My dad is 78 years old, and my mom turns 69 this year. My dad plans to work for another year because he “can’t afford to retire”. Here is their financial overview:
Assets
- 401(k) and IRA savings totaling just under $2 million.
- Total income of roughly $109k according to last year’s IRS filing (including mandatory Social Security disbursements, despite not yet being retired, due to my dad’s age) in a low cost-of-living area. Excellent health insurance through my dad’s job.
- Outright ownership our single-family home. No mortgages!
- Full-ownership of two SUVs, each purchased new less than ten years ago. No auto loans!
- ~Fifty acres of rural real-estate, including a mid-sized tractor and a giant metal barn/shed that is almost twice the size of our house, and has a loft. No mortgages on the property.
- A sailboat.
- ~$20k sitting in their checking account right now
- ~$400k of (non-retirement) stock investments ALL IN ONE SINGLE GOLD MINING COMPANY!
Liabilities
- ~$70k of credit card debt at ~30% APR (!?), which I just recently this week convinced my mom to pay off, after a year of begging and pleading.
- ~$150k in student loans at ~7% APR in my mom’s name which she took out on behalf of the educations for me and my two siblings (I also would have paid these off years ago if I had any say).
What’s Wrong?
They choose to live in poverty (of sorts), to forgo basic necessities, and to let their home—which they’ve lived in for nearly forty years—rot in disrepair.
- About half of the house’s exterior paint has flaked off completely. The rest is “boiling” off.
- Our roof leaks every time it rains because we have needed new shingles for maybe twenty years (IDK). The shingles are boiling and warped, just like the paint.
- ~40% of the walls in the house are bare, unpainted drywall from half-finished renovations my dad started thirty years ago.
- ~20% of the walls have drywall on only one side. The other side is studs with bare wires running through them.
- ~30% of the flooring is literally the concrete foundation, also from half-finished renovations my dad started thirty years ago.
- One window in one of the two guest bedrooms has been half-made of duck tape for the past twenty-five years, because it was broken and never replaced.
- There are several inch-wide gaps in the hallway ceiling surrounding the drop-down ladder to the attic through which 130F air pours directly into the central AC intake.
- Our one and only working shower broke last year—the water would only trickle out. Instead of calling a plumber, my dad just suffered with for nearly a month, because it was no biggie—it just took twenty times as long to take a shower is all.
- I thought that the one nice thing we had in our home was a proper stovetope range hood that blows the air outside instead of recirculating it into the house. Yesterday I found out that ours has been blowing the greasy hot air into our attic (where they store belongings) for the past twenty years, because my dad hasn’t yet finished its duct work.
Our energy bills are huge. Did I mention we live in swamp-ass Texas and it gets 110F for much of the summer? In the past forty years they haven’t invested a dime in energy efficiency improvements. It gets worse.
About ten years ago, our central air conditioner (which was probably installed in 1975 and came with the house when they bought it) broke down.
Instead of shelling out the cash for a new central unit, they bought one of those horribly inefficient portable ones that attaches to the window via a long hose. This brought the indoor living room temperatures down to ~89F in the summer. My dad would sit on the couch in his Walter White tidey-whitey underpants, sweating, two fans blowing on him, complaining constantly about the summer heat. They used shitty window units in the bedrooms. When the shitty portable unit in the living room died after just two years, they replaced it with a slightly less shitty portable unit from another company.
We finally got a new proper central air conditioner to go with our existing central air infrastructure (!) three months ago, after much pleading, protesting, and shaming by me.
A Vignette
Last night, I interrupted my parents nightly Netflix binge to talk to Dad about the roof. I mentioned how it’s a no-brainer which pays for itself by adding value to the home (their financial asset!), and that every day we go without a new one, more damage accumulates—which will cost even more to repair.
His reply has been echoing in my head ever since…
“A new roof could cost almost $10,000. Where am I going to get that kind of money?”
My dad refuses to hire contractors, because there are none in existence that he “trusts” to do it right. That’s why the paint is peeling. Because before painting the house, he plans to REBUILD the sides of the house with lumber and his own two hands. Because you don’t want to paint a shitty house, right? His plan is to wait until he retires, and then just do everything.
Similarly, I talked to my mom days ago about how how a couple professional HVAC renovations totaling about one thousand dollars could drastically improve the airflow, efficiency, comfort, and noise level of our home.
