Advice | Ask Annie COLUMNIST
Dear Annie: Since 2013, my mother has inherited $475,000, which she has cast into a bonfire of casino losses, church donations, failed business investments and undisclosed other ventures. My late father and I advised her to pay off the home mortgage, and we were strongly rebuffed.
Fast-forward to 2019, at 82 she is penniless; she has a mortgage far in excess of the home value. Additionally, she has run up over $25,000 in credit card debt. (I paid for bankruptcy attornies, but she failed to use them.) She has absolutely nothing to show for it — no new appliances, car, etc. She lives in a small town in a low-cost-of-living state, has an income of $2,050 a month from Social Security and her pension, and about $850 left over after all her expenses. I paid off two foreclosure notices within five months until I found out that she has a larger monthly surplus than I do.
I told her that I had my own expenses and could no longer pay her debts. Her response was “I thought you loved me” followed by “I thought you were doing so well and were making all this money.” She’s always been stubborn, childlike and secretive with her money, so apart from several years of almost daily casino visits, I don’t know what she did with it.
Now my finances have been decimated, and I have had to pull from my retirement accounts. Since she has squandered a life-sustaining inheritance with nothing to show for it, has ample positive monthly cash flow and a bankruptcy attorney on retainer in case she decides to discharge the credit card debt, do I have any further obligation to her? We have not spoken in several months, since I stopped paying her mortgage. Although sad, I’m resolved to the situation. But I wonder if I’m missing something, because I can’t seem to find anyone else with financially irresponsible parents. She won’t tell me what she spent her money on, nor did she take my advice to pay off her mortgage, so colleagues ask why this is my problem.
I have two other siblings, but I’m the one with a bit of discretionary cash, so I’m always the one pulled into situations that require a cash outlay. — Frustrated
Dear Frustrated: You have no financial obligation whatsoever to your mother — and you never did, truth be told. Your heart was in the right place in trying to help her, but to continue paying her mortgage would be a huge mistake. To gain the strength to maintain the boundaries you’ve set, you might draw support from a group such as Families Anonymous (https://www.familiesanonymous.org/) or Gam-Anon (https://www.gam-anon.org), where you’ll find you’re not alone. Therapy might also offer an eye-opening perspective.
Dear Annie: I have worked in the senior living industry for the past 20 years, and I am astounded by the number of people who bring children to visit their elderly family members and then allow the children to run around the building unsupervised. We have experienced unsupervised children banging on our piano, messing up the puzzle that our residents have been diligently putting together, playing with the ice machine and running in the hallways. Now that I am as old as many of our residents myself and am experiencing balance issues, I understand how frightening and dangerous it is for seniors to have children running in a building. Please remind parents that a community full of elderly people is not the place for kids to have a free-for-all. — Now I’m Old, Too
Dear Now: You raise some excellent points. It’s lovely for children to visit older family members in senior living communities, but safety and courtesy are a must.
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