Sorry for the foul language, but hey, when things are fucked, there isn’t a better way to describe the situation than the appropriate terminology.
The saddest of all is that THEY SHOULDN’T BE FUCKED. At first, I felt super guilty for letting my dad convince me that he had $50,000 set aside for my wedding to spend without, I don’t know, asking to see all of his bank statements before signing the contract for my venue and vendors. Ok, I still feel super ridiculously guilty about this. I feel guilty for never saying thank you in the right way for this generous gift.
BUT – it turns out, the $50,000 wedding was just one financial mistake in a list of what may be hundreds. Even if I were to repay my mother back every penny, she’d still be in quite the pickle. And I’m willing to repay every penny (my father would never let me do that, but he’s not here anymore, so there’s that.)
I’ve run the numbers. I put them in front of her face. I try to share how each year, not counting the tax debts and family loan she’s overspending her income $40,000-$50,000. Despite her $50/$60k or so after tax income with her SS and Pension, she’s still draining her IRA. She keeps saying she’ll take money out of the IRA. I keep telling her the IRA won’t last forever or anywhere near it.
The house has to go. I really, really, really don’t want it to go. I know it’s just a house. It’s just a stupid piece of property with a dumb room that I lived in for my first 17 years of life. It’s just a dumb piece of wood that has so many memories good and bad all jumbled up in it that I see maybe twice a year if I manage to make it out to the east coast that often and with it I can escape back to childhood and feel like there’s some sense of stability in the crazy fucked up world, but that’s not enough reason to keep a house that’s costing my mother $40,000+ a year to maintain and that isn’t even counting big fixes like… needing a new oven (it hasn’t worked in years now) or a roof or carpeting or anything else.
But I tell her over and over again that the house needs to go, and now that I’ve run the numbers, sooner than later. I tell her I’d love if there was a way to keep it, but there isn’t, and the best thing to do financially is to sell it ASAP. That means starting work on getting it ready for sale NOW. But she’s down in Florida in her winter condo, swimming for a few months. I’ll give her this winter — her abusive husband just died and left her with a bunch of unexpected debts and she needs to just get away and have some time to relax and not think about it. But then she’ll say in summer it’s too nice out and she has to go to the pool and she doesn’t have time to clean. My sister, who lives in the house for free, btw, works a minimum wage job and always says she is too tired to help with anything (her job does require her to be on her feet all day) but she lives there for free and really is no help… physically or financially….
I wish there was some way to have reasoned with my father about his spending… but he’d just blame my mother for HER spending. Well, they both spent too much. I understood and empathized with him wanting to spend his retirement income before he passed away. But he didn’t need to buy a zillion worthless paintings and sculptures at local art fairs (that now represent a rather large collection which has to be sold or donated or trashed) or all the worthless “collectables” and my mom didn’t have to spend so much on shopping and they both probably should have moved to a smaller property a long time ago (vs buying a second home which was cheap to buy but expensive to own in Florida) and…
I just feel absolutely sick because no matter how many different ways I spin the numbers they don’t work unless she sells the home. The whole tax situation is a trainwreck as well, as we’re now awaiting to find out what penalties will be assessed on some very late taxes that he refused to let my mother file on time and lied to her about having the correct amounts paid off (maybe he thought he did, I think he lost his mind in these last few years.)
You know, even at the end, my mom had to rush around to find a cemetery plot and paid top dollar because my father couldn’t handle thinking about these things and kept putting it off, despite being diagnosed with a terminal illness 13 years ago and told he had 2 years to live. Even after all that. So my mother ended up spending god knows what on the cemetery plots for both of them and funeral home expenses and all that, plus a brunch at a decent restaurant afterwards and poof there goes the money that my father said was saved for my sister’s wedding! Oh, and there was no liquid assets to speak of so my mother had to put it all on her credit card. My uncle did offer a $30k loan after we asked him for help to pay off the bills but that’s coming due next year as well and I’m sure he wants his money back and I unofficially said I’d be on the hook for it if she couldn’t pay or some reason. They have a legal agreement signed so he gets proceeds from the house when it’s sold. All that, just to pay for a funeral my father couldn’t properly plan for because he wanted to be immortal. I wanted him to be immortal to, but clearly we cannot have what we want.
And I feel guilty about moving away but I also know if I was there every second of every day these last 10 years it would be no different as my father only complained about my mother’s overspending but never ever would look at the bigger picture. I understand that being terminally ill was horrific and he couldn’t admit it to anyone so instead he just bought things as they made him feel like he would live forever, I guess, but those things are just things and I wish there was a way to bring him back and somehow give him happiness without having to just spend all this money on so much stuff that now has to be sold just to sell the house…
Even with the house sold, my mother will still be overspending, but I think she’ll be ok… if she were to sell the house immediately, which she won’t do. She says she needs years to clean it out. The reality is that she needs help to clean it out. A lot of help. Emotional and physical help. It will be very hard and stressful. It will be very hard for me as well. I certainly will struggle to part with my childhood furniture, which I thought one day might be used for my own children (especially if I had a girl), but it probably doesn’t make sense to ship it across the country, esp given right now I live in a one bedroom apartment with no room for it.
I wish I had a zillion dollars and could just throw money at this problem and be done with it. So. I have some liquid assets right now and I’m tempted to do just that. I mean, my parents paid for my college education AND my wedding so it wouldn’t be the strangest thing to pay my mom back now and help her out financially. But I also have a child and need to support my own family as I’m the breadwinner and I have serious mental illnesses and I can’t maintain my jobs for long enough and I still can’t afford a house.
I’m really struggling and I’m not sure what to do. I can just let her run out of money in a few years and go into debt, but then what? Do I just say “I told you so?” A few years ago I set her up with a Mint account and tried to teach her how to budget and it went nowhere. I think she’s starting to get why she needs to budget but she refuses to, so what do I do? She can’t spend $700 a month on food (I get how she can, I’ve done it before, but she can’t) and she especially can’t if she’s keeping the family home with its $700/mo variable home equity payments that will pop up to $1700/mo in 2020 and also whatever this tax payment plan of ~$1000/mo will be for 72 months…
Then these tax lawyers and enrolled agents want $3k-$4k to help her reduce her penalties for taxes and I’m sitting here thinking maybe we should just try to do this ourselves because she doesn’t have $3k-$4k to pay for help (if we can do it ourselves) and I’m just sick of feeling like I have to protect her from vultures who prey on the weak but also don’t want to be stubborn like my father and refuse help when it’s needed.
I could give her $100,000 but it wouldn’t solve anything, it would just delay the inevitable. I’d rather save the $100,000 for when she’s older if she really needs the support, vs now when she’d just spend it on things she doesn’t “need” though she’d say she does.
So that’s the state of that.
