by Tricia
Back in April, I asked who knows about your debt?. Today, I received a comment from Susan that said
“I have mixed feelings about rather you should share your debt problems with family members or not. I have a sister and brother-in-law who filed bankruptcy after a two year long battle of trying to stay afloat with their finances. They lost two homes they own. It was a tremendous burden on the whole entire family not just THEM going through it. We all gave money to them and I loaned them one of my cars hoping my sister would go to work and bring more of an income in to help her husband because she wasn’t working when he lost his job. However, my sister’s health was too poor and her husband had triple bypass surgery and he wasn’t able to work. This whole incident caused my bipolar to go out of control and I was hospitalized twice in that two year time. It hurt me financially and now I am in debt. So I ask you does having a family member sharing their debt burden with the family help? It takes a toll on everyone. Every family member in OUR family suffered because of it.”
As of right now, the only family members that know about our debt are our parents. It felt good to finally let go of our little debt secret and tell them. So far it has gone well and has brought about some interesting conversations. Who better to swap financial tidbits with than your family? (That’s as long as you get along with them, of course.)
To bring more persective to this, there is a blogger that is facing something similar to this. JW Thornhill at Need to Be Debt Free found out in February that his daughter’s house was in foreclosure. In his words,
“I’m additionally upset because they waited so long (9 months) before saying anything.”
Here we have a man who is trying to do the best for his family and pay off their outstanding debts. Now he has a grown daughter (and her family) in financial trouble and he is putting his debt reduction on hold to help her. In fact, they are letting them move in with them for a while.
I’ve been thinking about Susan’s comment all day and thinking about JW’s situation. I can definitely understand how Susan feels because I have had problems develop for myself as a result of other’s problems. But I keep thinking of JW’s words about how it took so long before his daughter said anything.
I think that’s a key point. My idea about discussing debt is to not wait until after it gets so bad. If you waited, everyone in the family would then be in “reactive” mode and yes, the stress would probably spread through the family. I think we should be talking about it before the debt situation gets to that point. But I know how difficult it is to even start the discussion. I didn’t even bring up our debt to our parents until we started making progress with paying it off and turning things around.
Being in debt and admitting your financial mistakes to family and friends is definitely not an easy thing to do.
