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?

This is absolutely nuts. My take-home pay from my day job is £3600ish, and I work full time in a very skilled job. I pay my mortgage (in London!) and all my bills alone out of that, put a significant amount into savings, and can still afford to go on 3-4 holidays a year, staying in very nice hotels.

She just sounds like an entitled Boomer who has never had a day of hardship in her life and so has no idea how most people live and budget.

i Don’t 100% know the issue, that’s what I think might be at play, but she was in hysterics saying how broke she was and having to cancel the phone bill, cancel sky etc to me that seems more than not wanting to manage finances.

plus she used to like those hols but since pre pandemic she’s not been on those luxe holiday so she’s not going recently and I don’t know about how she spends on clothes now, I know what she used to do, I don’t know if that’s continued since I moved out and that’s been 8 years

Have you asked her is she in credit card debt?

She said no, and same to sending money to anyone

Looking at this from the perspective of someone probably approaching your mother's age, still working full time, but looking to retirement. I earn what your father did I think and will have about 75% of a final salary pension scheme. DH earns more.

Your mother sounds feckless. I don't spend money like that. I bought my car when it was about a year old, outright. I keep my cars for about 9 years and £200pcm goes into my car account for the replacement in 2027. I'll get a smaller car next time.

Your situation is difficult. If you advise you will be wrong and if you don't you are wrong. All you can do is say on rinse and repeat "look mum, you need to write down everything that comes in and everything that goes out and track it. If there's more going out, then you'll have to make some savings or buy a smaller house".

I wonder if this may be a way to pretending she has nothing as a smoke screen to keep your brother's demands at bay?

It sounds more and more like dementia.

Will she give you power of attorney so you can see what the financial situation is online? I have recently activated my mums poa but she is older than yours at 87 and struggles with knowing what she has invested and where. I too live hundreds of miles away although she sounds more organised than your mum in that anything she has is in one place but she does not get paper statements any more. I am able to access her accounts online and see what is going on.

Sounds like massive debt she’s been hiding/ignoring. My parents were x4 holidays a year, new car every 3 years, QVC shoppers, buying clothes and expensive shoes ‘for work’ types. Basically if they felt like it they’d buy it because they had the money coming in.

On the cusp of retirement my Mum went into a massive panic like your Mum is and admitted they were 120k in credit card debt. Had to sell the house, to clear it. 2 years later they’d done the same thing again, and it was 50k. Sold that house to clear the debt and now live in a tiny 2 up 2 down. They’ve pissed their retirement away because of their utter inability to be adults and control themselves.

@ilyana, if you please, I'm a boomer who's never had a day of hardship. It doesn't make me like the op's mother. There's no need to be so sweepingly rude and dare I say it, ageist.

Tbh it could just be the drop in income, and the cost of living having gone up.
I knew a lady about 15 years ago, absolutely minted to my eye, seemed OK for money, until she was evicted.
One day she told me about how she was struggling, she had 2k a week, but it was such a massive drop in living standards for her, she just couldn't get by.
In real terms, she could, but she didn't know what it was like to live off jobseekers allowance like a lot of her neighbours at the time.
She had just been used to more like 8 or 9 k a week before her circumstances changed.

At risk of stating the bloody obvious, if she wants your help she can jolly well find those bank statements and gather everything up for you to be able to look at. She might be acting like a teenager but she isn't, and she can get onto the banks to order replacements if she chooses to.

If she won't send them to you, you can't help.

I dont think it’s to keep his demands at bay, because why tell me? He and I don’t talk really

I think you need to actually visit and spend time in the house looking directly at whatever bills you can find.

If you're on the phone asking questions it can come across as confrontational, hence the tears and the changing of the subject.

Would she be amenable to setting up online banking and allowing you access to her account so you can see what her outgoings are? Or if she already has online banking set up, can she let you have her password?

If you think she's really bad at finances and her fretfulness is a problem, do you think it's time to get the durable power of attorney process under way?

I imagine, like a PP said, she’s used to higher monthly income and so views her current income as ‘low’. My MIL has inherited a lot of land and assets from her late husband (talking millions), but of course that’s not cash rich as such. However, her monthly income is very high also, but less than what it was when her husband was alive. She was worrying about money last week and talking about how she’s now ‘penny pinching’ and has been for the last year, then offered to pay for us all to have a family photo shoot with our newborn about ten minutes later. She has also been on three abroad holidays so far this year, one of them was a luxury cruise.

