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[quote=Anonymous]Believe me, I understand.  Before the kids were born, we had much more disposable income and $300/month was easy for us.  So we sent money to my MIL.  After the kids (twins) were born, suddenly we now have $3000 of daycare expenses a month, clothing, food, etc for four instead of two and suddenly our fairly large disposable income is pretty meager.  We kept it up for close to 2 years and finally our sister in law came to visit, saw how close we were keeping things and finally got it through to us that we really shouldn't be subsidizing MIL.  While she is living on retirement income, she was doing pretty well.  She flies around regularly, to a church convention this month, a knitting weekend next month, to visit her sister, etc.  She flies to different cities at least every other month and in the last three years has been out of the country twice.  While we're buying our kids second hand clothing and baby gear to keep within our means.  So we finally opted to discontinue subsidizing my MIL.  It was a hard decision for me as a husband and father to admit that I couldn't afford to pay for everything when I had always had plenty of disposable income to afford everything, but the kids have doubled our monthly expenses.

What you need to do is lay out a monthly family budget, allocate the money for each month and then let him propose what to cut out of the monthly budget in order to send more money to his parents.  Both of you have to be on-board with what gets cut (he can't just unilaterally say that you're going to cut out date night to fund more money to his parents, but he can give up his cell phone plan, or his golf club membership or whatever that is only his to control).  I can tell you that the guy mentality here is often to just spend the money because you "know" that you can afford it, but until you look at the numbers in black and white and see just how much everything costs itemized and added together, it doesn't sink in that you can't always afford everything and to change the equation, you have to take money from pot A to give to pot B.[/quote]

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