It was a couple of weeks ago now that I went to visit my parents. It had been a couple of months since I was there, which seemed okay since my father’s health has been relatively good, but I was getting anxious about visiting again so I’d have a chance to check on my parents’ finances! I’d been hearing lots of stories about all the things my mother was trying to get done around the house, and was starting to worry about how much money she was burning through.
You may wonder why my mother would be doing all this. She’s a full-time caregiver to an invalid husband, so where does she find the energy to deal with hiring people to paint the house, pull out trees and shrubs, replace the windows, and put up a new fence? She also had people giving her estimates for repaving the driveway, putting a new roof on the porch, and gutting the one full bathroom in the house. She did acknowledge that this last item was crazy to do given my father’s health situation– which is why she was also getting an estimate on expanding the downstairs half-bathroom into the garage and adding a shower stall.
My mother is just manic when it comes to home improvements and decorating– it’s a bit scary. My father has always checked her impulses to do these things, but now he doesn’t have the energy. My mom was also quite inspired by our estate planning conversations with the lawyer several months ago. He said that if my father was about to go into a nursing home, it would be a good idea for us to spend down some assets so he’d be eligible for Medicaid sooner, and that putting money into improving the value of the house was a good way to do that– music to my mom’s ears!
After spending some time going over all my mother’s credit card receipts, I had to tell her to put the brakes on any further projects. At the rate she’s burning through money, my parents will be broke within 10 years, and this is not even counting major expenses for the house, or funerals, or potential costs like a nursing home. My mom is only 65, so this is a major problem.
When my father first got sick almost a year ago, I went through all their accounts and bills and put together a budget that I thought would allow them to live very comfortably, without changing any of their habits. I was happy to see that the budget would stretch their savings out to last over 20 years. I knew they’d have to be careful about major expenses, but I also knew that some of their expenses would decrease as they got older, so I wasn’t too worried. But unfortunately, when I made that budget, I made two major errors. First, I didn’t account for the fact that my mother hadn’t actually been living with my father for almost a year. I thought it would be enough to take his grocery spending and more than double it. I might even have tripled it, just to be safe. This came to a budget of $775. But now that my mother’s back, her actual spending on groceries tends to be more like $1500 a month!
To be fair, she doesn’t only buy groceries at the supermarket– she buys cleaning supplies, paper products, and sometimes plants and cosmetics. But still, it just boggled my mind that she could spend that much, especially since my dad was on chemo for most of the past 6 months and didn’t have much of an appetite. I’m still a bit baffled– she’s not eating caviar and steak all the time, and most of her spending is at Stop and Shop, not Whole Foods. I think she just somehow consumes a lot.
The other budget item I got wrong was medicine. Although my dad has supplemental insurance and a prescription plan that gives him better coverage than Medicare, he has so many ailments and takes so many medicines that his co-pays seem to be coming to over $300 a month. I had budgeted about $50 a month, which I should have known was way too low.
When I re-ran all my budget numbers, I felt almost nauseous. It was the same kind of stress I felt when I learned several years ago that my mother had run up $50,000 in credit card debt. I thought since then that she had learned a lesson, and that my openness about the family finances would have cleared up her illusions about there being unlimited funds for her to spend. And in a way, she is being more conscientious– she’s spending money on the house because she thinks the lawyer told her she should. And as far as the rest of the budget went, the problem is that her idea of normal and necessary spending is just different from mine. But it was just extremely frightening to me to feel like my family was speeding towards a financial disaster. I was so wound up and frustrated one night, I ended up just crying in Sweetie’s arms.
The next day, I sat my mom down for a talk. I tried to include my dad, as he sometimes seems to feel insulted when he’s left out of things, but he walked away halfway through the talk, as if he just couldn’t handle being involved. My mother had been jokingly referring to me as “her accountant” and telling the contractors who gave her estimates that she had to “get permission from her bookkeeper” but I tried not to get too dictatorial with her. I told her that I’d looked at over 6 months of her actual expenses and that they were much higher than the budget I’d originally done. I said she could go ahead with having the outside of the house painted, which would have been done already if not for the rain, but that I wanted her to put a total stop on any further household improvements for 6 months, and try to see if she could cut back some areas of her spending, emphasizing that it was her money and her choice in how to spend it, but that once it was gone, there would be no bailout available to her. She could make some moderate changes now, or she’d have to make drastic changes later. I explained that there was not much buffer for emergencies and that the only other source of income she’d have would be a reverse mortgage, which still wouldn’t cover her spending at her present level. She didn’t seem too happy about it, but asked for a printed out copy of the budget and said she wasn’t sure how she could cut back but that she’d try.
I thought I’d gotten through to her but a couple of days later when I was back in New York, she called me at work and then said “you know, I’m still going to just go ahead and have the driveway repaved, it’s only a couple thousand dollars.” I just lost it. “No, Mom, do NOT repave the driveway. The driveway is fine. This does NOT add value to the house. You can NOT afford it. Would you rather eat for a couple of months or have a smoother driveway?” I was probably a little too harsh and she got off the phone in a bit of a huff but I think sometimes I have to be harsh to get through to her.
I talked to my sister ZZ a little while later and she said “Mom’s kind of depressed. She’s freaking out about the budget stuff.” ZZ also can’t get her head around the immense amount spent on groceries, but she did have one good idea for cutting some money out of the budget. My parents spend several thousand dollars a year to have someone do their landscaping and shovel in the winter. ZZ pointed out that she and her husband could just visit more often to mow the lawn in the summer, at least, and that they could probably pay some neighborhood kid much less to help shovel in the winter. We’ll see how this works out. I hadn’t originally thought the landscaping was something to be cut because I was focused on not causing my parents any extra stress or discomfort, but I need to think more creatively about it. We’ll all be trying to find ways to balance their budget over the next few months… we’ll see how it goes.
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