Fast forward 20 years. She has no savings, is 93 years old, in the beginnings of dementia, and basically lives on her small social security check and government help. My sister-in-law and I have to provide a great deal of her personal care because there is no money to hire additional outside help. We were able to get some assistance from the Office of the Aging, but not nearly enough.

He took literally 10′s of thousands of dollars over the years and gambled most of it away. This was money his mother could have used now to pay for in-home care.

Sadly, like Larry and Abby, she did this to herself. I (along with my sisters-in-law) tried to stop her and talk some sense into her, but it was pointless.

The worst part is when she tells us over and over again about her “good boy” and how much she misses him, yet we are the ones doing all the work. (He’s a truck driver and on the road a lot, so she doesn’t see him as much as she sees us)

Our daughter is in graduate school. I paid for part of her initial college education, and help her with a few small expenses, but that’s it. She is on her own and unless there is something life threatening involved, I’m not going to accumulate debt to bail her out.

It’s too bad about Larry and Abby. What a hard lesson to learn so late in life.

Yeah, it’s understandable that they’d want to help their son in anyway way they could. But that’s like saying it’s okay to keep helping an addict. At some point, you have to draw the line. I could understand spending a lot of your savings in the vain hope that your son would get a clue. (Though why they didn’t pay some business consultants rather than give him the money, I don’t know.)

But once you start dipping into fixed assets like rental homes… That’s when you have to realize that, as much as it hurts you, you need to cut the kid off. Look at it this way: It was obvious that he was running the biz into the ground. So they should have made sure they were well-situated enough to provide him with a place to live, since clearly he’d end up back with them when it all officially fell apart.

Granted, I feel especially frustrated about situations like these because my in-laws just keep taking my brother-in-law back time and time again. Even though my FIL is out of work and my MIL is chronically ill and living on disability. And they owe money to the IRS and don’t own their house. And my BIL is a serial dater and each of his girlfriends pretty much moves in. Which means both of them have friends over who eat up my in-laws’ food. And on the rare occasions my BIL does work, his parents don’t see a dime.

I know that I can’t understand yet what parental love is like. But I have learned the hard way (and many times over) that you have to put the proverbial oxygen mask on yourself, before you help others. Otherwise, you’re no use to anyone.

Believe me, we wanted to give her both but in doing so would have added to our debt. Not smart.

I would eat nails for my daughter and go for a swim in Lake Michigan today (it’s currently 24 degrees in Chicago). But what lesson did Larry and Abby teach Pat? “Go ahead and try something that you’re not qualified for — if you don’t succeed, someone will bail you out.”

Discretion is the better part of valor, and at some point they needed to put their own needs first. It’s a sad story, and I wish them the best.

I am the person who discovered the analytical errors in the Old School Safe Withdrawal Rate studies and reported on them on internet discussion boards and blogs. That’s why you see these words appearing here.

My wife and I have taken the two boys on a one-week beach vacation every years of their lives. This year it was two weeks. No, I cannot afford Disney World today and it was my decision to leave a non-fulfilling but financially rewarding corporate job that is responsible for this.

I don’t believe that that decision will end up hurting the boys. But of course I cannot say with certainty. All that I can do is pray that I end up being right about that one. I of course love my boys. But I also love the thousands of people who I have been able to help with the work that I have done at my web site. And I believe that it teaches my boys an important lesson for them to see that it is not all about the money (although of course financial considerations are indeed important).

By the way, it was my concern that my decision to leave the corporate job not hurt my boys (or my wife) that was the cause of my discovery of the errors in the retirement studies. I didn’t want my plan to fail. So, before handing in my resignation, I checked those studies carefully. That’s how I came to read John Bogle’s book and learn about the errors in them.

Rob

I stand by those words, Simon.

If I had stayed at my safe corporate job (where I did precisely zero meaningful work but earned a big paycheck for doing it), my boys’ college fund would have been assured. But what sort of lesson would they have learned about what matters in life? It’s not only security that matters in this life, in my view. That’s not the lesson I want to pass along to them by my example.

That said, if they need help getting started in life, and I am able to help by making some financial sacrifice, I will be doing it. My parents did this for me and I believe that I should be passing the favor along to the next generation.

My hope (and expectation) is that my web site will be a huge success and that the boys will end up in a better place than the one in which they would have ended up had I stayed at the safe but boring corporate job. But none of us can see into the future, can we? That’s what makes these questions hard ones. That’s what makes all of life’s great questions hard ones.

If we act in love (the real kind, not the sentimental kind), we are doing the best we can, in my assessment. I don’t say that I always succeed at doing this. I say that it is my aim to do this. And that I often worry that perhaps I am making a bad choice. I look at my boys’ faces when they go to bed at night and I feel love for them and I worry that I am not doing enough (or that I am doing too much).

Rob

I’m not 100% sure where the initiative for the repeated gifts came from. It could have come from the “child” who asked for money even though his parents were struggling and who lacked the skill to know when to fish or cut bait. Or it could have come from the parents, who may have presented the money as a “gift” or even pressured the “child” to take it.

There are families where the designated givers (generally parents) actually push gifts on recipients and use emotional blackmail to force the recipients to take them. The recipients are often unaware of the financial impact on the givers. Even when they are aware, the recipients have usually been conditioned to accept gifts because of years of having done so. Years of what Stanley and Danko would call “economic outpatient care” have generally destroyed whatever money management skills the recipients originally had, and enhanced both the need and the expectation of the recipients to the point where they have to choose between letting the donors bleed themselves, or changing their own financial behavior.

Unfortunately, there’s a difference between receiving crisis aid in an unforeseeable catastrophic emergency (fire and illness come to mind) and receiving regular financial “help” or bouncing from one crisis to another. The former does not necessarily cause or enable financial irresponsibility. The latter will. It postpones the moment of reckoning at which the “gift” recipient realizes the situation is unsustainable and decides to do something else.

They felt they could afford to help him but the effort should have been memorialized by an attorney with the doors to the bank shut when the business was failing. Throwing good money after bad is not the way to make a bad investment turn around.

I come from a different mindset, it would never occur to my siblings or me to bankrupt our parents. We were taught early on that they just did not have the means to help us but they gave us the tools for success by being loving parents who valued education (not necessarily college), a strong work ethic (a sick day? what’s that?), and to value each other more than money and things.

I wish these parents well.