A recovering addict and single mom took her $5,600 tax refund and used it not to splurge on the latest gadget, but to pay her rent—for the entire year. Christina Knaack put a photo of the rent check on Facebook Wednesday and explained her reasoning behind the move in a post that’s since gone viral, the Houston Chronicle reports; it’s been shared more than 120,000 times so far. “Instead of buying my kids the latest Jordans or fancy electronics I paid my rent for the YEAR,” the South Carolina mom of a 4-month-old and a 2-year-old wrote. “I’m a single mom and I do it all buy [sic] myself on a minimum wage job. I (know) that a roof over my kids head is what’s important.” She went on to say that she keeps her priorities “straight” to make sure her kids have everything they need—and that with the extra $450 per month they won’t be paying in rent, the family can do things together.
The post has racked up more than 300,000 Facebook “reactions,” just eight of them “angry,” and thousands of comments—most of them supportive, Fox 8 notes. Of course, not everyone has been completely on board with Knaack; one commenter, for example, wondered why Knaack hadn’t used the money to start saving to buy a house, while another wondered why she doesn’t have a better-paying job. In an update Thursday, Knaack said that she never expected to go viral, but made her post public in case her friends wanted to share it. “As of January 3rd I celebrated 3 years clean,” she wrote, and she thought perhaps “a recovering addict would see it and see that life off the streets is possible and for any single moms to (know) it is possible to survive on (your) own.” (This single mom donned a mustache for her kid.)
This article was written by Evann Gastaldo at the NY Times here: http://bit.ly/2m1dA6S
