Should I give her money?

[crocsjoc]

Much as I would like to give my dd some of the money I am expecting in compensation for an accident, I am very much afraid that she will just squander it. She has very little idea of 'looking after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves" and any suggestions as to keeping accounts so she knows where the money goes are met with scorn and cries of "you're just sooo patronising".
What should I do?

Sounds like you have made a sound decision

Ok, I had some wonderful advice from you all a month ago.
The money for the compensation has not come through, the solicitor dealing with it is on the case but in the meantime...
I get a telephone call this morning from dd to say:- "We are in a bit of trouble because they overpaid us in tax credits, they have taken the money back and now we haven't got the money to pay the rent."
I asked how much she needed and it is the whole amount £495. And this is only the 16th of the month and dh gets paid on the 28th.
I have transferred the money, fortunately (or maybe not so fortunately) I have it, even without the compensation. There is still £700 outstanding on the credit card loan and so far, over the past three months I have given her more than £100.
Should I insist that I see their bank details and know what they spend their money on? Simply say:-"No sorry, I can't do any more? And I expect this to be added to the loan repayment."?
I can't run the risk that they will be made homeless with an 8 month old baby, but she has spent more than £25 on the mumsnet Christmas meet-up and expects to buy a dress for that as well. Then she told me she wanted to buy dh a £30 present for his birthday and so it goes on.
What do you say?

2

I don't think you can insist on seeing her bank statement really. But I would not now pay anything else for her as she is not learning to take the consequences for her finances if she can keep running to you to bail her out. I don't think by doing so you are doing her any favours in the long term.

If she is a Mumsnetter will she not see this thread and put 2 and 2 together?

I know of parents who have bailed their adult daughter out every time she has got herself into financial bother, it started out with a grand or so and at last count I believe the parents remortgaged their house and gave her £40,000. I am gobsmacked at this and can't help but think that if she had learned the hard way when it was only a grand or so then she would be able to manage her money by now.

IMO harsh as it may sound it is best to let her be the adult that she should be and tell her she has to sort it out for herself.

She might well, even though I've name changed. Should I care?

Do not keep bailing her out because by doing so you enable this to continue. You should not act as the bank of "Mum and Dad".

I think she should stand on her own two feet. BUT I think it is wrong of you to be asking advice about a mumsnetter on here.

I don't know if you SHOULD care. Do you? Or do you hope she will see it?

(Agree with Carmenere that you shouldn't talk about another Mumsnetter in that way though. Someone may put 2 and 2 together and realise who she is.)

I think it relieves my guilt to hear what you have to say about it.
Shall we leave it then if you think it better?

First of all, I apologise for bumping such an old thread. I am the "ungrateful" darling daughter of which "crocsjoc" speaks. I have just found this thread after she told me started it (5 months later. Nice.)

I'd also like to thank you all for giving advice to my mother. Unfortunately, as is often the case with these things, you've not been given the whole picture.

My mother broke her arm in December 2006, when I was 8 months pg. I went in every day for 2 weeks (while she was v immobile) to help her wash and dress, my dh and i did her shopping (along with some other family friends) and we generally helped out quite a lot. Of course I didn't do this because I wanted money. At the time I didn't even know she would get compensation.

I suggested she get in touch with a solicitor about compensation. She was unwilling so I did it for her. Not because I wanted the money but because I thought that we could stop it from happening to someone else. The place where she broke her arm was extremely negligent and I thought that they should pay.

Let me give you a little background. We were living round the corner from my parents at the time. I was heavily pg, and dh was in a job which he hated. He was regularly getting verbal abuse as well as inappropriate text messages from his boss. Just before xmas she threatened to sack him for minor reasons (such as receiving text messages from me at work). I was 8.5 months pg at the time.

So we were in a very precarious position. Dh suggested that we move back to his parents in Surrey, where we wouldn't have to pay rent and we could build up our finances before sorting ourselves out. We were told that my parents would help out, but the help never came. We got ourselves deeper and deeper into debt, not because we were frittering money away but because we didn't have enough money coming in to cover our outgoings. I told my mother this time and time again, but it was ignored. Actually, tell a lie, we were bought a loaf of bread here and there, which was nice, and my mother paid off our credit card, with the understanding it would be paid back which is fair enough).

Of course when Mum got the compensation I was taken out for lunch. She bought me a pair of Crocs (no comments please! ) which have been extremely useful, and she paid for me to have my haircut, but not highlighted as she doesn't agree with it. It was lovely.

But then she told me that she had decided to loan the money to her church. She hasn't given you the exact figure, and I wasn't going to as I thought it was crass but I'm actually so furious reading this thread that I'll tell you it was £12,000. Twelve grand.

I asked her how she'd feel if she never got it back and she told me that she always loaned money on the basis she wouldn't get it back. Well you could have fooled me. You could have fooled me £30 a month of repaid credit card loan which she insisted on.

Of course it's her money and she can do whatever she likes with it. But the issues here are much, much deeper. And interestingly enough I asked a question on the Religion thread a while ago: "Would you help out your daughter's struggling young family or would you loan money to the church?" The answer was that I would help out my family before my church.

Crokky's excellent suggestion of keeping the money to one side and helping us we needed it was not followed. When we moved it transpired that we needed 3 months rent up front which was a lot of money. About £2,500. When I asked mum to help us, she wouldn't. Because we don't look after the pennies.

We don't squander money. I use cloth nappies so we don't spend a fortune on disposables. I breastfed so we didn't spend money on formula. We had to run a car because dh had to commute, but we didn't make unnecessary journeys. When we went to visit the IL's they paid for the petrol. I don't buy clothes. All of ds's clothes come from NCT sales or charity shops or from friends. We didn't buy a new buggy, we were given one. And I desperately wanted to trail round Mothercare looking at fancy prams and car seats. When our car had to be written off and the insurance payout fell short of us buying a new car by about £500, we had to sell a lot of dh's comics and artwork to pay for it. I don't waste money on expensive food. We occasionally have fish and chips from the chippy when we're too tired to cook. We haven't had a holiday for 3 years.

