IMO, the grasshoppers are adults, let them take responsibility for their actions.
This seems a bit better suited to IMHO than GD.
[ /Moderating ]
Ditto.
Two of my uncles helped pay for my brothers and me to go to college (Dad had been unemployed for over a year and his new job didn’t pay that well); they got every penny repaid but they loaned it on the condition that “this is money I don’t need, so you pay it back if and when you can;” their choice, Mom wanted to set up a formal loan and pay back interest and Dad’s sister threatened with kicking her out of her house if she ever said anything that stupid again. If I’d known how much my own college was going to come up to, I would have gone to a cheaper one closer to home… but dangit, going where I did turned out so well that I can’t believe the other one would have been anywhere as good. Would I have gone without a college education if I’d had to? Of course. But when there’s two siblings who don’t have children or whose children don’t want to go to college, making the nephews who do want to go to college become supermarket cashiers instead (and no, my parents weren’t on the grasshopper side) would suck.
My brother and SiL make good money, but if they’re ever in the situation of having to tell their children “it doesn’t matter that you went the college track and did well and want to go, you can’t go because we can’t pay” and I can, my bank account will open up wider than any whore’s legs ever did. If it’s so SiL can go on spending the equivalent of a car mechanic’s salary in Mango every month, then they’re cordially welcome to KMA.
I’m more Ant than Grasshopper, but based on car-crash statistics, I’d like to add that spending N years “saving for tomorrow” has a limit on how wise it is. Remembering that tomorrow exists is important, but you have to find an equilibrium point between “living in the now and letting tomorrow take care of itself” and “living for tomorrow”.
/soapbox
As nashiitashii indicates, from reading the OP it sounds like Mrs. Grasshopper was the driving force behind their wild, grasshopper nature.
Has she ever been employed thoroughout this whole experience? How old are these people? And why is it only Mr. Ant, out of all the extended family, that is burdened with this dilemma? Doesn’t anyone else have any money?
The Ants don’t owe the Grasshoppers a damn thing, and they’d be extremely foolish to give them any money. If they do, the Grasshoppers won’t have to deal with the consequences of their past actions, and they’ll simply squander the Ants’ money, then have to ask for more. Regardless of what happens, the Grasshoppers will never change and will always resent the Ants, either for not helping them enough or not helping them at all.
This will not have a happy ending unless the Grasshoppers realize that their past actions have led to their present consequences, and they need to change, rather than expecting the Ants to bail them out. I really hope the Ants don’t cave in to the family’s guilt trip.
I find OPs that reduce human lives to children’s story parables to be dubious at best.
:dubious:
What nuances do you believe are missing here?
The Ants don’t owe the Grasshoppers anything.
But if it were my brother, I’d have a hard time letting him starve, go without a reliable car, or his kids not get college educations. (I’m not sure where I stand on helping him keep his present house. Then again, he’s got enough Ant in him that that doesn’t seem like a problem I’ll ever have to face. And we’re talking a house somewhere between starter house and McMansion).
So I don’t think I could wave good-bye casually as I set off on a cruise, but I wouldn’t catch up the mortgage payments or pay off the credit cards. (I might have agreed to keep up with the mortgage payments if the Grasshoppers promised to sell the house as soon as possible and buy a more modest one. Simple concrete actions with promises of not so much payback, but changes in behavior which will help keep the hole from getting bigger. Payback is of course desirable.)
Why? The parable existed as a metaphor for human behaviour in the first place.
As an ant, I don’t help bail out grasshoppers (at least, not in a large way).
They simply won’t learn how to do it themselves if the work is done for them.
Pfft. I’m a proactive ant. Not only do I never spend money on anything, I also invent financial crisises out of thin air to hit up my grasshopper sister for mo’ money, which goes right into low MER index funds and long term investments. If she had the money, she’d just blow it on handbags and shoes anyway, so she’ll thank me later for it. 
Sis sometimes asks my how it is that I make so much more money than she does, own absolutely nothing aside from my SDMB membership, shops at the goodwill and dent&scratch, and could still be constantly in financial difficulty. They’re not called grasshoppers because they’re smart.
