My sister is financially screwed beyond all comprehension
My sister’s life is, to be honest, a mess. I don’t like her husband (can’t name a single family member of mine who likes him) and she got knocked up at 18 to him and had to drop out of school.
But whatever, not my monkey not my circus. Well, that is until your parent’s guilt trip you into helping her balance her budget because you work in financial tech and they know nothing about what that actually entails.
For the last two weeks, I’ve been trying to help her and her husband out with their situation. She works 8 hours a week doing part time work and he makes maybe $1.8k as a cleaner (before tax.)
They are under a mortgage for a home they cannot afford, have 2 kinds with a third on the way, and neither of them seems to have any motivation to try and find better jobs to pay off their loans despite this being a worker’s economy at the moment.
Despite all this though, until 2 days ago I thought they could at least pull their heads above water. The only debts that they told me they had were the mortgage and a single credit card.
I helped them a few hours over the weekends but noticed that something was not adding up at all. They refused to show me raw bank statements, giving me rough estimates for outgoing charges or edited statements to “help me understand their account better.”
I knew they were both lying to me and I told them last Saturday I’m done helping them unless they’re honest with me. Sister finally fessed up and told me they were hiding debts and loans from me because “she was embarrassed” and “didn’t want mom and dad to know how bad it was.”
I was annoyed but told her to give me EVERYTHING and let me look over it this week alone to come in this weekend with an actual strategy to help out.
Folks, dumb and dumber are roughly 115 thousand dollars in debt between them. This does not include their mortgage and loans after loans.
Some of the highlights include:
- 6 maxed-out credit cards
- a handful of debts I cannot figure out where they got them from
- a car loan that they can’t afford
- other miscellaneous loans
I don’t know how in gods good name these two have survived this long. They bleed over a thousand dollars a month just paying the minimums on all this and have been living off credit cards for probably a long time.
My brother-in-law asked me if I had taken a look at what they sent me last night. He said he was excited to hear my “silver bullet strategy” while I downed shot after shot of whisky reading this nightmare they’ve involved me in.
There is no silver bullet, these two are doomed. I’m not going over Saturday. I’m gonna tell them to find a bankruptcy lawyer and hope they survive whatever process comes from that.
Not my monkey, not my circus.