haha
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Upsetting thing going on in my extended family. I got a call from a much younger female cousin who said she needed $290 to pay a week in advance at a Day's Inn. I said I will this once, how do I get it to you? She needed it by the next morning, so we decided that I would pay her bill directly to the desk clerk. But he wanted a lot of information from me beyond my CC info, so I got my cousin back on the phone and told her that we would have to try something else. I called my sister who lives in the same city as the cousin to see if she could cover the week and I would reimburse her. Well she told me that this cousin has been living off family members for quite some time, but she had been unable to get employment after losing her job months ago. She had been living in a woman friend's basement, but the woman's boyfriend told her that either cousin must get out, or he would. Hostess decided that she needed boyfriend more than my cousin, so cousin's stuff wound up out in the yard. So this is where I came in.
Sister and I talked a while, and sister said that all the solvent family members had been trying to get now homeless cousin to apply for disability, housing assistance, etc but that she had been dragging her feet.
Sister bawled her out for trying to involve me, 2500 miles away, and I figured that would be that. Next day I got an im- "I'll be at the new hotel in an hour, and I'll call you then". I had decided not to mess up the tough love that my other cousins had been trying to establish, and also to save myself some money and grief, so I texted her that I could not help.
Meanwhile, I am pretty upset. This woman had always worked, but spent too much on travel, expensive apartment and so on. I felt mixed. She was not someone who turned her back on work, but she did overspend and apparently let herself become unemployable.
I told her no, that she had to get public assistance if she was tapped out.
She signed herself into a general hospital psych ward. Everyone hopes that a good social worker will place her and get the assistance applications going. She is too weird to survive long on the street.
In recapping with my sister, I learned that my Dad and his brother had been helping her now dead mother for years, after aunt got divorced and had poor representation. Though aunt kept the children, former hubbie walked off with much of what was left left of aunt's inheritance, and he never paid child support or maintenance. Meanwhile he was sailing in Long Island Sound summers and the Virgin Islands winters. He is now dead also. They were fairly old when they adopted cousin and her brother who is a bigger disaster than she is, but he is also a very unsympathetic character and is able bodied to do labor jobs. He has mostly kept himself together doing farm and construction labor
This newly homeless cousin has always been generous, not only with herself but with her derelict brother's children and others. She is in no way a bad person, just really lacking in sense and unable to say no.
She is the third woman that I have known or know who blew through an adequate inheritance and had no savings to speak of.
Family members and friends can make suggestions and have done so, but we really have no control over self-destructive financial behavior.
Still, it makes me feel awful.
Ha
Sister and I talked a while, and sister said that all the solvent family members had been trying to get now homeless cousin to apply for disability, housing assistance, etc but that she had been dragging her feet.
Sister bawled her out for trying to involve me, 2500 miles away, and I figured that would be that. Next day I got an im- "I'll be at the new hotel in an hour, and I'll call you then". I had decided not to mess up the tough love that my other cousins had been trying to establish, and also to save myself some money and grief, so I texted her that I could not help.
Meanwhile, I am pretty upset. This woman had always worked, but spent too much on travel, expensive apartment and so on. I felt mixed. She was not someone who turned her back on work, but she did overspend and apparently let herself become unemployable.
I told her no, that she had to get public assistance if she was tapped out.
She signed herself into a general hospital psych ward. Everyone hopes that a good social worker will place her and get the assistance applications going. She is too weird to survive long on the street.
In recapping with my sister, I learned that my Dad and his brother had been helping her now dead mother for years, after aunt got divorced and had poor representation. Though aunt kept the children, former hubbie walked off with much of what was left left of aunt's inheritance, and he never paid child support or maintenance. Meanwhile he was sailing in Long Island Sound summers and the Virgin Islands winters. He is now dead also. They were fairly old when they adopted cousin and her brother who is a bigger disaster than she is, but he is also a very unsympathetic character and is able bodied to do labor jobs. He has mostly kept himself together doing farm and construction labor
This newly homeless cousin has always been generous, not only with herself but with her derelict brother's children and others. She is in no way a bad person, just really lacking in sense and unable to say no.
She is the third woman that I have known or know who blew through an adequate inheritance and had no savings to speak of.
Family members and friends can make suggestions and have done so, but we really have no control over self-destructive financial behavior.
Still, it makes me feel awful.
Ha
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