Exactly! Thank you.

They also could have purchased the home for themselves as an investment^[1], and rented it out to me for the price of the mortgage. I know people with families who did just that. It would have been a win-win.

I accept my mistakes and agency. I’m mostly upset by the lack of communication in our family. Until very recently, my parents have been relentlessly secretive about money due to my dad’s deep-seated insecurities and shame (he didn’t share what his income was with his own wife for decades), which I view as a problem separate and discrete from his poverty trauma about spending money.

It seems like you’ve at least had an accurate perception of your parents’ wealth. After my parents rescued me from homelessness, I spent two years unable to get out of bed due to depression, because I thought I had brought financial ruin on my entire family and that we were a week away from living on the streets.

The only thing I knew was that we had $50k in credit card debt. I knew nothing about their $300k in stocks and $2M in retirement savings. I assumed they had maybe $200k in retirement savings, at most, one or two mortgages, and were living paycheck to paycheck (because that is the only sane reason to have credit card debt IMO). It was only after hearing my lamentations for years that my mom finally shared their true status. The removal of that weight from my shoulders is the only thing that has allowed me to get my life back together.

I have a friend whose parents bought an investment home and rented it out to their son after he graduated college and started working. He never asked. His parents just did it, because were smart enough to know that that would save him money while also making money for themselves. If my parents had been as open about their financial situation as I was to them, we could have planned intelligently and done something similar and saved at least $200k together. But they are social basket cases in addition to being financially illiterate. I still love them though.

We’re all in different stages of life, but pretty much, yeah

He’s never psychologically recovered from the poverty he experienced in childhood. I’m sympathetic, but I wish he hadn’t unnecessarily extended that trauma to us.

The median family of retirement age has just $200k in savings.

From the perspective of my generation, having tenure at 40 is financial security. That’s a guaranteed job for life with excellent benefits. Inheriting half a million dollars soon afterwards is just a cherry on top. They’ve wasted a lot of money through their financial illiteracy.

yes

They will never, ever take a vacation. My dad refuses to spend money. He lets my mom control all the finances and blow money needlessly on credit card interest, because they can’t communicate.

It was a place I was renting. I was desperate to stay there because I was settled in and didn’t want to move into an apartment. I had a piano (heirloom) and home theater (purchased when I was doing well financially). I got a series of roommates to make it more affordable after my girlfriend left. I was unemployed for a long period, which caused most of the financial trouble. If I had been able to get another job (a friend offered me a better paying job literally three months after I went bankrupt and moved out of the state), it might have worked out.

They are very bad with money. At one point they took out a second mortgage to buy more stocks. They are both living in the future and don’t communicate. My mom’s biggest financial aspiration is buying a new oven. The reason she has sacrificed so much to make her stocks go up is because she believes that God will make her rich and that windfall will force my dad accept Christ as his lord and savior, thus saving her marriage.

I had to get them both to admit to themselves that they weren’t going to move into a different home before they die, which made my mom tear up. They never planned to raise their kids in this home (it’s not big enough), and now their kids are nearly forty.

My dad has not retired yet because he doesn’t believe he can afford to (he says he’ll retire next year, but only because he’s being pushed out). He doesn’t believe he can afford anything at all. He complains that “rich people” in our college town have purchased investment homes for their kids to rent, which he could have easily done himself, at least three times over. I never thought to ask for help because he always made it seem like we were a week away from living on the streets.

Especially considering their housing costs are near zero, and it’s among the cheapest places in the US to live.

Average lifespan in the US is 78

That’s life expectancy at birth. Life expectancy at 75 for men is ~87.

Yes! My dad is very ADHD. I forced him to ask his doctor for a prescription this year. His first week on Ritalin was the very first time he was able to grade an entire exam without taking a break, he said.

When I told my mom I was making $35,000/year, she thought I was doing great, because that was their income when they started out (in 1980 when rent their rent was $200). She’s a Republican and does not believe that America is in decline.

I have two siblings

I never wanted them to touch their retirement savings. FYI their total net worth is about $3 million (maybe more).

