GRH4V: personal expenses alotment.

If you are a person getting a pension or a disability payment of any kind, service related or not, the way this place is set up, is they allow you to keep 100.00  of it for your personal expenses. Non Income people get 5 dollars a week, or 20 dollars a month - hardly enough to get a few cans of coke or pepsi each week. If non income people cannot find another source for funding, they will find it difficult to get personal items that they want and may have to settle for second or 3rd best items, some of which are made available to them for free by the service organizations. Things like toiletries, and shampoo and body deodorants.

Pensioners get to keep 100 dollars a month. While that may seem like a large sum, it is not. If one of these people decide they need to get a dress shirt or something for a special occasion, the cost can eat up half of the allotment. And if the person smokes, well, that is 2 cartons of cigarettes.

Then you have the veterans who do have their own vehicles here.. the cost of maintaining them eats up the 100 bucks instantly. Basic car insurance can cost over 90 dollars a month even with a perfect driving record. Then you pay for fuel and repairs on top of that, and you can see why 100 is not enough.

Take the case of one fellow on the Dom unit. Greg uses his car to take fellow veterans to go shopping, or to pay bills. Anyone who is ambulatory who can leave the facility, he will take. He takes one fellow from 2 red, over to pay his phone bill once a month. He takes others on trips to Meijers, or Best Buy or where ever they need to go and only asks for some gas money in return. Most guys give him 5 bucks,  - about the cost of 1 and a half gallons of gas.He has taken guys to court, to the train station, to the bus station, to Van Andle Arena, to their homes so that they can get things. He even took one guy to Muskegon. WOW.

The problem is that his car insurance went from 85 to 120, due to changes in Michigans car insurance laws.
But he was able to use his veterans status to get it back down to 65 a month for basic insurance only.
He just dumped 500 dollars into a new set of tires and still needs some work done on the car. So that 100.00 he will be getting for his disability will barely cover operating expenses. Let alone providing any personal items he may want.

This is why the allotments for personal expenses needs to be increased on both levels, and so far from what everyone can see, or tell, no one from the home is doing anything to get the Board of Managers or the State congress to approve an increase.