You know what she said?
“Oh, no. I don’t want to invest that much money into the house. We’re not going to live here forever.”
They do not communicate AT ALL. They are both living in the future in separate fantasy worlds.
My entire life I grew up thinking we were destitute, because *gestures around*, but mainly because my dad does nothing but complain about money and how everybody else is a rich doctor. My parents have been extremely cryptic and weird about finances for my entire life. My dad refused to tell HIS OWN WIFE his income for DECADES. The ONLY thing I knew about their financial situation until a few months ago (I’m 37) is that they had tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. This has caused me and my siblings incalculable anxiety and stress. I was in bed with depression for years, thinking we were going to be thrown onto the streets at any moment. My mom could only tell me “not to worry about it”. Yeah, that helps.
Any mention of finances will launch my dad into the same fucking speech about how his income is “going to go down to almost half” when he retires—he basically guilts you for bringing up the subject, in a condescending tone. He is an extremely miserable, dour, joyless man who emits an energy field which doubles the cortisol levels of everyone in a ten meter radius. He is incapable of warmth and affection. He is short-tempered and belittles my mom. My mom puts up with all of it because she’s an evangelical and Jesus told her that he will one day make my dad a Christian and a good person, basically. She told me that circa 1997.
I asked my mom why she has all of that money on the “roulette table” (extremely un-diversified, volatile investments). I asked her what in this world she wanted the money for… She said she wanted new underwear and a new couch. That’s it. Oh, and she wants her family to be happy. Finally, she revealed the true reason: Jesus tells her when to buy and sell the gold company stock, and she will one day make SO much money on the stock market that my dad will have no choice but to see that God is real, and accept Jesus Christ into his heart as his Lord and personal savior (and make their life and marriage perfect, I guess). She can’t imagine or articulate any big-ticket item that she actually desires, she just wants to be “rich”. She doesn’t want to spend the money she has RIGHT NOW to improve the lives of her family RIGHT NOW.
I am still unpacking the C-PTSD I accumulated from a childhood of extreme emotional neglect. BOTH of my siblings have been involuntarily hospitalized for schizophrenia that manifested in the past three years. During our childhood, my mom spent all day in bed asleep with depression, and my dad didn’t know I existed, even though I was right in front of him the whole time. Neither of them have any social skills whatsoever. We ate family dinners at the table together in complete silence for eighteen years. I didn’t even know that wasn’t normal.
fam this is dire
and i talk to new trans people every day over their shit conditions
If I discovered my parents were sitting on millions of dollars after decades of penny-pinching and complaining about finances, I think I might just die. So much of what you described sounds like my parents, and I also have very little perspective on how much they actually have on hand. How did you find out they had all this money kicking around?!My mom finally leveled with me and showed me her Merrill Lynch account about a year ago to ease my depression and make me feel okay about buying things for myself like clothing. My financial anxiety was immediately wiped away and replaced with confusion and anger. Overall, it was a great improvement though (that’s how much money weighs on people under capitalism). I’m trying to process the anger in a healthy way and repair the family. My parents are fucked up and have difficulties expressing their affection for me, but they would both die for me in a heartbeat. I’d be living on the streets without them, and I know of parents who would be letting that happen instead. My mom has also been very kind in letting me buy a few treats for myself over the past year, which is something I can do with a healthy conscious now that I have the full picture of their financial situation. It’s been therapeutic towards the trauma of past penny-pinching.
If you have a “good” (subjective, I know) relationship with your parents… maybe just ask? “Hey, Dad. How are your retirement finances? I want to know how you’re set up for the future.” Or whatever
My dad is normally not the type to discuss the details of his finances (which is also my mom’s finances, he just handles all that stuff), but he happily breaks open the spreadsheets and plans he has if I ask. It’s something important to him obviously but also he knows it matters to the family too. One day they will die and it’s important for the main inheritors to have an idea what’s coming. Whether that’s zero or something substantial. Or if they have nothing setup, the family might have to start figuring out how to handle that situation too.
All that to say, a responsible parent with adult children shouldn’t have any issue getting down into the shit a little bit. Of course this all hinges on a lot of stuff. I know there are some people who would just tell their kids to fuck off and never respond otherwise. 🤷♂️
This is why they stopped putting lead in the gas folks.