Well for example, ants and grasshoppers are not in fact models of industry vs. models of waste. Ants and grasshoppers do what they do because they are programmed to do it, it’s not a CHOICE for them, and of course the real point of the parable is that the ant and the grasshopper’s behavior are choices, one set good, one set bad.
I am also always amused by the fact that everyone in threads like these self-identifies as an ant. Grasshoppers do not start such threads. Kinda makes a guy wonder just how self-serving this metaphor is. :dubious:
In sum, admiring the industry of an ant vs. the wastrel ways of an grasshopper is about as meaningful as admiring the purposefulness of a shovel vs. the lazy sloth of a trivet, and a pretty good sign that a ton of BS is headed your way. It could well be that what one person views as wastrel ways is actually a reasonable response to another person’s life experiences. You don’t really know, do you? And one thing I’ve noticed is that ants typically arent’ very good at puttting themselves in another species’ shoes. Must be all the legs.
In my opinion, the “ants” owe them absolutely nothing. From my past experience, if they are bailed out, they will probably turn up 6 months later with their hands out again, because they won’t have learned anything.
It is normally a bad idea to help someone out before they have acted to correct the problem themselves, or at least tried. If the grasshoppers are in so much financial trouble then he needs to sell the house, sell any luxury goods or similar, and the pair of them find any job they can. If they have done all of this and need temporary help paying the rent on a small apartment or something similar, that may be different.
But paying for someone to have luxuries you never had, with your retirement money? Why?
Please tell me this is a joke?
You, uh, didn’t do well with the “analogies” section of your English aptitude tests, did you? 
Might’ve had issues with that whole “Greek mythology” section, as well. Especially the part that includes Aesop. Didja fall asleep that day? 
If I was Mr. Ant, I wouldn’t bail out brother Grasshopper on the scale described in the OP. Filing for bankruptcy or losing a house they couldn’t really afford is not the end of the world. However, once that’s done, I would probably offer some money while they’re adjusting to life on Mr. Grasshopper’s lower salary. Not a huge amount, but whatever I could spare that I thought would be genuinely helpful and not enabling. Like money toward a reliable car or first and last month’s deposit on a rental, something like that.
I don’t have time to answer each reply (though I thank you all) but to clarify some questions:
Mr. Ant is just turned 54 (and planned/plans to retire at 55), Mr. Grasshopper is one or two years younger, depending on whether his birthdays has passed.
Mr. Grasshopper DOES have a job, has had it for about 4 months now, but it pays about a third less than his previous one. He’s still job hunting for something on the level of the previous job, but it’s well over a year now so I don’t really think he’ll land one soon enough to prevent the financial implosion.
Mrs. Grasshopper does’t work. As I remember it, she quit her job the day after Mr. Grasshopper got promoted to his first ‘managerial level’ job and hasn’t worked since, except for charity volunteering things.
Both of them are in reasonable health, but Mrs. really has no qualifications. She could get some training, but, well, it would take a real attitude adjustment for her, and I don’t think she’s there yet.
They have two children. The elder is out of college and living with/on the way to marrying a nice guy. The son is finishing his senior year at college. I’ve never heard that either has grad school type ambitions.
The Ants had three children. One died in a car accident, the other two are out on their own and seem to be self-supporting, though I think both got hefty chunks of money for down payments from the parents for the condos they live in.
The Grasshopper house IMO is a lost cause: they could barely keep up with the payments before, no way can they afford them now. Selling it would have been a great move last year (in hindsight) but the market in this area has not just stalled but started to deflate. I think they need to accept the loss and sell the house for whatever it will bring, since every speculation I’ve seen lately seems to expect prices to be flat or declining for at least the next year or two.
