I got credit card bills that I literally couldn’t pay
“I honestly don’t know how we’re going to make it,” the 54-year-old Bethlehem Township woman said. “I pay the utilities and the car payments, and I don’t know Taffeta bridesmaid dresshow we’re going to pay it without $1,200 a month. I don’t know where the money’s going to come from.”
Harding, the wife of a truck driver, was laid off in mid-May from her longtime job as an accounts receivables staffer in an Akron printing company.
“I cried my eyes out,” she recalled. “I was totally depressed and not expecting it whatsoever.”
Stricken with Parkinson’s disease and mourning the death of her 19-year-old stepgrandson, she’s been unable to find a job. She says she sent out 150 resumes, which yielded only one interview.
With federal legislation from July expiring today, she is set to be one of about 3,590 Stark County residents who will exhaust their unemployment benefits in December unless Congress again extends the assistance, according to the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. Bills to continue the checks are mired in limbo as Democrats and Republicans argue about how to fund the $12 billion to continue the program for another three months. About 10,000 Stark County residents are slated to stop getting unemployment checks by the end of April.
“I was totally devastated last week to find out I wasn’t getting an extension,” Harding said.
FEAR, TREPIDATION
Several local people who have lost their benefits or will soon lose them described their economic situations as desperate. Some have been unemployed for two years.
Robert Smith, 21, of Canton, says after his unemployment checks of about $260 a week stopped in July, he no could longer pay rent. He said he was let go from his job making machine parts in North Canton in November 2008. Smith says he is surviving on food stamps and a $50 a week part-time job at a video rental store.
“I owe for college. I got credit card bills that I literally couldn’t pay. They’re breathing down my neck. I have no money,” he said.
Carroll Kendall, 61, of Perry Township, doesn’t want Congress to extend unemployment benefits. He believes it is the role of families and churches, not the government, to assist people in need.
But he has been receiving unemployment benefits since January, when his contract job in Lake Township ended. His benefits of just under the maximum $375 a week will expire cheap taffeta bridesmaid dressesin January. After that, he says he and his wife, now the breadwinner, may be unable to make their mortgage payments.
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