Brought to you by the EveryDollar app. Start budgeting for free today. So I've been married for about 10 years. My husband and I have three kids.
Y'all are in it right now. Yeah, so hopefully you don't hear any screaming. We've got kids at our house too. It's all good.
Thanks. We're happy. We've been working really hard financially, so we both work. We're working really well towards our goals.
So the reason I'm calling today is I like to try and turn around and pay it forward. And so we've been helping my mom out. So my mom, she's a single lady. She has my sister who's about 11.
And they have been moving in and out of apartments, not great apartments and such. And so we're blessed enough to have two houses. We live in one, and they both have Airbnb basements. So we decided to rent the second one, the top level, to my mom and my sister.
And with the condition of like, hey, we're going to be Airbnb-ing the basement because we live near ski resorts. So that's been really good for us. And she understood that. And we give her reduced rent.
We do make her pay rent, but reduced just because we want to help her out. Sure. Yeah. And it's been a couple years, and we've kind of run into some major problems.
Yeah. What are the problems? She kind of is a hoarder. And so at first it wasn't bad, but it like accumulates over time, which at first I was like, you know what?
Like I'm going to let her like live in the house the way she wants to, as long as the outside of the house is okay. But long story short, we now have a cockroach infestation in the house, which is really bad. And we got a lot of like bad Airbnb reviews. And so we just had to cut the Airbnb income, which is not great.
And so we're trying to navigate that because I obviously we want to help my mom. But at the same time, it's kind of biting us in the butt. So I'm calling to see if you have any recommendations. Yeah.
Remember this line. The tension is the path. Okay So that sounds all woo woo where the uncomfortable conversation is that where you got to head directly Yeah And so you guys know what has to happen here Either there two there two things you know have to happen Either she got to move out and you have to have extremitors come in You're going to have to do some work on that place and get it back up and running. Or she gets to stay under some very strict new rules.
One of which is no hoarding. We're going to have a cleaning crew. We're going to do some of those things. And you'll know that one of those two things has to be true.
And so the path is not trying to figure out a nice way to do that because it's nothing you do moving forward. It's going to be received as nice. Yeah. And you've probably been doing this dance your whole life, right?
Yeah, unfortunately. Yeah. And it breaks my heart for you, breaks my heart for your mom, especially this 11-year-old little girl. Uh-huh.
Yeah. But you all have to take that path directly towards it. And now, if you sit down and say, here's not, hey, mom, we need to, but hey, this is what's going to happen next. If you want to stay in this house, we're going to have a cleaner come in.
We're going to have all this stuff that's going to have to be removed. And we're going to have somebody come in every 30 days and check the house. If you want to stay here, great. Will she pack up and move and throw a fit?
Or would she exhale and say, thank you? I honestly don't know. I think it could go either way. So that's kind of tricky.
And if you say nothing and you do nothing, the house just goes into further. It ends up with her leaving at some point. Yeah. And so also, here's another great line to put your back pocket.
Choose guilt over resentment. Choose the guilt of the hard conversation and not she doesn't deserve your resenting her existence. And if you let her live there and just destroy this house from the inside out, I'm going to put that back in your court because you didn't want to have hard conversations because it's going to make you feel bad. It's going to hurt your mom's feelings.
and so every time her phone you pick up your phone and she's called in you're gonna resent the fact that she's there you're gonna resent the fact she's calling you you're gonna resent the fact that she didn't have a little bit of that now because you've had to close the airbnb yeah like i like and you even knew like well she kind of a hoarder but as long as she keeps it here and as long as you knew how it gonna end right and so it you just saying okay i gonna own what i got to own here And then I going to create what happens next Yeah One way I could see it going too and I love to hear your thoughts is like us laying the ground rules Like, hey, this needs to happen in order for you to stay. And her, like, saying, like, oh, yeah, sure. And then not really following them. So how would you navigate that?
Like, you give her one warning and then say, sorry, we're going to end your lease? Well, I would put some things in place. Like, a cleaning crew will come here every 30 days or every two weeks. I'm going to put that on your rent.
Or we're going to cover it, but somebody will be here every two weeks. if we're going to double the trash service. I would put some very concrete things in place that are really outside of her control. These things are going to happen.
To help her. To help her, yeah. Because these are things to like her. Correct, yeah.
This is in service of her and of the home. But to your point, Aubrey, if for some reason it's just unmanageable and the cleaners are like, we can't even... We can't get in the door. Yeah, then all of it...
Yeah, then to me, that's her then breaking the boundary that you guys set. And that's on her at that point, not you. So she has, in that sense, dislaced herself because she didn't keep the rules of the property, which any landlord would have, right? On the planet, yeah.
It's just messy that it's her daughter, right? Was she kicked out of – you said that she was going from apartment to apartment. Was she kicked out of these places, or she just had to find a new location or cheaper rent? Or, like, what was the reasons before that?
One, I think she was politely kicked out. And the other one, I actually don't know, but I know she got in a big actual legal disagreement with the landlord over her security deposit. Okay. Yeah.
So she has a history of not being a great tenant, right? Yeah, and we knew that. And maybe another thing to put on the table, if y'all are in a financial position, is to say, we're going to pay for six months for you to go see somebody finally. And you've had a hard life.
We know you've had a hard life. and you struggle with various mental health challenges and emotional challenges, we're going to put, we've got six months of counseling, we're going to put that, but this is contingent. If you want to stay, you've got to go see somebody and we're going to pay for it. Interesting.
I hadn thought of that That a great suggestion Thank you That might give her an excuse to go fine I go see somebody so I can keep my house but it lets her hang on to like the illusion of dignity while going to actually get the care that she knows She knows she needs I never met a hoarder who wants to be in that situation Yeah. Right. But it's a compulsion. It's just this inner engine that just keeps running.
And so maybe that's another way to help. But it's going to come down to you having some really clear firm. Here's the boundary. And here's the exit strategy if and when this happens.
Or your husband, where is he in the picture? Is he overly frustrated? Is he like done? Or does he have like tons of grace and he's on the other side of you even?
he so i i kind of poor guy i kind of put him in as a mediator because my mom and i don't have a great history okay i basically do it for my little sister and he's on board with that 100 on board yeah he's definitely like on the frustrated side yeah um because we've had to replace the fridge because she was you know putting too much stuff in the fridge and other things okay so aubrey i'm gonna ask john yeah you have to really depend on that yeah you can't put him in that situation you have to be the one okay yeah yeah that's fair hug him and say thank you for going first and he went out on a shield for you and it's time for you to just to step up and y'all can do it together obviously but um my rule of thumb is the the child of the parent needs to go first yeah yeah that's fair it's hard it's hard i mean we get calls and not necessarily with this specific thing but whenever a grown adult passes their parent yes and they end up having the parents their parents do you know what i mean like from that emotional side all of it like it's just it's it's really really hard um so i think y'all's generosity and you lending out kind of all the branch to her wanting to help her in life and for your sister i understand that's part of the motivation it's just so beautiful it's so wonderful but being able to do it i think in a way that's good for you guys too right that you're not yes is there a chance your sister can move in with you oh i I would wish that, but I don't think that's ever going to be a possibility. Yeah, y'all got some hard conversations to have. I would sit down with your husband and y'all write these things out, and I would probably put everything in writing, and then y'all sit down and have the next hard conversation. The tension is the path here.
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