We all have different levels of comfort and her version of skint and penny pinching is certainly not mine. Perhaps this is the same for your mum?

I echo the concerns about potential early dementia. She may have seen or read something about the cost of living crisis and become obsessed with the idea.

@Notamum12345577 What is your industry?

My mum got in a right mess with her finances when she was in the early stages of dementia and my siblings and I tried to help her sort out the different accounts and direct debits etc but it was difficult. In the end, I went round when she was out ( my brother took her out for lunch) and rooted through her drawers, cupboards and filing cabinets to find details of all her accounts and investments - far more that I expected! I took photos of all the latest statements to go through at home and took away some old statements that went back years as they were mixed up with current ones and adding to mums confusion.

I found she had a number of unnecessary direct debits such as extended warranties for appliances she no longer had, along with three policies for Sky box insurance when she did not have Sky! I used my Power of Attorney with her bank to cancel them all and also closed some old accounts that she no longer used.

my issues were different to yours in that she did have plenty of money even though she thought she didn’t but she could no longer manage the paperwork due to her increasing confusion and memory loss. But the only was for us to help was to resort to subterfuge and ferreting around when she was out. She never knew and as her dementia advanced, the worry over bank statements became forgotten and replaced by other obsessions but I am so glad that I made copies of all important paperwork as by the time she went into a care home, most of it had disappeared from the house!

Well if you're a single parent you're a bit stuck re visiting which is what you need to do really.

Our neighbours are like this now, husband who did everything has had a stroke so now all the online stuff he did is a mystery to his wife. Between them his daughter who lives away and my OH have managed to sort everything out . The shock of a sick husband was the first priority but then it was all the income and outgoings.

Some women get into a pickle because their husbands did everything. My friend had never even put fuel in her car. Then her husband had a breakdown. Was in a private clinic for months. She grew up fast that year

Worth consideration but let’s bear in mind that early onset dementia is incredibly rare. It affects less than 0.5% of people under 65years.

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.

Op at some point you will have to go and look at her actual papers.

She wants to moan but doesn't want solutions.
Tell her this and you want to help but can't without seeing actual evidence and figures.

@Ihateslugs

My parent didn't have dementia but also couldn't keep one top of affairs, too old, too tired and ill.

I believe as a moral duty all big companies trim gas to banks to sky need special older people teams to give proper assistance.

I've found out parent also was nt receiving money they should have been due to silly errors by pension people.

Unfortunately they thought they weret doing OK and didn't ask for help.

I agree with this.
I have a similar mother who never worked but lived very well off my father's income, then pension when he died. She's recently downsized from 4 bed to 3 bed (only for her) but it's already proved too small so she had a massive orangery put on, ripped out the brand new kitchen to put on another extension and brand new kitchen. New roof, new windows etc....

..... Then she claimed for a free boiler on the boiler scheme. She waited 6 months to do this until the building works had finished and she'd paid them before claiming she was skint.

My skint and her skint are very different things and Frankly I get fed up of hearing how bad off she is.

Not necessarily.

Someone who has been spoiled and cosseted their entire life might genuinely feel poor if they suddenly have to ever actually think about money at all.

My friend's mother lives in a mortgage-free, four-bed detached house, retired at 57, having only started working at 40ish after kids, and genuinely thinks she's poor because she can't just book holidays to Florida without even thinking about it anymore.

My friend is a millennial who graduated into the recession, works 60 hours a week, her husband does the same, they're barely scraping by in a two-bed flat, their tiny baby is always at nursery because they work so much, and her mother genuinely believes she's worse off than they are. It was my friend's birthday the other week, her mother took her out for dinner and spent the entire meal commenting on how expensive it was until my friend lost her temper and just ended up paying the entire bill. Lots of them are like this. It's not dementia, it's self absorption, entitlement, stinginess, and cruelty.

That ^^
My mum used to ring me crying about pain she was in. Wouldn't take painkillers though or ring the doctor
I ended up saying unless she had seen the doctor and taken painkillers, I didn't want to hear anything about it