Do you hail from the kind of family where money is freely lent and borrowed? Some do, and they will always turn to the Bank of Mum and Dad (or Aunty Flo) as the best option to get their short or long term borrowing needs met. It’s probably more to do with habit and a lack of experience of dealing with commercial borrowing, since I know that not all of these borrowers are happy with their easy deal.
We all need debt help from time to time, but there is something about the uncertainty of not knowing what the terms of borrowing are, that is infeasibly stressful.
You may or may not believe me when I say that I have heard some of these people complain that the debts get written off. I am serious. At least with your main banking provider you know exactly where you stand, and they won’t be at all interested in the fact that your car failed its MOT this month and you’re consequently a little shorter than you expected. If you want to get me started on the gripes and complaints of the lenders, then that’s even easier. They complain with a shrug that ‘Debbie must think I’m made of money,’ yet they keep lending. Sometimes they can’t really afford to, and see the loan as a gift, even though they’ve been told: ‘I’ll pay you back.’ It’s like an unspoken contract, with both parties pulling the wool over their own eyes. (There is no need for duplicity since the other party is colluding in their own self-deception.) The thing is that ‘Debbie’ almost certainly means what she says at the time, but the trouble with borrowing money is that we do it because we’re short of it.
When our needs increase a bit further down the line, this shortage becomes even more uncomfortable and obviously the most important debts get paid off first. This means that the mortgage, rent, credit card, electricity and grocery bill will always take precedence over Dad’s money. So why do we do it? Borrow from family, that is. I guess it is because the precedent has been set. Traditionally parents help out their children. Maybe the happiest parents (and adult children) set a cut-off point for this kind of help and have stuck to it. Maybe it would be best for the over-indulgent parents concerned to invite their offspring to source a good deal in the market place and then offer to better it, on more formal terms.
This might be enough to break the pattern of dependency and lack of responsibility without it being too shocking a first step in that direction. It would almost certainly be doing their children a favour, and even those who still delight when a debt is written off will, on some level, be desiring an adult and autonomous relationship with their own money and would rather be in debt to Mr Barclay, Nat West or HSBC than to their own Mum and Dad, ever infantilised and part of a game where everybody knows the outcome, but nobody’s telling
Money gets tight, sometimes you come up short its rediculous to run to the bank of Mom and Dad consistantly. We live in a society that lives beyound our means, people need to scale back and be realistic. I liked your comment about families that have established a cut off point and stuck to it, the other thing not addressed is education. We need to be teaching (and practicing) our offspring to live within their means, and then once we do that these money emergencies will be far and few between.