single moms posts

Rachel Porcaro is the manager of a hair salon, and to look at her, you wouldn't think "tax fraud." If you were to walk into her home, you probably wouldn't think "these kids are obviously fictions of her imagination!"

According to the The Seattle Times, to see her with her two boys, 10 and 8, where they live with her parents, the three look more like a normal family headed by a single mom than any you could imagine. She works, pays her parents $400 rent a month, and pays to feed, clothe and provide for their preteen needs: toilet paper, toothpaste, soap.

That's not how the IRS sees it. Porcaro, the agency says, is making far too little, half the average necessary for a mom to survive with two children in the Seattle area.

About 74% of women say it's very important for their kids to go to college and get a degree, according to a new OppenheimerFunds Inc. survey. But in many cases, women spend a lot more time preparing their children to get into college than figuring out how to pay for it.

According to the poll, women often leave the financial planning for higher education to their spouses. Of households planning financially for college, women took primary responsibility for the planning 65% of the time, compared with 85% of men. Women also determined who will pay for college 67% of the time, compared with 77% of men.

"I think if it's a two-parent household sometimes you have to split the work," Donna Winn, president and CEO of OFI Private Investments Inc., told WalletPop in an Interview. "But I also think a lot of us get caught up in the things that are day-to-day. It's a little easier for us to do that in the sense that you address the immediate need, and then by not addressing that future need you leave a big hole in what your kid can do."

I am the ant.

When the elephants battle, it's my kind who ultimately get stomped on.

After obsessively reading about the outcome of the last decade of unchecked greed, I realized that this obscene Wall Street gaffe doesn't affect my situation in the slightest. Yet.

Because I don't have a mortgage that I HELOC'd to high heaven. I don't have a portfolio heavy with financials. I don't work for an investment bank. I don't live on my dividends. I don't own a business that needs to borrow to make payroll, and I don't have any payments on a 2007 Ford Excursion that I now can't unload as gasoline prices reach ever upward.

In other words, I'm already under the radar. Move on, please. Nothing to see here.