our lives right now where we could finally enjoy the rewards of all that devotion and hard work and maybe breathe a bit easier and finally start to help our kids financially way more than we could when they were younger. But at 57 and 59 we are worse off today than we were in our 20s! That’s a fact! We haven’t had ANY debt but a mortgage for over 18 years and here we are living paycheck to paycheck today. We can’t save a dime, we haven’t had any vacations in over 29 years, we own no assets whatsoever, drive a 2000 automobile that’s on its last leg but can’t afford a car payment, can’t afford to help our son pay for college so we have to watch him struggle. We have a fully disabled son that keeps getting denied SSDI while billions of money goes to Ukraine and our family falls deeper into despair. The whole thing got exponentially worse during the past 4 years and now we can’t afford the 100% increase to our grocery bill. What used to cost us about $250 a week just four years ago now costs us $480 every week.
Accomplishments?? Surely you jest? Or you’re an out of touch elitist yourself. It can only be one or the other.
In an effort to keep my post shorter earlier and not glaze over the readers eyes I didn’t include all the whys. I know it’s hard to imagine but that’s the problem, people can’t see beyond their own experiences.
When you leave your career to take care of three children with disabilities, you lose the required 2nd income this economy imposes on you. In addition to having less income we also had much higher medical expenses than an average family of five: for doctors, PT, OT, psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, medical devices, and over $350 a month out of pocket for all the medicine. We had on average 28+ doctor appointments every month for quite a few years. That alone cause stress and depression. We never had money left over. Then the institutions overrun and destroyed by the democrats such as the department of education forced us to have to hire advocates and attorneys (expensive) to fight public schools that neglected to implement clearly written IEPs for our children for over 7 years. Free services never were able to help and were mostly inept in our circumstances. After trying four long years to work with the system to get the timely help our kids needed, we saw it was impossible. They were incompetent and it was destroying our kids’ education and spirit. We had to deplete the savings I had from when I worked and my entire retirement account to place them into private schools to protect them (advice of two attorneys and four different doctors.) Despite having hoards of tangible proof of negligence and violations of the IDEA Act and confidentiality laws, and all the letters by doctors stating they had advised we move them years before we ever did, and that it was indeed medically necessary, the IRS still took away ALL our deductions, including our mortgage interest and property taxes, husband’s work expenses, and all charitable donations that we had ample receipts for, because we tried to deduct the special education expenses under our medical. We couldn’t afford private school nor could we afford the $30,000+ it would have cost to win the public school paying our tuition via Due Process (justice is only for the wealthy,) so our accountant explained that while not much of a help we could get minor relief by deducting the medical expenses. The tax code is clear that if private school is necessary for the health of the child and doctors are recommending it and they get what they need in such a school when the public school failed to provide that, then the tuition, travel, materials, and meals are deductible. We only deducted tuition because I was so stressed out from fighting the schools that I couldn’t handle finding every single penny spent on travel, materials, etc. I just had no time. Still - the tax lady stated tuition is never deductible. She violated the tax code. Queue another $7,000 tax attorney bill that verified she was wrong and we were right but we ran out of money to finish. He was able to protect us from what she was doing but not able to get back the $12,000 they took from us. Every minute on the phone with the attorney costs a ton of money. Now there were other things happening just as egregiously and out of our control at the same time draining our checking and savings so we really hadn’t a penny to continue. We couldn’t win Due Process with the public school because in our democratic state less than 1% of ALL cases brought by parents without an attorney win.
Pro Bono is only for politically sensationalized cases too. They take less than 5% of the cases that come across their desk. Ours was certainly an intriguing one to them because of how egregious it was and I document better than anyone they had ever met, even had recordings and email evidence that were fully incriminating, but they passed in our case due to caseload. Our sons weren’t in wheelchairs or weren’t with the kinds of disabilities that make the best headlines I guess. People with cases like ours that do end up in the judicial files and win can afford the legal fees to fight it, and in our area that “starts” at about $30,000 for just the first year.
When we finally were past the hell of high school and our kids were out of school we could have started to finally save and start getting ahead. But this economy the past four years has prevented that completely. One of our sons is totally disabled and unable to work. He is now 26 and supporting a third adult is not cheap on one income, especially in Biden America. I’ve not been able to get a job in the past four years because I’ve been out of my career for so long, no recent experience or references, and I am only seen as a “privileged” white woman, which oddly doesn’t fit DEI wokeness. And I’m far from privileged. My parents were poor as were my husband’s. We own nothing but a house and a beat up car. I just “look” upper class because I take care of myself, but one only has to glance down at my clothes to see I’m anything but.
I had $12,000 left in my retirement account after all that hell we went through, and over the past 5 years it has been as low as $9,000 and never went above $12,400. Anything it actually earned in that time seems to go to fees. Middle to lower class families cannot build income with only $10,000 to work with and the best investors don’t see us as worth their time.
I should mention that our state took two years to deny our son SSDI. Thankfully the attorney helping us doesn’t get paid unless my son does. Still we keep getting denied despite overwhelming proof of disabilities.
Inflation is only leveling off for the rich.