Taking control of a family member's finance

bargainbetty

I have to say, I agree with the posters who think your parents need to step back first. Perhaps you could talk to them before you intervene with your sister, and agree that all three of you will sit down with her and help her solve the problems by helping her to recude her spending, budgeting etc, but none of you will give her any more money. Your parents will have to stick to this.

If she continues this way, she will go bankrupt. Heartbreakingly, if your parents do not step back, she may take them with her. My mother would walk through fire for me, but I know that if she lent me money to clear my debts and I ran them all up again through sheer irresponsibility, she would tell me to s*d off if I asked for more. She would help me make the calls and do the numbers, but not another penny would come my way until she saw I was taking responsibility for my own life.

The parallel with addiction mentioned earlier was valid - you cannot help someone until they are ready to help themselves. However, you can make the decision to stop enabling them.

Good luck x

dancingfairy

I think you really need to sit down with your parents and stop them helping her out and also sit down with your sister and really lay it on the line - like has been said - she risks being made bankrupt and also bankrupting them and the fact that they have worked hard all their life and she wants to just spend their pension and to get her to think how selfish and irresponsible it is.
I would however make it clear that you will help out in any way you can by going through her finances with her, going to the CAB with her etc but that you will not lend her any money.
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mrk76

Guys,

Firstly, thanks for taking the time to reply. You've all roughly drawn the same conclusions - and rightly so because they're the obvious, common sense ones!

Of course bailing her out / babying her / mollycoddling / trying to do everything for her isn't going to teach her the valuable lesson she has so badly needed for the past 10 years - I'm painfully aware of this.

I can't stop my parents from bailing her out - if she turns up, distraught, in absolute dire straits, they will not turn their back on her. It's easy to cite this as foolish, short-sighted, detrimental etc from a distance (which it is) - but there is another dimension to this: their blinding love for their daughter!

So hopefully that takes my parents out of the equation as a 'manageable element'. I can delay their actions - but when it comes to the crunch, they WILL step in.

My aim was: to introduce a situation where she had to adapt to living on set budget (the teaching a lesson part), and her finances we're completely transparent (to myself and another family member), all the time working on the assumption that she has little self-control (treat this problem as an addiction), and simply saying 'sink or swim' will almost certainly result in a 'sink'.

What I'm aiming to do is a slightly more managed teaching of responsibility (I think!). Ultimately I will have to leave her too it at some point - but I'd like to have given some remedial action a damn good try before I give up!

I hope this clarifies things.

Thanks for all your input so far.

annie-c

I do hope that your sister is able to find a way out of her problems.

I think you are right when you say that you cannot stop your parents bailing her out.

At the same time, I don't think there is anything you can do either to 'manage' the situation or 'teach' her a lesson unless she wants to learn for herself.

Have you mentioned this site to her to have a look at for herself?