To not understand what she’s spending it on

[Idlovetoknow]

It’s my mother. She’s a pensioner and a widow, but she working. She cannot deal with her finances. She’s been on the phone tonight weeping over how much of a dire situation she’s in financially, but I don’t see how.

income from work: £1100 (after tax)
state pension: £800
widows pension: £1600 (think this is after tax too)
private pension: £200/300 (she was wooly on this)
so total income around £3600 a month

No mortgage, no rent, no grounds costs.
council tax £200 a month. Power £150 (let’s say 200 to round up) food and pet food £400, car £450 petrol £100, health insurance £200, phone £50, sky £50, pet insurance £80- that’s £1300 at an absolute max

i don’t understand. She’s not being frauded or taken advantage of, but i don’t understand. I try to talk to her for instance tonight when she rang frantic over money but she gets into such a tizz she can’t tell you anything. I’ve asked for months for all bills and bank statements to go over expenses but she can’t produce them

Anyone any ideas?

Your mother sounds like she's never really been a good mother to you. And her behaviour is that of a reckless child. Spoilt, selfish and manipulative. I'd be telling her straight, either you let us see your statements or you are on your own. You sound very caught up in fear, obligation and guilt. I'd put good money on Walter Mitty brother bleeding her dry, it's quite a common scenario. I have a friend whose sister conned their dad out of £100k. And I've heard of two other instances amongst acquaintances.

This.

you see her every week?
ask for her statements
or just listen to her
is she buying other things off the tv channels, you said she bought jewelry
perhaps her heating bills are higher than £150
water bills
green garden bill

i don’t think it’s dementia, she’s never really understood Money and always got frantic over it.

All the speculation about alcoholism and gambling. 🙄OP my mum is just the same. Dad died about 9 months ago, I have been sorting out his estate and they are swimming in money. At almost 80, mum has plenty of money to last the rest of her life. She does not have an expensive lifestyle, does not buy expensive clothes or jewellery, no expensive hobbies, very few holidays, no mortgage/rent. Her public sector pension more than covers her living expenses so she has all these ISAs and Premium Bonds and other things just sitting there.

Yet she worries about spending and "treating" herself to a M&S meal for dinner rather then Lidl or Aldi. You would not speak to her and think she was well off. Dad was the one who always managed the money and organised the savings accounts and mum just went along with it. Although dad was ill for the last few years before his death and she had to deal with it she just left things ticking along, paying bills by direct debit and allowing policies to renew. She has no concept of how much money she has, how much she's spending, where the savings are, how she would access them. She finds it all very scary and has delegated it all to me and my sibling. When brother visits he regularly finds lots of unopened correspondence for him to deal with. Recently she needed a new fridge freezer which is a large but not enormous purchase. Lots of worry about affording it although she could buy every fridge freezer in the showroom and have money spare.

I do hear you OP, it's frustrating and worrying. You won't change her though, it's a confidence thing and if she's not confident on the phone or internet she's not going to get suddenly better. All you can do is keep reiterating that there IS money and that she IS living within her means.

She seems quite typical of someone who’s gone through life without having to look after financial matters. We once nearly called the financial regulator as MIL swore blind her mortgage was GBP 5,000 a month. We thought she and FIL had got conned. When we spoke to FIL, we discovered mortgage was GBP 500 a month. 🙄 I expect MIL will be incapable of managing anything if something were to happen to FIL.

Your mum’s version of poor is different to most people’s. She’s incredibly well off. Again this is quite common. My MIL says SIL (huge house, two luxury cars, kids in private schools) is poor and has no luxuries and often cries about it. 🙄

Nevetheless, I’d go through her accounts with her, and get her checked out for dementia, just in case. I wouldn’t seek POA if I were you (unless she has dementia). I’ve a feeling she’d just accuse you of stealing her money.

She may be your mother but she sounds a spoilt whiny bellend and I would be giving her very short shrift. In the context of how most people live, I simply couldn't listen to this nonsense. When you think of all the bright talented people across the world who work so hard and who have so little materially in life, that someone this incompetent gets to be this wealthy and entitled just boils my piss.

Agree, is she used to being the damsel in distress and your dad was her rescuer so she needs a new one? So her expectation is you will come along and take care of the boring things like bills and general cost of living for her and she doesn't have to use her savings and she can go back to enjoying her 1st class, 5 star fun?

@LIZS Let's hope not because she is still working in a sales environment! EEK!
And driving a posh car which she changes every 3 years.

Honestly, as a woman roughly her age it really annoys me that women of my generation who burned their bras, clamoured for equality, can be so flipping useless (perhaps) when it comes to looking after themselves on £43Kpa!

It's either all emotional blackmail or she's led a charmed life where she's never ever had to budget and is now panicking that she hasn't enough money.

Alcohol too cheap to explain this! You can can wine for £3 a bottle so even 3 bottles a day is only £63 a week so cannot explain the spending.

gambling yes

I don't understand the lack of bank statements, does she bank online? If she has paper statements they must be in the house somewhere.
Then there's the aspect of 'running the show' at her job, she holds it together there but can't cope with her personal matters.

