Living on SNAP

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Recommended: Poverty in our nation

Poverty is a state in which one lacks the financial resources to live a stable way of life that is acceptable in society. The purpose of the living on SNAP experiment is to put our self into another person’s shoes who uses food stamps. Also the purpose of this experiment is to understand the pros and cons of a government designed program such as SNAP and how it helps provide basic resource needs to the many of Americans living in poverty.
While creating my hypothetical family I did not want to have the average American family that consist of a mother, father and multiple children. Instead, I decided to have a single mother, 33 years of age and her daughter 15 years of age. The main income source for the family comes from the mother who makes an average of one thousand four hundred and fifty dollars a month. The last source of income is from child support of the daughter which is one hundred and fifty three dollars. The two bedroom apartment the family lives in is five hundred and forty dollars, the utilities bill is one hundred and nineteen dollar and the monthly car payment and insurance is three hundred and seventy dollars. The grand total of expenses is one thousand one hundred and twenty nine dollars which only leaves four hundred and seventy four dollars for emergencies or situations that may arise.
The monthly allotment my hypothetical family receives from SNAP is $210. In order to find my family monthly allotment I went to the USDA website to first see if my family was eligible for food stamps. The monthly incoming income of my family is $1,603. The second step was to subtract twenty percent of the earned income which resulted in the total $1,282. Then I subtracted the previous total from $152 which is the standard dedu...

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...onthly allotment and have more than four people in their family then Food Stamps will not benefit them as much as it would a family of two. Especially, if there is only one person in the family who is supporting the family and the other members are dependent of that individual.
The most important thing that I learned from this experiment is that living in poverty is hard. The money they make from their job does not support themselves and their family members as well as they would want to so they have to seek government assistance. The government assistance programs provide some help towards buying food but only if you meet a certain net income. But for the people who do not meet the net income because their monthly income is too high even if it is just a couple of dollars higher than the target net income they are not able to receive Food Stamps which is very sad.

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