We gotta add lead back to gas to counteract the micro plastics. What does plastic hate? Metal. Lead. Very heavy metals. That’s right. Drink from lead goblets. Inhale leaded gas fumes. Maybe even drink a little room temp mercury. Hey it can’t hurt. I bet it tastes delicious too. Liquid metal! In your mouth. We were meant to drink it. You’re enjoying yourself and healing your body.
They just like watching the number in their bank account go up
The joy and satisfaction an extra 10000 could give them far outweigh any material benefits of a new roof
Yeah this is it right here. They like looking at their net worth increase but only in terms of money or stocks. Maybe they think once it hits a certain threshold everything will be fine, or maybe they just want to rack up the score before they die.
Sounds like your dad is the “starts projects but never finishes them” type. And I get that finding a contractor that isn’t a scumbag is hard, been burned on that end before.
The part that doesn’t add up to me is that it seems like a selective cheapness. Your dad doesn’t want to spend the money to fix the roof because that might be $10k, yet has a sailboat, two SUVs, and I have to assume they didn’t get to $70k in credit card debt without buying some nice treats with that money. Which says to me the cheapness with the house is a rationalization crutch for their spending; if I’m cheap when it comes to home repairs, that counters out the toys for big boys.
Maybe try focusing less on the fiscal aspect and more their age. Like, your dad, statistically speaking, isn’t likely to live much more than another decade, which means he’d be leaving all those repairs and issues entirely on your mom’s shoulders. Make it more about thinking about her than resell values. And if you can, convince him to sell the stupid boat. As the saying goes, the two best days in a boat owner’s life are the day they buy a boat and the day they sell it.
Make it more about thinking about her than resell values.
Nothing in this makes me think he gives half a runny shit about his wife.
Still a good angle to try.
He talks frequently about how the retirement money is more for her than him. There’s a dissonant mixture of love and contempt. He was head-over-heels for her, but his anger issues pushed her away. She took up religion (subconsciously?) to spite him, because she was too submissive and traditional to leave him, and he hated nothing more than religion. He still sometimes snipes at her about “preachers”. I think it’s okay to hate televangelists as he does, but he should have long ago either accepted who she is, or left her.
I got my ADHD from him. But I got diagnosed and started coping ten years ago. He’s never had the benefit of that awareness. I’m trying to share my techniques.
The credit card debt is a result of a lack of communication and mutual decision making. My mom handles all of the finances, and she has been covering the costs of treats but also all the emergency expenses with the credit cards, because she doesn’t want her stock numbers to go down. If my dad had his way, he would probably have chosen to sell some stocks instead.
I’ve tried the age angle, and also the resell value angle. Too early to tell if it worked. People rarely turn around and say “yes, you’re correct” when it comes to deeply personal issues. You can only plant the seed and wait to let the gears turn on their own.
“Oh, no. I don’t want to invest that much money into the house. We’re not going to live here forever.”
i mean…it sounds to me like they are nearing retirement and, like most boomers, have decided ‘fuck it i’m not here for a long time jesus will sort me out’ like they do towards pollution, climate change, etc etc lol
It could be some kind of undiagnosed/unadressed mental illness, too. If your folks aren’t willing to see a professional about it, nothing you can do, but it may help you reframe their actions so that it causes you less grief.
It could very well be as “simple” as depression and past trauma. My sister mentioned schizoid personality disorder yesterday, and reading about it kind of sounds like my dad except for the “not getting angry” part.
I don’t mean to claim to know your issues or trauma, but in my case recognizing the signs of mental illness in my mother helped me move forward with dealing with my own childhood trauma. It doesn’t erase them, but at least it helped me see her actions as those of someone who isn’t well.
I hope this helps you be more at peace with your folks’ actions, even if materially it doesn’t change much.
I don’t know if it has a specific label, but “not well” is definitely a correct starting point
In my case it explained so much, and somewhat made the resentment I felt towards her and myself easier to get over. It’s not that she was a bad person or that I did something wrong, she’s just sick and didn’t really have the tools to deal with it.
I have enough experience with life to know that it leaves a lot of people fucked up through little or no fault of their own. I have sympathy, and see them as deeply flawed people trying their best. They are playing out the role of parents that was modeled to them in their own childhood. I’m trying to balance kindness towards them with vocalizing my trauma. It’s particularly hard with my mom, because it breaks her heart to hear about that stuff.