As for others in the family helping out – we are, we have been. In particular, a few of us chipped in to buy the Grasshopper’s a reliable car to use, though it’s in the name of one of my uncles for obvious reasons. A larger group of us have also paid for much of his son’s junior year college expenses, and ALL of the senior year costs. Not that I’m claiming this was a big hit on us – I have five brothers/sisters, my mother was the youngest of seven children, and my father had three brothers. Add in nephew/nieces/cousins/children of cousins… we’re a large group. But while we are willing to help the kid finish college and other basic necessities, we don’t want to support the Grasshoppers so much they don’t feel the need to adjust their way of life down to what they can afford to pay themself.
What’s happening is that the Grasshoppers aren’t ready to ‘downsize’ their lifestyle. They seem to still believe that Mr. will land that great new job any day now, and so giving up the house would be foolish. But banks aren’t into having faith and waiting, and so, knowing that Mr.Ant has a sizable amount of stored money (he’s never said how much, and it’s not our business, but to be enough to fund an early retirement and travel it HAS to to sizable) Mr. and Mrs. Grasshopper are doing their best to guilt Mr. Ant into at least getting the mortgage up to date and subsidizing it ‘just until’ Mr. Grasshopper gets that job.
It would be a ‘loan’ of course, they say…but you know what they say about loans: consider the money gone forever, and maybe you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Which is where we came in.
That’s going to be tough, as I know what you mean by her getting a job she’s qualified for would necessitate needing a real attitude adjustment. (Some of that is also her being in need of a reality check, as, well, when you’re out of the workforce for that long, you’re not going to be qualified to do a whole lot upon reentry.) At this point, though, even her getting some sort of part time paid work would help.
Also, as for that “great new job” prospect that hasn’t been happening for over a year, they need another reality check because they weren’t able to afford their lifestyle when he had the big job. Now that they’re struggling even more, they’ve been getting a lot of financial handouts to keep them modestly afloat. It’s even worse that they missed the window of opportunity they had in the past to scale down the house a little bit and now would have trouble selling it because of the real estate market in the area. Since you guys have helped in the past, it might be time to fork over some “tough love” and withdraw whatever financial support they’ve been receiving, or require that they seek credit counseling as part of the financial help.
As for the issue of the kid going through college, are they completely unqualified for loans? Since they’re seemingly not interested in grad school, a little bit of debt from student loans isn’t going to hurt their future, and teach them a little about what financial independence costs. Is the tuition at the school expensive in comparison to state schools, or is it a lower cost of tuition and fees than a private school? (If you’re paying $40k + per year for this kid to go to college, then maybe a little of that can be paid with loans.) The issue isn’t with punishing the kid, but with making the parents realize that your financial support isn’t a crutch with which to lean their excessive lifestyle on.
I have a Grasshopper sister, who hasn’t been living high off the hog, but who sponged off our parents for as long as they let her. She’s divorced and has two (now adult) children, so my parents didn’t want to see them do without. She’s had numerous low-level jobs throughout her life, but they never seem to “work out”. She’s living with (and sort of sponging off) her son right now, and has just gotten a job. Her kids have no intention of supporting her for the rest of her life. They started out in a hole as she took out credit cards in their names and ruined their credit before they were adults. The long and the short of it is, she never had to support herself, and once my mother cut her off financially, she’s been struggling.
My parents infantalized her and then couldn’t understand why she wasn’t out there supporting herself. Tough love seems to be the only answer. 50 is a little late to grow up and realize the world doesn’t owe you a living, but it’s just what my sister and the OP Grasshopper need to learn. Mrs. Grasshopper “isn’t ready” to work? Too bad. They “aren’t ready” to let go of the house they can’t afford? Too bad. Life doesn’t care how ready you are when it throws challenges at you. You just have to do your best to deal with them.
StG
This is ridiculous. She needs to make some money, even if it means working the checkout lane at a grocery store or Walmart. There are plenty of jobs that don’t require qualifications, and they all pay something. For them to be asking for money from somebody else when she’s not working is a blatant slap in the face.
If it were my brother and his wife (it wouldn’t be - they’re both pretty industrious), I’d invite them into my home, let them use my truck, let them eat my food and drink my beer… but there’s no way I’d make a mortgage payment for somebody who refuses to work.