AITA for not wanting DH to give MIL 4K to clear a debt
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Anonymous
They aren’t united, and DH has just as much a say as she does. What about his marital happiness? |
Anonymous
No, their savings are okay. Not great. Not good enough to throw thousands of dollars at MIL which she will likely waste on her MLM and then come back asking for more. It's hard to know without knowing the ages of the kids and their average monthly savings rate. But they need to be careful. They cannot afford their own goals plus supporting MIL for the next 25 years. |
Anonymous
How happy will they be when MIL moves in because she's bankrupt? DH is being delusional about his own happiness. |
Anonymous
I don’t see signs of this. She isn’t pulling from her retirement, she is paying off the loan without missing payments, it was a needed renovation not a splurge, and she is close to a fully paid off house which she can downsize from. This doesn’t strike me as an out of control spender. |
Anonymous
We don't know if she's an out of control spender-- OP's DH didn't even know about the HELOC. But we do know that she doesn't understand money and makes bad decisions, and she's not getting any younger. This isn't about the spending. And she is NOT paying off the loan, she is merely paying the interest i.e. making zero progress on the loan, and it has a variable rate so her payment could increase at any time. There is a lot we don't know here. She is not that close to a fully paid off house, she's got a variable rate HELOC which OP's DH wants to bail her out of, but we don't know the precise amount but probably around like $40K. We don't know what other debts she has-- credit card, MLM, medical, who knows. We don't know her Social Security income, we don't know how much SIL plans to pay her for babysitting or how long that will last. We don't know how long she'll be able to work at all even for SIL, for her health. We don't know if she has long-term care insurance or any other insurance that can be utilized. We don't know the value of the home. There are a lot of unknowns here. She could have a costly medical problem, she could have her health prevent her from babysitting, the house could develop a costly problem, who knows. This situation is NOT good. $200K plus a normal house is nowhere near enough savings for a 69-year-old. The cold hard facts are that unless she dies pretty young, she's going to zero out her assets and OP/DH and SIL are going to have to cover everything that Medicaid and Social Security don't. |
Anonymous
OP would likely still not be helpful. She'd let her mother experience deprivation to teach her a lesson and make up for past crimes, real and imagined. Then she'd create a thread here to garner support for herself, slowly dribbling additional terrible details about her own mother in subsequent posts. |
Anonymous
But is it the kind thing to do? How is spending 10% of their savings kind to OP or DH/OP's kids? I've posted before (that I can relate to OP's "you're on your own" upbringing). All I have to add now is that in many ways this is no different than either OP or DH wanting to spend something that is completely outside of their budget. Go over your budget together to understand what loosing $4K means for your life. I might change his mind. It might change yours. Maybe he'll see it means no vacations for a year. Maybe you'll see it can be recouped with only giving up one dinner date a month. What are your financial goals for your savings, and how does giving MIL $4K change that? Focusing the conversation on the numbers takes the emotion out of it. Its not that you're saying no, its that there are only so many dollars. GL. |
Anonymous
| If you give 4K to his mom, give 4K to your mom as well. See how he feels about keeping it fair between the families. |