Hang in there, comrade
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schizoid personality disorder but you also get angry = american protestantism
Are they waiting for the rapture?
Just my mom.
Well, maybe my little brother too. He found Jesus a couple years ago.
As a fellow cPTSD “enjoyer”, trying to cultivate an empathetic understanding of my abusive mother based on her personality disorder has been both helpful and counterproductive for my own healing process. Be empathetic and understanding of the reasoning behind the behaviour, but also be cognisant of when you’re using intellectualisation methods to avoid actually engaging with your own painful feelings.
I think a lot of people are so alienated from homeownership now that the concept of endlessly deferred maintenance has started to become alien. It usually starts with like a couple of minor things you don’t have the energy or time to fix yourself. (The one weird drawer you have to smack, peeling paint on the siding, the squeaky baseboard heater) You just get used to it, and then it just keeps getting worse. Eventually you get to the point where the problems start causing other problems and you just don’t see it or notice it. Every year the HVAC bill goes up, and you get to the point where you aren’t even thinking about it as a problem. It’s just “normal.” A huge problem is the endless value growth of the housing market.
If you bought a beater car for $3000 in 2004 and never changed the oil but now it’s valued like a Ferrari, you’re just not going to think about putting twice what you paid for the whole car into buying a new alternator.
I’ve seen a shocking number of American boomers who could easily afford maintenance just let their house literally rot out from under them to the point where their homes were condemned and seized because they were an active danger to the entire neighborhood.
That’s a good point with the car analogy. A lot of times I feel like we should level this 1960s house and start all over, but spending that kind of money would give my dad a heart attack.
The cPTSD is something I’ve only recently begun to suspect about myself; I haven’t yet discussed it with my psychiatrist. It started when I googled “why do cute things make me cry” and the first result landed me on a related post on the cPTSD subreddit. Then I started recalling all the times that I became extremely, inexplicably emotional when watching tender family moments play out in animated TV shows.
For example: there is an episode of Rick and Morty that ends with Morty crying on his bed (or maybe he was just visibly upset—I don’t remember), because he had just broken up with his first girlfriend and was experiencing a painful new emotion for the first time. It was very sad—something that might even bring a reasonably well-adjusted viewer to tears if they were emotionally invested in the story and could identify with the characters. But that’s not what hit me.
Morty’s mom, Beth, hears him crying and walks into his room, up to his bed, sits next to him, embraces him (😮), strokes him (😱) and says “there, there. Mommy’s here… mommy’s here…” Morty sobs… but I start sobbing harder than a five-year-old kid who just watched a movie where the dog dies. WTF!? I was shocked. “OMG. Parents can do that!? That would have felt SO good,” I thought. I tried to think: What would my parents would have done thirty years ago in that scenario? I think they would both gawk in horror at me—IF they noticed my distress at all. Hugging me would not have even crossed their mind—I am dead serious. Speaking soothing words would also have been beyond their skill set.
Then the whole prolonged trauma thing made sense. It’s not a single event that made me cry myself to sleep one night and left me with trauma, it’s the accumulation of mini traumas with zero emotional guidance.
I tried as hard as I could to recall a hug from my parents. I think I hugged them at the airport or something a couple times… I think (as a formality). Phrases never uttered in my childhood household include:
- “How are you?”
- “How was your day?”
- “I love you.”
- “I’m proud of you.”
- “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
- “Are you okay?”
Sounds like my mother-in-law. Woman is sitting on at least a million in stock and inheritance money but is a drunk shut-in who lives like an animal in her piece of shit house. She refuses to buy or do anything that would improve her life including significant medical procedures.
She broke her hip a few years ago and basically sat in her chair and used a trash bin bucket as a bathroom for half a week because she didn’t want to spend money on hospital bills. The whole house was such a fucking wreck. Her toilet looked like some hellmouth as she clogged it some time in ancient days and just kept using it. Why? Because she didn’t want to hire a plumber.
Thanks for that disgusting imagery lol.
It’s hilarious boomers are like, “suddenly everyone is mentally ill! In my day we didn’t need therapists” or “all the vaccines are causing autism” when there are probably countless who live like this with undiagnosed issues.
Dear lord, I feel completely unqualified to give you any kind of advice so I’ll just say I’m sorry and I hope you manage to untangle this somehow, I thought my family was weird with money but this is a whole other level.
if it works, it works + why do stuff when you can do minimal stuff and no disturbance - is how this reads to me (maybe some non-inflation adjustment thinking as well, like my home was 10000 bucks, you nuts to buy roof for 10k?)