The reason we were in the horrible financial position is because we were promised help that never arrived.

To finish, I'd like to point out a few things that I think are very telling.

"She might well, even though I've name changed. Should I care?" Pretty much sums her up tbh. Translates as "I'll do whatever I want, I'm always right. Should I care?"

And:

"I think it relieves my guilt to hear what you have to say about it." Funny that she was guilty about it. I wonder why?

I hasten to add - I don't actually want her help now. She can spend her money on whatever she wants! But I wanted to set the record straight. I won't reveal her usual MN name because that would be cruel. And I'm not the cruel one here. Dh may be on later to clear his name too.

(sorry for the rant btw)

i think that certain things need to be kept within families and not shared throughout mumsnet and the rest of cyberspace

you should be sitting talking it through as a family, it sounds like money is a deep rooted problem in your relationship

you'd think, wouldn't you lulu? she's only on MN cause she used to stalk me online when i was pg.

Ud it sounds like an awful situation to be in. I'm so grateful that my parents aren't at all like that.

OOh Jodie - have you had any luck with the No Cry Sleep Solution? cause i think i need it back!

UD email me your address I'll get it in the post on Monday for you. I've read it and have things in mind to try but we've all been ill for weeks what with one thing and another (tonsillitus for the children and now a d&v thing we all have) and I've been to tired to try!

Are things not going well with sleeping then?

Message withdrawn

And I'm the DH that has been called a 'pratt' here, so I'd just like to stand up for myself a bit and offer some more explanation.

My Wife - UD has been in floods of tears this morning after trying to sort out some financial stuff with her mother, who is basically calling her a liar about a great many things and is failing to see the full situation.

What I'd like to offer is a few observations:

Yes, UD had a (slight) drugs issue. She used to smoke weed so that she could have dreamless nights of sleep, instead of them being filled with nightmares about something extremely terrible that happened to her as a child (which she is also now being accused of lying about). Now she is a mother she does not touch drugs. It's not like she was ever addicted to heroin.

As for the 'looking after the pennies' thing and the issue of being patronised. Well, yes, UD could have 'learnt to stand up on her own' but that would have meant not living as a family and claiming benefits. Instead, we decided to be a family and I worked really bloody hard in a job in which I was being put under monstrous pressure. Now, the pounds I earned - did they look after themselves? Damn right. They went on the rent. The council tax. Electricity. Gas. Water. So that there were no pennies left.

We were accused of squandering the pennies when it hardly seemed to matter, as there were no pounds. The 'help' we were offered was an accounts book.

The reason this was 'patronising' was because I knew damn well that there was absolutely nothing to go in the black column and the only way things were going to change was to change our situation.

I wanted to leave the town we were in (living just around the corner from UD's parents) and find a living and working situation which would not bleed us dry any more.

After months and months of being told 'the help will be there if it gets really bad' I had to say 'right, well, it's worse than really bad, it's been utterly terrible for far too long and whilst there maybe has been help with the 'pennies', the help with the pounds wasn't materialising and neither of us had any way of magically making any more pounds somehow appear.

In the time in which help was promised, but not forthcoming, I spent literally all of my savings just keeping us afloat and also sold things I had that were valuable, with no possibility of ever replacing them.

If money being spent on rent, bills etc was 'squandering' it, then it was squandered. But believe me, other things which some people consider essentials, such as new clothes, were very few and far between.

Now, to sum up my problem, and the real reason I'm posting (which is to support my wife, really) is that we never wanted this money. We never asked for it and never expected it.

What I did want is to have been able to get out of a very bad situation, which was draining all of our resources, and I stuck in there for as long as I did, because there was this offer of help (and childcare when UD went back to work) were dangled in front of our noses, but constantly snatched away.

When enough was enough, and I got a new job, and we moved, I was/am vastly, vastly more in debt than I would have been had I followed my instincts - and also my own accounting of our finances and situation.

The reason we were and are in so much trouble is because , even when I was looking at our finances in a reasonable way and saying 'okay, enough is enough, we're just getting worse and worse here' I didn't actually do enough to change the situation at that point.

Yes, the money was 'squandered', but I now think that it was squandered on keeping us in a situation that was convenient for the original poster, but which damaged UD and I an awful lot.

Pelafina - she "loaned" it.

Don't give her money.
she is old enough to sort out her finances and the more you enable her the longer it will take her to "get it" as Dr Phil says.

Did you read the whole thread?

just remembered something else -

she mentions about the wedding that she paid for. this is the wedding which she emotionally blackmailed us into doing. because i was pregnant. she then gave us £1000 for it, which was very generous, but a very low budget for a wedding. dh then spent a lot of money on making it half decent. and nobody really enjoyed it.

Ok the Urban Dryad family are having a rough day !! Your mum is a piece of work UD.
I have no time for anyone who tries to control their children with money and I apologise if I read the situation inaccurately in August.

My mil watched whilst dp worked so hard that he ended up in hospital with a suspected heart attack because he was trying to support his children. All the while she had 70k in CASH, 70 thousand pounds, just five of those thousands would have kept her son from a near death experience But he didn't want to ask her because he knew the price would be too high(and he had no idea that she had so much)

But back to your problem. A line has been drawn here, simply you must never, ever talk to your mum about money again, remove this tool that she wants to control you with. And I would be furious with her for rallying support for her campaign on mn, a place that is your sanctuary. On a brighter note, it sounds like you have a wonderful supportive husband.