Georgia family still downsizing after $20,000 gift

Gainesville — Brittiny Peters can only shake her head at what’s happened since she and her husband, Gregg, decided to put most of their possessions up for sale on eBay to cover mounting medical bills for two of their children.

“It says a lot [about] the materialistic society we live in that a family selling everything they own would make national news,” Brittiny Peters said.

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Paul Donsky/pdonsky@ajc.com

The Rev. Tom Smiley of Lakewood Baptist Church in Gainesville speaks outside the Gainesville home of Brittiny and Gregg Peters on Sunday.

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The attention escalated when a Texas couple on Friday bid $20,000, but only on the condition that the Peters family keep their stuff.

Now people are wondering: What will the Peters family do?

In an interview on Sunday from her Gainesville home, Brittiny Peters said she and Gregg still plan to pare down their lifestyle. They’ll donate many of their worldly possession to a charity or to other needy families, she said.

The Peters family has already received the $20,000 from the Texas donors, Donnia and Keith Blair of Fort Worth. The Peters family will meet in the next day or two with their minister to decide the best way to disperse their belongings.

Why not sell it?

“We already feel like we did sell it,” she said as her two sons jumped in an empty inflatable pool set up inside the family’s tidy suburban house. “It’d be kind of dishonest to turn around and sell it again.”

The Peters family has been bombarded with interview requests as news spread of their eBay strategy.

In the span of a few months last year, their 2-year-old son, Noah, was diagnosed with autism and other medical problems and their 7-year-old daughter, Ayla, was diagnosed with a rare disorder, Still’s Disease, a form of arthritis. The couple also has a 1-year-old son, Eli.

Peters said she and her husband have already taken steps to downsize their lives by paring down their cable and telephone packages and trading in a 2004 Honda Accord for a 1995 model, all to meet new medical expenses reaching $2,000 a month.

The couple’s middle class home has children’s toys strewn about a downstairs playroom, a kitchen with gleaming stainless steel appliances and a family room with a 62-inch screen TV. Peters said they never considered moving to another house, saying it would be difficult to sell now that it’s dropped in value.

Her children are covered by Medicaid, she said, but the government program does not cover all expenses. The couple’s income has taken a hit lately because Gregg, a private tennis instructor, missed a lot of work to be with his sick children.

The two stress that they never planed on giving away everything, just nonessentials. They plan on keeping their children’s toys as well as appliances and mattresses.

They listed approximately $40,000 worth of items on eBay, the popular online auction, from DVDs and leather coats, to the king-sized bed where the family had Saturday morning pillow fights, according to a Web site set up by well-wishers trying to help the couple.

They also intended to sell things such as stereos, their TV, a laptop computer, decorative furniture and their 2000 Chevrolet Tahoe.

Now, Brittiny Peters said, they will give away those things. The Tahoe, she said, will go to a program that helps drug-addicted men.

“We’re going to do as much as we can to help as many people as we can,” she said.

— The Associated Press contributed to this report.