(also, some older folks don’t want to retire cause they have no idea what do with their lives)
So many people work their entire adult lives, retire, immediately die. That’s some depressing shit
I also would have paid these off years ago if I had any say
Don’t lmao
I’ve been so focused on removing the shackles of debt my whole adult life that I haven’t thought much about it. You’re right, what are they going to do to my parents if they don’t pay it? Ruin their credit rating? Don’t need that anymore. Pull their Social Security? I doubt it.
You need to start talking to lawyers about power of attorney. Seriously.
i’ve seen something like this. my parents are late 70s. one is a “blow all their money on nonsense and rack up credit card debt” and the other is a compulsive net worth hoarder. i have theories about how their individual relationships to money triggered the others’ compulsions, but i’m at the point of no longer investigating it. rather, just triaging as i can and trying not to take the evolving, totally avoidable disaster personally.
to me, the connection i felt most strongly about was their advanced age and complete lack of future planning or sense of proportion for what is possible given their state of physical and mental decline. my sibling and i began talking to them 10 years ago about developing a plan for their dotage, because we knew they had some savings, we “kids” were both just getting by, and eventually, we all wanted to be nearer to each other so we could look out for them as they lose capacity. to avoid what happened to their entire cohort: caught out by scam artists, ripped off and/or suddenly in dire straits, physically, and needing some kind of assisted living situation with nobody knowing where any assets are, no one with cognitive function having the capacity to take the necessary time off from work to set them up, etc etc. we wanted to be proactive about it and come up with a plan.
literally brushed off for a decade. they just wanted to play and play and play, trips around the world for exotic treats, basically racing to the brick wall of the problem, never recognizing the looming limitations. wanting to spend their last remaining good years doing their own thing and waiting until they couldn’t do basic self-care anymore or think straight to come to the table and talk about a plan. now they’re fucked, they think it might be time to do something, but can’t contribute any mental or physical capacity to it, but still think they should be in charge while the “kids” (in the middle 40s) should just do whatever bizarre command pops into their mind at a given moment. like we don’t have jobs and responsibilities already.
i am some combination of sad and mad about it, because my sibling and i basically begged them year after year to help us plan a strategy to take care of them so that this situation now unfolding wouldn’t happen. and they rebuffed us over and over, because they seemed to believe they would be at 100% mental and physical capacity until their 90s or something.
i tried a few years ago to explain to my mom that i had a whole plan for my life that involved me purposely setting up my day to day life to be completely low key with daily walks, lots of time and effort spent on low impact personal maintenance, and generally easy living by 55, because i wasn’t going to crash into old age by surprise. she, at the age of like 75 at the time was like, “wow, really? i still don’t think about any of that.” meanwhile, i was having to drive her somewhere right then and support her mobility at every step.
it’s like a compulsive avoidance of recognizing one’s own decline and mortality, leading to an absolute lack of personal integrity. it’s like being around toddlers that have control of all the assets, won’t communicate anything, but may just dart into traffic at any moment… or decide that bathing is optional. it absolutely blows, but there’s a limit to how much responsibility i’m going to take for it, because we were proactive and they said constantly rejected the idea. so now they get the same reactive solutions every other zero plan boomer gets from their kids.
it’s like a compulsive avoidance of recognizing one’s own decline and mortality, leading to an absolute lack of personal integrity.
Please tell me they at least have a will.
supposedly, but who knows and how dare i make inquiries, is all i care about money? etc etc.
i decided to continue on as if all of it would vanish like a fart in the wind years ago, since that seems to be the most common phenomenon with boomer wealth. between the industries that have sprung up around preventing intergenerational wealth transfers via specific elder abuse/exploitation and the perennially evolving financial / identity theft scams with constant robo calls that the government never actually does anything about, it seems like capital formations are rapidly clawing back all that unclaimed surplus value they allowed the boomers to accrue during the cold war.
probably would have had a chance at building something a decade ago, some kind of subsistence situation for future generations to return to as a means to resist exploitation, but that would have meant the retired boomers had to spend a month of every year of their retirement being a productive, communicative part of the family team instead of spending every waking moment dancing like a child at play in the garden of earthly delights.
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