Helping an older lady

colsten

If you know she won't listen to you, why do you want to get involved? Have you given her any reason to think she should be turning you for help? If you have, you should do the honourable thing and offer your opinions. If you have not, keep telling her that you are not very good with all this financial stuff and try to steer her in the direction of an IFA. Assure her that neither your wife nor yourself are in any way interested in inheriting anything from her, and that all her assets are for her to use for her own benefit.

Voyager2002

I think it is against the law to give financial advice unless you are an IFA or similar. So you have a good excuse for refusing to get involved.

J._Jones

Thanks to all for their generous help. Everyone deserves a response, so, in reverse order:

Voyager2002: strictly that would be if I were representing myself to my mother-in-law as a professional financial advisor for gain, in which case I'd need the relevant certifications specified by the regulator. The law doesn't (yet!) preclude family and friends giving free guidance on money matters to one another. But it's a nice idea: I may use this as a get-out as she won't know anything about the legal side.

colsten: no, I've not given her any reason to think I'm an expert. But as I'm clearly solvent, have two degrees and am married to her child that makes me the obvious recourse for financial advice in the mind of someone who is hostile to discussing "private" issues with a professional advisor.

kidmugsy: thanks. Several very good ideas there but you are gravely under-estimating the degree of difficulty involved in persuading this 62-year-old to put off taking a pension to which she is entitled next year and in getting her to understand what an ISA or a fund wrapper or a top-up are! You only need to know that she has lived in or near Liverpool all her life and yet remains convinced that it is possible to see the Manchester Ship Canal running through the city centre, and that she is in serious difficulty with her (long-suffering) employers for aggressively refusing to embrace the IT which her work has been using for a decade and more, to understand how hard it is to get this particular lady up to speed on even the most basic matters.

Silian: the BTL (not strictly tbe case: it was inherited not bought and was unmortgaged) made sense in circumstances where she had suddenly acquired a highly lettable house in a nice area, didn't need or want to live there and was seriously talking about selling it aged 53 and blowing the capital year by year on fast cars and fancy holidays until she retired whereupon, as she was telling us with great gusto at the time, she'd apparently throw herself on the mercies of the council. The use of an extremely competent agent made the running of it straightforward and it also gave a woman on a £13,000 salary a good extra £7,000 annually, but the mere knowledge of ownership and being responsible for a property turned out to be beyond her and, having sacked the agent and failed to find a replacement tenant herself, the property has now been vacant, costing her money rather than earning it, for some time. In short, we'd yet again under-estimated her capacity for making self-harming decisions. And trust me: she definitely isn't wise to the 4% rule. The target of £6,000 is purely based on a plausible estimate of what it will cost her to rent the kind of place to which she now aspires (the bombast about pleading poverty to acquire a council flat having faded somewhat now that she has had a closer look at what that would actually mean in Birkenhead).

sparkiemalarkie: too true, but she's my wife's mother and *exceptionally* forceful so it's not easy to dodge this particular bullet.

jimjames: again, past experience indicates that explaining to her about investment trusts and corporate bond funds will be impossible. See my reply to kidmugsy above.

xylophone: good idea. In fact my wife has already got her to check her pension entitlements.

mvarier: you may well be right. The thought had occurred to me already!

JohnRo: indeed so.

ChiefGrasscutter: if only it were possible.

Gadfium: See my reply to sparkiemalarkie.

xylophone

she is in serious difficulty with her (long-suffering) employers for aggressively refusing to embrace the IT which her work has been using for a decade

Perhaps the employer will make her redundant - giving the world for peace and considering it well lost......;) (Apologies to John Dryden)...

Mind you, she'd then be asking you how to invest the redundancy money.....:rotfl:

Had you considered emigrating?

J._Jones

We have indeed, in all seriousness, considered emigrating, which we may yet do when I stop work. After all, the mother-in-law has always regarded even the 35-mile trip to Manchester as impossibly intrepid and doesn't own a passport. (My wife once got her the application form and tried to talk her through it but to no avail: she couldn't understand the process and quickly reverted to the combination of ranting frustration and irrational aggression for which she's notorious.)

You are dead right about the employer, which we suspect, though very patient with her over the years, may now be concluding that an obstructive and truculent 62-year-old Luddite is precisely the sort of human resources asset they can probably do without.

Reaper

I wouldn't normally suggest investing in a single fund but it might make it simpler for her.

If so how about the Vanguard Life Stragegy. You can read up on it here in the amusingly titled:
Vanguard LifeStrategy funds turn passive investing catatonic

All she has to do is choose what proportion to invest in equities, buy the thing then leave it.

Of course buying it raises another slight issue as the internet is the cheapest and easiest and cheapest place to buy it and manage it, but you can still find places that allow you to operate by post or phone.

She could take a a regular £6000 each year regardless of investment performance on the assumption on average it ought to cover it (she ought to check from time to time that it is of course).

atush

mvarrier wrote: »

Easy- she wants six thousand a year. That means with 150k she's allowed to live another 25 years by stuffing it under a mattress. Maybe 27 years in a savings account. If she wants to live longer, then she'll have to listen and compromise but it's no skin off your nose.

To get 6% off 150K, she would either have to spend capital, or invest the money to return 4%. This would mean not plain vanilla savings accounts.

She is seemingly, at the very least, being unreasonable. At the worst, her plan (and her financial intelligence) spells complete and utter financial disaster.

I would either steer clear, or point out to her (go ahead and show her this thread how unreasonable she is being.

She will be at the mercy of rising rents. She will earn less than 4% (she'll be lucky to see 2%).

She needs to educate herself, use the internet and an IFA. I would not agree to help her apart from outlining how wrong she is. Then at least when you are proved right, she cannot blame you.

xylophone

(go ahead and show her this thread how unreasonable she is being.

Crumbs! Would you?:eek: There'd be blood for breakfast?

atush

J._Jones wrote: »

We have indeed, in all seriousness, considered emigrating, which we may yet do when I stop work. After all, the mother-in-law has always regarded even the 35-mile trip to Manchester as impossibly intrepid and doesn't own a passport. (My wife once got her the application form and tried to talk her through it but to no avail: she couldn't understand the process and quickly reverted to the combination of ranting frustration and irrational aggression for which she's notorious.)

You are dead right about the employer, which we suspect, though very patient with her over the years, may now be concluding that an obstructive and truculent 62-year-old Luddite is precisely the sort of human resources asset they can probably do without.

In your case, I think emigration could be wise. Although i'd keep a flat or similar to come back to in case it doesn't work out (dont tell the MIL though, as she will want to move into it once she cannot afford rising rents).

This part "to the combination of ranting frustration and irrational aggression for which she's notorious" smacks of mental health issues, how does she feel about doctors?

And how did her daughter come out normal

margaretclare

She sounds the sort of person who gives older people a bad name. I'm reminded of the kind of thing posted by paulfoel re his Dad in Wales.

DIY as a landlord is notoriously difficult. See 'Can't pay, we'll take it away' on Channel 5 TV. She should have stuck with the letting agent.

I can't suggest anything, I'm afraid! It's nigh on impossible to help someone with this kind of living-in-the-past mentality. The past is another country. They do things differently there.