.
Get real!
The couple are doing the right thing.
The guy is hopeless if he spent the money on drugs.
.
People are homeless and poor for a reason.
Giving them a house and money without fixing the underlying problem won’t help.
This isn’t rocket surgery.
He needs his share of the money to be placed into a Trust.
The Courts need to appoint an Advocate to manage that money for him and dole it out as needed, but with prudence and limitations. Only so much per quarter, or every three months. He should not still be beholden to this couple who have their own point of view on what is ‘fair’.
One day, this homeless Vet may get tired of that couple trying to do his thinking for him. He probably knows where they live and where they work. Even kind and gentle people have their limits when they think someone is ripping them off or treating them in a condescending manner.
What ever happened to that guy that did the Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese commercial. He only had one line in one commercial that I ever saw. I thought Kraft paid him $100,000 but it was a lot of free advertising for them in other ways.
Didn’t know about this story.
This saga is ripe with inconsistencies. Something is awry here, but the real truth will be hard to me by.
GoFundMe donations - people squander the money on themselves all the time. There is no legal accountability. The donors should know this. Foolish from the git-go, and foolish to demand that they spend it the way they said they would. First of all, it is enabling, so the worst thing for the guy, so that is a good decision. Second of all, people just gave them money and assumed they would spend it the way the donors assumed they would.
“Assume’ makes an Ass out of u and me.
They should have prepaid an apartment and utilities for 10 years.
No one in their right mind would just freely voluntarily send money to a guy with an Italian name a New Jersey. LOL
They collected the money telling people it’s for the homeless vet. They raised the money under false pretenses, if they don’t give all of it to him.
You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
Or, as Larry the Cable Guy would say, “no matter how hard you try, you can’t baptize a cat.”
Is GoFundMe even legal? What about all the myriad of state and federal regulations and taxes it has to go through?
Wow The GoFundMe organization took a $30/k fee? Hefty chunk. Johnnie can’t handle $ or anything else for that matter being drug adled and the couple are a mixed bag— trying to help him and helping themselves to the cookie jar at the same time. Lawyers? Vultures take their cut too.
Advice to Johnnie— get clean and get a job and stop choosing to be a street bum. As for the donors they got hustled out of their well meaning donations.
Yo...Bill and Hillary...is that you?
My dad and mom our elderly and have tried to help out a bunch of homeless people over the years by giving them places to stay either on their property or in houses that they owned along with giving them money. It has never worked out not even once. The people they have tried to help keep wanting more and more. When people finally say enough is enough they turn on you and make all sorts of allegations. My parents have lost tens of thousands of dollars trying to evict people who never paid a dime of rent and completely trashed their properties.
People who can't make it in our society always blame others for their situation when the real problem is usually substance abuse and mental problems. I feel very bad for this young couple who had the very best intentions for this clown and are now having their good name smeared and their reputations drug through the mud. Speculation by people who have no clue about what is really going on makes me a little sick. Shame on them all for speculating about this good couple based on what a thieving druggie has accused them of. There is usually only one reason a homeless guy gives a woman $20 and it is not out of the goodness of his heart. And shame on the druggie for not being able to get his act together even after a couple expensive treatment programs and being given a real chance to straighten his life out...
The couple can run another GoFundMe campaign for their legal expenses.
If the fundraisers kept any of the money, or used it for “expenses”, the IRS will want to talk to them about it.
That is taxable income.
Plead the Fifth!
I don’t know about the legal issues involved, but clearly if they raised this money through GoFundMe under the pretenses that it would be used to help this homeless guy, it was IMO morally wrong for them to spend a cent of it on themselves, beyond any expenses they may have occurred in trying to help this guy. If they decided handing this dude any more money was a bad idea, they should have left it in the bank until they had decided how to proceed - setting up a trust, donating it to charities, or whatever. But to my mind, clearly spending money donated for another purpose on yourself is immoral.
I have on a few occasions donated to an open-ended GoFundMe, based on my impressions of the person asking. For example for help with medical and other costs involving an accident, or for help with their dogs. These were all people I had known for some time through various web forums. I didn’t inquire or care what exactly they did with the money, because I gave it freely for them to spend as they needed. I would hope that if they raised a lot more than they needed that they would have paid it forward, but that’s up to them. But they weren’t raising it specifically for the stated purpose of giving it to someone else.
I don’t know about the legalities. Fraud statutes seem to generally be pretty broad, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they could be prosecuted under them.
Good Samaritan homeless veteran will get all of the $400,000 in donations still owed to him, GoFundMe says
because they do not want a bad image. They make money on fees.