I have a friend who is experiencing a lot of difficulties. Some of them are financial.
She is out of work and is low on money. She found out about a Covid-related program that would let her stop making car payments for 2020. The payments are now resuming in January.
She apparently misunderstood how the program worked. She thought all of the payments were being moved back ten months. But the program only deferred these payments until the first month of 2021. The result is that she is now supposed to make ten months of payments in January.
She does not have the money. In fact, she did not have the money for just the one month payment she expected and had been asking people to help out by donating money to her. She is now asking people to donate money to her for the much larger payment, which is ten times what she thought it would be.
I am not in a position to give my friend the money to make this large payment. (I am also not in a position to loan her the money although I expect such a loan would end up being a gift.) I could help by contributing some money to the general donation fund.
But here’s the thing. I feel that she is not going to be able to get the whole amount she needs. And I have now had a cynical thought; if she can’t pay all the money she owes, is there any point in paying part of it? If we give her money and she pays off half of what she owes and they repossess her car anyway for the unpaid other half, what’s the point in paying anything? She might as well pay them nothing.
I feel guilty for questioning whether I should be helping a friend in need. I feel I should give her the help I can because she’s my friend. But I also feel like I shouldn’t be giving away money when it ultimately won’t do anything to help her situation; that’s just me throwing money away.
Thoughts and opinions would be welcome.