Yeah, we’re kind of going through this in my family as well. My aunt has been jobless for a while now and my grandparents have been supporting her and my cousins. Even inheritance aside, they’re sure as hell not rich and my aunt has now almost GUARANTEED my grandparents will be running out of money before they die, leaving my side of the family to shoulder the burden.
My dad once said, “You don’t want to help people too much.”
No. All that means is that you haven’t resigned from the human race.
Now, if you decided to put your own life savings into attempting to rescue Mom and Sis’s mortgages, with Sis making the investment decisions…
Then you’d have earned the right to do the first self-pitting where people will agree with the OP. 
I wish I had an intelligent answer for what you ought to do now. I don’t.
Where I come from, what mothers do is teach their children to live with the natural consequences of their actions, even if it means being deprived of things they want.
My mom would rescue me from homelessness, but she would never fund a lavish lifestyle that I wanted and couldn’t afford. If I want to borrow money from her, we agree on terms of repayment before I see a cent, and if I don’t honour the terms, I will never see another loan from her, and imho, that’s fair enough.
I loathe this practice. Just about always a huge mistake to engage in imho, no matter who the primary is, family or otherwise, or what the loan is for.
I’ve written about my brother and what he does to my mother. He’s homeless by choice, refuses to work and lives off my money my mother gives him and sandwiches from the homeless shelter. Sure, he’s mentally ill, but he refuses to get help and guilts my mother into giving him more and more.
She’s finally doing something about it, but it’s been a long road.
My mom has a good friend who bought a nice house for her only son (who’s easily in his 50s), who then, despite being unemployed for over year while living in that nice house, decided he needed a nicer house. Which she bought him. So he’s paying about triple the mortgage payment (or, rather, she is) that he was in the first house she bought him, and two years later he STILL is unemployed. I don’t know all the details, but it just makes me sick to see someone take advantage of their mother like that.
But ultimately, you can’t stop people from doing stupid stuff. Even when they get utterly burned in the process.
Hey, if it’s any consolation, I’m thinking of going back to college in one or two years, for a degree which should allow me to get jobs with better conditions but worse pay than my current and last few ones.
One of the things that had me waffling about the idea is that I’m my mother’s primary caretaker.
One of the things that strengthens my resolve is that I know that if I have money in the bank and it’s not earmarked, Mom will do her best to be the one who spends it. She already owes me 3K that were supposed to be for fixing the small bathroom (and I’ll kill Middlebro for saying “oh, I’ll do it” and doing a fuckup job that actually lowered the value of the flat) but which has gone into… unknown places. Unknown?
Sorry: I’m willing to pay for The Nephew to go to college; I’m willing to pay for Mom to be able to live on her own. I’m not willing to pay for Mom’s clothes bought in the most expensive boutique in town!
Your mother isn’t really interested in helping your sister at all. If she was, she would do what is best for her in the long run, which means teaching her financial responsibility, even though it is hard. She just doesn’t want your sister to be mad at her. Many people confuse these two.
Ask your mom if she would supply an alcoholic with free beer. She is enabling your sister. There is no way this is all going to work out in the end, she is only putting off the inevitable.
Totally totally true. And really, why should they? It’s like a spoiled three year old: why change when your world is perfect? You want something, you don’t want to have to earn it, throw a tantrum or cry and Mom buys it for you, works like a charm. Why on Earth would you voluntarily say “From now on I’m taking nothing I didn’t earn.”
My sister is 48 or thereabouts and talks about having a child. At this stage she wants to adopt “because at my age any kid I had would have flippers and a tail”, but I’ve tried to dissuade her because she wants a kid for the worst possible reason: she wants someone who’ll be young and who she loves and can trust who’ll take care of her and her husband when they’re old.
I’ve tried telling her “It doesn’t always work that way”. I’ve known far more people who ended up working a hell of a lot longer than they really wanted to or would have had to BECAUSE of their kids. My aunt saved enough to retire at 60 but once she did she wasn’t able to do anywhere near the amount of traveling and home renovation she wanted or to sell her house before the market in her neighborhood fell because she had to constantly bail out her grown kids, pay to educate her grandsons, pay for a son-in-law’s $3000 surgery and later his funeral, couldn’t move to a smaller house because a grandson or two were always moving in or out, etc., and at least she’s a thousand times better off than a former boss who cleared almost $1 million when she sold a business but ended up spending most of it on legal fees and rehabs and hospitalizations for her druggie son that she wouldn’t cut off (she went back to work because she had to).
With luck my sister would have a child who’d do what she wanted, but there are just too many kids who are born mentally disturbed or easily led or whatever and won’t be self sufficient even with the best rearing, and frankly I’m not sure my sister would be the best. Currently she’s very wealthy but a really messed up teenager when she’s in her 60s could change that (and even if she was fantastically wealthy, you think Nicole Richie or Paris Hilton are likely to be responsible conservators for their parents when the time comes?).
With jsgoddess, I think you need to do what my mother did with her sister (the aunt mentioned above). My aunt has two kids, a once druggy/alchy son and a clean-living but mega-flakey daughter who’s mother to the two grandsons. Strangely enough, formerly druggy/alchy son actually did straighten up due to a health-scare and a wife who gave him an ultimatum (and who later left him, but it was a friendly divorce). He’s been self-supporting for the last 20 years and does everything for his mom that she needs done as he lives close by, but she’s given probably 5 times as much to her daughter and the grandsons (whose inheritances should come out of the daughter’s portion) as she has for the son. My mother told her “You need to remember that when you make your will” and “You should put his name on your house and other valuables so that if he ever needs to he’ll have full power to sell/lease/administrate/etc.” (he actually is reliable and trustworthy to the best of our knowledge). She did this.
My cousin- his sister- still things she’s down for either 50% or 25% in the will (the 25% being if her 2 sons are figured as equal heirs) and she’s not. Nowhere close. And she and her sons have been (to quote Coupland) “pulling the plug and slicing the pie” in their minds for years. When my aunt dies (which I hope won’t be anytime soon) I’m going to make some popcorn, pull up a chair and watch, cause it’s gonna be good.
But jsgoddess would not, imho, be out of line in asking her mother to remember the inequity of distribution in life when she makes her will. From what it sounds like, js would be one helluva lot more likely to take care of her mother in the event of incapacity as well.