Good neighbors are hard to find.

In this story from Reddit, we meet a neighbor who thought they were doing a nice thing, only to find out the generous act was not well-received.

Yeah, it’s weird.

So let’s take a look!

AITA for not telling my neighbor I had started a college fund for his kid?

I (36F) bought a rural property in 2016.

This property has a very large yard and a long driveway. I also travel a fair bit for work.

I was looking for a service to handle shoveling my driveway in the winter, and handle mowing my lawn in the spring, summer, and fall. (mostly because I’m gone a lot, but also because I just don’t want to deal with it)

The author found an enterprising young man willing to exchange manual labor to earn some money to save up for college.

I was talking to my neighbor (‘R’) who said his son ‘A’ (14M) was a hard worker and wanted to make some extra cash, as he was saving for college.

So A and I came to an agreement. Every weekend he would mow my front and back lawn and I would pay him $40.

In the winter, whenever it snowed, he would come by and plow my driveway. (Firm $40 a week whether or not it snowed.) He would just drive on over with his tractor and handle it.

It worked very well for four years.

A perfect arrangement. And the author got extra help when she needed it, too.

This kid was a godsend.

I foster dogs and if I have to go out of town unexpectedly, he would come over and feed them and play with them and love on them and just have a grand old time. (And he would be compensated accordingly for the extra work.)

All in all, I probably paid him 3-4,000 dollars a year for the work.

I made good friends with his folks. I get invited to all the family parties.

His older sister had a baby and I went to the shower.

They had a great relationship, and it became as much family as neighbors.

So it is obvious I have a soft spot for this kid.

Knowing that he was working so hard to try to afford to go to school, every time I paid him I would also set aside the same amount and I put it into an envelope.

She went above and beyond to help this young man be able to get to college.

I was invited to a socially distant graduation party earlier this month. He graduated from high school, and he is going away to a state school about 2 hours from us next month.

I took that envelope full of cash to the bank and I got a check which totaled out a little more than $12,000.

I included this check in the card I got him for graduation and I thanked him very much for helping me all these years and wished him well has he moved on with his life.

A generous gift that it would turn out was even more meaningful in light of recent events.

He was extremely thankful because his mom has been laid off and they were worried about how they were going to pay for school and they were trying not to let him go into debt.

Now, the issue.

I was worried that his parents would think of this as charity because his mom had been laid off.

But it wasn’t like she had just recently decided to do this, it had been in the works for four years.

This plan had been years in the making and I hadn’t mentioned it to them because I didn’t want them to count on it if for whatever reason I wasn’t in the financial position to offer it when the time came.

R called me extremely upset that I hadn’t told them about the fund prior for two reasons.

1) It overshadowed their gift to him and 2) they had spent so long worrying about how they were going to pay this, and if they had known about what I was doing it would have saved them a lot of stress and problems.

AITA?

A tricky situation where you can see both sides of the coin, I am sure. Let’s see what the folks on Reddit have to say.

Top comment says the author is not only great for helping the kid financially, but being a mentor in his life.

Another says it can be hard for people to accept generosity when they are down on their luck.

And it’s fine that the author didn’t tell them, just in case something had come up and caused her to rescind the gift before it was given.

Many folks empathized with the neighbors, and wonder if maybe the presentation could have been handled differently.

It sounds like the neighbors have been under a lot of stress, says this comment, but they’ll likely come around.

It’s likely a case of hurt feelings, and though the author didn’t do anything wrong, maybe there was a better way to handle the situation.

No good deed goes unpunished!

If you liked that post, check out this story about a guy who was forced to sleep on the couch at his wife’s family’s house, so he went to a hotel instead.