I can totally relate to that. The reason my parents are helping my sister and not me is because I defied their parental authority. When I decided to leave Europe to go spend 2 years in America to get my MS degree, they forbade me to go. They threatened to cut me off, using my inheritance as leverage. I went anyway and since then I have clearly been paying for my "disobedience", especially since I never came back (I had not planned on staying in America, but even the best plans have hickups; I didn't plan on finding the woman of my life right here in America). Now don't get me wrong, I love my parents to death and we have remained very very close, even after my moving away (I am closer to my parents than my wife is close to her mom living down the street from us). But, nonetheless, they are far more generous with my sister and, as I mentioned earlier, they are in the process of building her a house. But I am not envious of my sister. They use that leverage to get her to do everything they require, often trampling all over her private life. She often gets upset and angry, but she realizes that the relationship with my parents is a complex one based on mutual dependency. On the other hand, they have no leverage over me. I do as I please. I actually think that, on some level, my sister is envious of the freedom I have. My cousins who have received large sums of money from their parents are also very "tied" to their parents, some willingly, some not so willingly.