If I were them and had $500k in cash twenty years ago—inherited money which could not be invested into a 401(k) or IRA—I would have at least saved enough for my kids’ college tuition, instead of saddling them with student loans, even if I didn’t give them a cent towards a home. Instead, they bought rural land out somewhere so they could pretend to be farmers, and my mom burned at least $150k by day trading.

They have 2 million dollars in retirement savings that are entirely separate from the $128k $300k+ in other savings

did you actually personally see all these financial statements?

Yes. I have the login credentials to their two accounts with Merrill Lynch, and my dad’s 401(k) with Fidelity. I personally reallocated the funds in the latter account on behalf of my dad, with his permission, to my recommendation. Those three accounts are over $2 million total.

On second thought, there is one investment account which I have not seen, which is my mom’s etrade with $112k. I have no reason to doubt her though, based on their other (personally verified) assets.

That’s a good point with the car analogy. A lot of times I feel like we should level this 1960s house and start all over, but spending that kind of money would give my dad a heart attack.

The cPTSD is something I’ve only recently begun to suspect about myself; I haven’t yet discussed it with my psychiatrist. It started when I googled “why do cute things make me cry” and the first result landed me on a related post on the cPTSD subreddit. Then I started recalling all the times that I became extremely, inexplicably emotional when watching tender family moments play out in animated TV shows.

For example: there is an episode of Rick and Morty that ends with Morty crying on his bed (or maybe he was just visibly upset—I don’t remember), because he had just broken up with his first girlfriend and was experiencing a painful new emotion for the first time. It was very sad—something that might even bring a reasonably well-adjusted viewer to tears if they were emotionally invested in the story and could identify with the characters. But that’s not what hit me.

Morty’s mom, Beth, hears him crying and walks into his room, up to his bed, sits next to him, embraces him (😮), strokes him (😱) and says “there, there. Mommy’s here… mommy’s here…” Morty sobs… but I start sobbing harder than a five-year-old kid who just watched a movie where the dog dies. WTF!? I was shocked. “OMG. Parents can do that!? That would have felt SO good,” I thought. I tried to think: What would my parents would have done thirty years ago in that scenario? I think they would both gawk in horror at me—IF they noticed my distress at all. Hugging me would not have even crossed their mind—I am dead serious. Speaking soothing words would also have been beyond their skill set.

Then the whole prolonged trauma thing made sense. It’s not a single event that made me cry myself to sleep one night and left me with trauma, it’s the accumulation of mini traumas with zero emotional guidance.

I tried as hard as I could to recall a hug from my parents. I think I hugged them at the airport or something a couple times… I think (as a formality). Phrases never uttered in my childhood household include:

• “How are you?”
• “How was your day?”
• “I love you.”
• “I’m proud of you.”
• “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
• “Are you okay?”

I’ve been so focused on removing the shackles of debt my whole adult life that I haven’t thought much about it. You’re right, what are they going to do to my parents if they don’t pay it? Ruin their credit rating? Don’t need that anymore. Pull their Social Security? I doubt it.

Yes. I posted that when I had just finally learned the full truth about their financial situation. I walked away without reading any replies, because the subject was too much to deal with at the time. I should qualify that I later learned that some of that $600k included one of my dad’s IRA’s which was simply moved to another investment firm, so not all of that decrease represented losses by my mom—I could probably log in and calculated the exact amount if I really cared to (I don’t)—however, I know that there were other accounts in the past that she moved from ~$150k to $0 through panic trading, and I could glean from that $600k account that her choice of stocks in the long term (~20 years) performed significantly below market average, despite good performance over the past few years (as is typical). So my depiction of the situation was still emotionally accurate.

I have enough experience with life to know that it leaves a lot of people fucked up through little or no fault of their own. I have sympathy, and see them as deeply flawed people trying their best. They are playing out the role of parents that was modeled to them in their own childhood. I’m trying to balance kindness towards them with vocalizing my trauma. It’s particularly hard with my mom, because it breaks her heart to hear about that stuff.