📝 AITA for not donating to a GoFundMe

By Boring_Toe_2966 • Score: 0 • April 17, 2025 12:54 PM


To make a long history of context short: my family is terrible with money. Brand new cars but cannot afford rent, constantly asking for money and rarely pay it back, and tend to not pay for things like insurance. As much as I(f, 22) love my family, I eventually stopped chalking up there financial misfortunes as bad circumstance as I am now owed a few thousand dollars from them (over the course of a few years of lending but no payment back) and see their spending habits a bit more clearly. Fast forward to now, my older sister (early 30’s) has 3 cats, 2 rats, 2 fish, a brand new car (but no insurance on the car), and kids. A lot of expenses, and unexpected costs tend to pop out of nowhere. For context, I really disprove of how my family treats and cares for their animals. They tend to medically and generally neglect their pets, and I’ve had to pay for multiple pets being put down because of preventable conditions simply because I couldn’t bear to watch them suffer. My sister lets me know her cat (12 years old) either needs emergency dental surgery where they pull all of her teeth (maximum $900, as confirmed by multiple vets in our rural area) or she needs to be put down. At the time of knowing few details, I agreed to give her a bit of money (unspecified) towards the cause. However, after this, I have received numerous hysterical texts that left a bad taste in my mouth. First, my sister planned on applying for a vet line of credit, but “lost” her ID. She called me in a fit of rage, screaming that she’s just going to “put the damn cat down”, and “this was too much trouble”. I was taken aback for obvious reasons, but being yelled at for her losing her own ID, was really unsettling. I advised her to find a way to pay for the surgery, insinuating I wasn’t planning to help pay. Fast forward, she and some family members are posting GoFundMes for the procedure. My sister had made the goal of the GoFundMe an additional $1000 to the estimated cost of the procedure, and for some reason that bothered me. I was sent the GoFundMe link several times, and I was purposely not interacting with them/liking/sharing/responding. My sister reached out, and asked me if I planned on pitching in (more like, how much). I asked my sister why she needed to use a crowd sourcing option in the first place. I was informed she only needed a maximum of $500 up front, and after that she could do payment plans, but first she NEEDS the $500. I was taken aback again, because now it seemed more like a demand than an ask, and I mentioned she could DoorDash, UBER (things she’s done in the past) to make $500 pretty quickly (in the past, she’s told me she’s made $300 a night doing this). She told me she cannot do that because she no longer has car insurance and can’t use drive share apps. I essentially told her this is her problem to handle and I didn’t have the money (which, I really don’t) to just lend or hand out. My entire family is now mad at me because I am not dipping into my savings (which they assume is a lot more than it is) to help my sister. AITAH?

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