From $70K to food bank, one family's struggle
- Story Highlights
- Patricia Guerrero went from making $70,000 to drawing unemployment checks
- Desperate to feed her kids, she recently went to a food bank for the first time
- Expert says charities are reporting a rise in middle-class families at food banks
- Guererro: "It just happened so fast. It happened in a matter of -- what -- two months"
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CNN
ALTADENA, California (CNN) -- When she was laid off in February, Patricia Guerrero was making $70,000 a year. Weeks later, with bills piling up and in need of food for her family, this middle-class mother did something she never thought she would do: She went to a food bank.
Patricia Guerrero was laid off in February. Desperate to make ends meet, she recently went to a food bank.
"It brought tears to my eyes, and I sat there and I cried. I was like, 'This is really where I'm at?' " she told CNN. "I go 'no way;' [but] this is true. This is reality. This is the stuff you see on TV. It was hard. It was very hard."
Guerrero is estranged from her husband and raising her two young children. She's already burned through her savings to help make ends meet, and is drawing unemployment checks. She has had to take extreme measures to pay for her interest-only mortgage of $2,500 a month. In fact, her mother moved in with her to help pay the bills.
Guerrero even applied for food stamps, but was denied. 
Watch Guerrero describe going to food bank »
"I never used the system. I've been working since I was 15-and-a-half. I needed it now and it turned me down," she said.
Stories like Guerrero's are becoming more common as middle-class Americans feel the pinch of an economic downturn, rising gas prices and a housing crunch, especially in a state like California that has been rocked by foreclosures.
Americans also have been attending in large numbers foreclosure fairs where mortgage lenders, financial planners and counselors offer tips to hard-hit homeowners.
"Our economy is struggling, and families in the 'Inland Empire' and across the nation are hurting," California Rep. Joe Baca said, referring to an area of Southern California in his district.
"Our housing market is in a state of crisis due to rampant abuses of sub-prime lending, and unemployment is rising. At the same time, the cost of necessities such as gas, healthcare, and education continue to rise."
Map: Foreclosures state-by-state »
Daryl Brock, the executive director of Second Harvest Food Bank in California's San Bernardino and Riverside counties, said his organization supplies food to more than 400 charities in metro Los Angeles, from homeless shelters to soup kitchens to an array of food banks. While the majority of people they help are working poor families, he said they have seen some major changes.
In the last 12 to 18 months, Brock said, the agencies he supplies have begun seeing more middle-class families coming to their doors.
"Our agencies have said there is an increasing number of people coming to them for help," Brock told CNN by phone. "Their impression was that these were not people they normally would have seen before. They seemed to be better dressed. They seemed to have better cars and yet they seemed to be in crisis mode."
He added, "The only thing they can do is give us anecdotal evidence that they think it's because of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown and the housing crisis." 
See recent trends of foreclosure filings »
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A former loan processor, Guerrero knows all about that, although so far she has been able keep her house.
She used her tax refund to help pay many of her bills for the first two months, but now that money's gone.
She says she's now in a middle-class "no-man's-land."
"It just happened so fast. It happened in a matter of -- what -- two months," she said.
She's eager to get back to work and to hold onto her home until the market turns. But for this single mom, every day it becomes harder to hang on.
"It's just depressing," she said. "For me, I just don't want to get out of bed, but I have to. That's my hardest thing. I have to." E-mail to a friend
2 comments:
The problem with American is that people all think they're middle class. For example, millionaires and wealthy always talk about the "middle class values" whenever they are interviewed as if they're the middle class themselves. People with lot of debt, little of saving, also think that they're belonging to the middle class just because they think their salary is in a certain range or slightly better than other people. Because everyone thinks that he/she is doing fine, they don't really care much for other people whom have lesser fortunes. Furthermore, the right-wing, Republican administrative does not care much for the common people. Its base supporters are the wealthy, the corporation, and the big businessmen. Thus socialism is applied to the business and corporation in form of tax cut, incentives, subsidies, pork-barrel projects.....All safety nets for the common people are dismantled. Years ago (right before Katrina), the Republican even came out with the so-called study, reporting that there was no poor people in this country (because according to them, all families in the US have at least one car and a color TV). Now, believe it or not, they claim that the middle class is getting smaller because the middle class people are becoming wealthier and moving out into the wealthy class. Welfare became a dirty word, even though corporate welfare is rampant and hidden from the public. Only when thing turns sour, then people will have to face the reality. The government taxes them yearly, but they don't get much back from their taxes. They have accepted and helped the wealthy, greedy, selfish, well connected politicians removing the social safety net, now they have to face the consequences themselves.
ITS A FAKE STORY BY CNN
someone looked up Guerrero on the local assessors database:
Here’s a little more information about Patricia Guerrero’s financial situation from public records (LA County Assessor and Recorder):
The 2,948 square foot house on a quarter acre lot was built in 1948.
She and her estranged husband Ray acquired the house, apparently from HIS PARENTS Israel and Esther Guerrero, in August 2002, at which time the debt load on the property was about $157,000.
Ray and Patricia took out a conventional fixed-rate first trust deed on the property on 8/14/2002 for $202,000.
I’ll spare you all the gory details of their various refinancings and equity loans, but the present note from 8/21/2006 is for $649,999.
So, it looks like they bought the place for a sweetheart deal and proceeded to jack themselves up to the tune of about $450,000 over a period of just 4 years.
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