Mother demands high monthly allowance from children, but won’t leave a single cent for them after death
My mother has 3 kids, including me. All of us are working adults and have our own families (including kids). Ever since we started working years ago, my mother has requested that all of us give her $800 monthly allowance. She is perfectly healthy but doesn’t want to work. So just by staying at home, she receives $2400 from her children.
Initially, we were able to support her financially. But after we have our own families and kids, our spending is really high. The cost of infant/child care and domestic helper is not cheap. My brother has 3 kids in his family while I have 2. My other sibling also has 2 kids. Despite us having to feed so many mouths, our mother insists that we do not cut down on her monthly allowance. But there was a time when we asked her how much she spends each month, she said she is very thrifty and only spends a few hundred dollars. So why does she need $2400 each month? When she sees the doctor, we would pay for the bill.
Even when she is hospitalised, we would help her pay for everything. She mainly spends our allowance on handphone bill, utilities bill and groceries (hence only a few hundred dollars spent). I just want to ask you people out there… do you slightly decrease the allowance you give to your parents after you have kids?
Then recently we had a conversation with her about her finances. She has roughly $300k savings in the bank (most of it comes from the hefty allowance we give her). And she also told us that after she dies, she will donate all of her savings to charity and leave nothing for us. She said that doing such a good deed will bless her soul and she can reincarnate into a very good family in the next life. This means that we still have to fork out money for her funeral, which I heard can cost more than $50k.
My siblings and I were very upset to hear this. We felt that she should at least leave some money to cover the cost of her funeral so as not to burden us financially. But she was very stubborn and didn’t want to change her mind. Then all of us suggested that we give her lesser monthly allowance (enough to support her needs) so that we can save up for her funeral, but she flew into a rage and called us unfilial. Seriously? Is our suggestion really unreasonable?