Meant to add, I too, was wondering about gambling or something similar on line. She's not going to admit to it if that was the case and would deny it was happening. Bank statements would give answers to a lot of this.
An addict or cheating person will often speak out against something that they are supposedly totally dislike but are using it as a smoke screen for what is really happening.

Might she be caught in a romance scam, but too embarrassed to admit it. Or online gaming/bingo for company.

Sorry I’ve only skim read but:
How has she been getting 5 x 2 week holidays from work annually? That’s 50 days annual leave. Are some unpaid?
5x 5 star first class flight holidays could easily be costing five figures each- surely that’s from savings not monthly salary?
Why doesn’t she have to worry about servicing the car because she only keeps them 3 years? Is she not servicing them or is it included in her lease?
Apologies if I’m being thick or missed something.

That's like my mum
Income after tax around 1500 pounds a month
Then she has 20k in savings and 8k in a current account.
She receives a pension from my dad because he died.
No rent or mortgage to pay. House was worth 295k in 2018.
But she isn't satisfied unless she can save and save and doesn't seem to understand life costs money

Her energy bill is 150 a month
Council tax 150
Sky 69
Other small bills
Phone 10 a month.

She still doesn't think she can afford life

Is she getting demands from HMRC for income tax? There are odd rules about not being able to take tax due from pensions. My spouse’s pension is taxed at source to the maximum permitted but I still get a massive bill each year from HMRC. It does take a few years to sort out after the spouse’s death and might be enough to panic her.
Also do not be dismissive about the possibility of her drinking - after DF died DM had 4 people regularly buying her bottles of whisky and presumably drinking them all! She was tiny and when she broke her hip the hospital doctor said she was severely malnourished and dependent on alcohol, first we knew about it and it took several years to wean her off it.

She’s definitely getting both because she was crying that she only gets half over my dads pension and it’s not enough, she’s only just started claiming state pension. She had a lump sum for that too for deferring it, and I think it’s caused tax problems for her and I think this could be issue, she went against financial advise

My first thought was is she the victim of some sort of romance fraud....

Honestly I have no idea how she managed it with work, but she did. They don’t have annual leave system or sick system either because she also takes a lot of sick days.

she used to hide the holidays she went on, she went on an American road trip for a month and said it was work and then we all found out later.

im not sure how many times she’s flown first class, she did to like Thailand or Vietnam but she’s not been on these sort of holidays since pre covid so like 2018/2019 when my dad stopped working.

the car servicing is included or not needed as the vehicle is under 3 years old. So basically she doesn’t have to worry about it

Again apologies if highlighted already but is there any chance her husband had financial irregularities and had spent savings etc. that only became apparent on his passing, that she’s embarrassed about revealing? This happened to someone I know.
Is the ‘just chatting to people’ sales job commission based? Any chance her client base has shrunk post pandemic or people are just tightening their belts and she’s hiding this?

This all very familiar behaviour to me. I would bet she has ADHD and/or pathological demand avoidance. There’s nothing you can do about that. But if I were in your position, I’d arrange to spend a day at her place to go over everything and actually work out what her true financial position is.

If everything is OK, then she will either continue to get stressed about it anyway, or find another thing to get worked up about.

If she's genuinely concerned, suggest you take over her accounts/bills etc for a period of time and give her a living allowance, just to see how it all works, and also take the burden off her for a few months.

when she comes to you next you and she’s conveniently forgotten everything again you can go online at register with her bank and all the utilities. Then see all the statements and bills online.

Are the Financial
Advisor and tax advisor overcharging her ? You really need to see what all the payments are. There are some fraudsters out there who might be taking advantage of her . It's good that she's asked for help. My lovely DM wouldn't accept help even though my BiL worked in finance, and we only found out she'd paid 8k to a financial advisor after she died !

I’m not au fait on the lingo but I don’t think it’s widows pension as such, although it’s what she calls it, it’s half my dads pension, she gets 50% of it

Sorry OP, I have no answers but ‘servicing not needed’ doesn’t seem right to me, even a basic oil change must be done? Even on her low mileage isn’t it a condition of the lease hire it needs the service record to be complete either to reduce the depreciation for the trade in/ balloon payment. I wouldn’t trust a dealer trying to sell me a used car with no service record. This could be inflating her costs every three years?!
The annual leave thing doesn’t stack up either, it sounds to me like it’s unpaid or she’s taking sick doesn’t it, based on what you’ve said about company policies.
Anyhow I’m sorry for your situation.

It is a low base pay but it’s a smidge above minimum wage, it didn’t used to be, but they cut her hours and kept the wage the same to not pay her more, I think in truth that’s how she got so much annual leave before because the wage didn’t seem legal and then they didn’t have a pension scheme.

she’s seen a financial advisor. I didn’t know when she can’t remember the name, he called her after her investment went down, she had a huge go at him. She wanted me to give the advice and when I said I couldn’t she stopped talking to me for months, she saw the FA in that time. She refused to see a tax advisor because she saw the financial advisor recommending one as the financial advisor not wanting to help