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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So I just posted in another tread and realized the therapeutic value of posting!  I hope I can safely vent here. My DH and I and my BIL and SIL all financially support my in-laws. I'm actually fine with this generally as I know my DH loves his parents, he always puts me and our family first, and we can generally  afford to help.  However, I just learned (while on a family vacation with in-laws and family)  that my MIL just racked up thousands of dollars in credit card debt after secretly opening up a new credit card. This even after promising us years ago she wouldn't do so. Several years ago we bailed out ILs by paying off their house. A few years later we found out that ILs secretly took out a second mortgage in their paid off house to pay off my MIL's cc debt.  After that, DH and BIL established a trust and took over their finances. Well, apparently she is at it again.

Her selfishness sickens me and my FIL's enabling is pathetic. I'm so angry but just need to get through this vacation. I'm just so disgusted and sad for DH. His mother looked straight at him and lied to his face years ago with her promise to not over spend. Oh, and to top it off, her dog just shit all over the rug at the beach house we are paying for. The idiots showed up ( without asking) with their dog in our "no pets allowed" rental.  They sicken me. So why am I here- for the kids. On surface everything is fine, no fighting, etc. and our kids love their grandparents and their cousins. Thanks for letting me vent. I'm just so upset, angry and sad. [/quote]

So when this happens again (and it will, obviously) make turning the house over to one of their kids a condition of the bailout.  Rent it back to them for a token amount.  She will have no assets and not be able to get anymore credit. [/quote]

^^^^^ This is very wise advice. You don't need to wait for it to happen again, because it is always happening along the ways based on what you describe. The kids, your husband and his siblings, need to communicate as a group over buying the home for your their parents to live in. Call paying the utilities, insurance, taxes and ongoing maintenance "the rent" and be done with the issue. Your husband and his siblings will never reform or escape their mother's habits, and by now your MIL has no apparent motivation level to change or you'd have seen it. So let her "enjoy" her retirement in a home her kids have underwritten and hold arm's length. Of course she will complain. And complain. And complain. And complain. You are telling her how to live, treating her with disrespect, etc., but that is all bullshit and is also easier for you to hear once in a while rather than be exposed to the anxieties of this on an ongoing basis.

Even if it makes you sick that your husband goes in on a group "bailout", it really isn't one. 1. This way you know with certainty what the one-time amount is. 2. The correct way to think about it is this isn't money in a hole, a house is an asset. An asset you partially own. 3. To the extent you once day come to hate your siblings-in-law the way you hate the MIL or in the instance where one sibling-in-law goes into money duress, you have the future options of them buying you out or you buying them out. Get 5 valuation guesses from local realtors and take the median or average -- then clean the decks, or 4. Your husband and his siblings all agree to treat the house like an inheritance to be sold in the instance of the deaths of their parents.

I was married into a family with dependent parents-in-law. The problem there was my ex-wife's siblings were also adult dependentd at times and would ask the parents for $$$ that synthetically came from my ex-wife's "helping her parents when they asked and needed it". I found that a common denominator in that family seemed to be a genetic condition to be frivolous with money the parents passed to their kids. The best point to reach is an end point. That end point can be financial (buyout of the house and have FIL & MIL live in it for their retirement & that's it) or the endpoint can be your marriage. Sorry to be so brutal, but it is just a fact. This will eat you up from the inside out and end worse if you don't draw the line now. [/quote]

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