I recently wrote about the retirement issue of having most of your wealth tied up in your home. You can read about that at House-Rich Cash-Poor in Retirement. This post is covering a different topic and I do use my own mother to present the topic. While she is the center point and, in some ways, this is a letter to her, it is also something many retirees struggle with. The money is either available or available for access but you worry about your kids — leaving them with less or leaving them with debt. For some, the hardest part of retirement is spending the money.
My mother has wanted to redo her bathroom for quite some time. She mentions it periodically the way you would mention the weather, lightly, in passing, never as something that has intention. Her bathroom is dated and she would love a new one. She has the means to do it tomorrow. She will not though.
My mother turns eighty-four this August. She lives in a home she owns free and clear. By most measurements she would be considered beyond comfortable. Despite this, which I always tell her, she lives as though one hard winter will force her into bankruptcy.
Let me be clear about what I mean, because this is not a story about a woman scraping by. My mother is not poor. She has a paid-off home, a paid-off rental property that has earned its keep for over twenty years and savings that have quietly grown rather than shrunk. She could go to a nice dinner whenever she likes. She could see a show. She could say yes to almost any small good thing the day puts in front of her. The money is there. What is missing is the permission. Somewhere across a lifetime of being careful and taking care of others, the idea of spending on herself stopped occurring to her at all.
Soon my mother will be picking up a new puppy she has named Lexie. After years of trying to persuade her, I finally won the battle. A companion. Something to love and walk and keep her company. I know there is a part of her excited and joyful but most of the time is spent working out how to cover all of the costs. The food, the vet. The small recurring things. I watched my mother do anxious arithmetic over a dog she could afford many times over. It was just one more sign of the distance between what she has and how she lets herself live.
Before I continue, I want to be clear that my Mom lives a simple life and she is happy. She would do for others and tap into money to help others without hesitation. Her reasoning is that a new bathroom would be nice but it isn’t necessary. Her sinks drains, the toilet flushes, and she can take a shower. My point — after a lifetime of taking care of others — is that you deserve everything that will bring joy to your life. Not everything has to be necessary.
Here is the part that is frustrating. Her net worth has grown not purely from a disciplined personal finance approach — she taught me budgeting using the many decades old envelope system. It has grown because she does not spend on herself. She has spent more of her money on me than herself. When I have needed help, the help came before I even finished asking. Very recent example, I recently mentioned wanting to get a cross necklace. She knows I am spending a lot on two kids headed off to college and likely would not spend the money. A day later, I noticed a Venmo alert. Yes, you guessed it, my Mom had sent $1,000 to me for a cross.
Her savings are strong because she will spend on others but not on the person who truly earned the right to treat herself. She built a cushion for everyone but herself.
My father has been gone since January 2004. He was one part of the story I share at Blessings Come From the Worst of Times. On the night he passed, I promised him I would take care of my mom, and watching over what she has is one of the ways I keep that promise. The rental home that is supposed to help support her came out of the hardest financial season of my life, a story I tell in a book I am writing and one I will share here another day. What matters here is that it has done its quiet job every month for twenty years, exactly as it was meant to. She was always meant to live on what it provides. She simply has trouble believing that.
The small joys only ask her for permission. The bigger ones ask for more. She would love to build a Carolina room off the back of the house, somewhere to sit in the evening and watch the deer step out along the tree line. She would love that new bathroom. Either one runs into real money, the kind that at her age would mean borrowing against the home she worked her whole life to own outright. And that is where she stops cold. She does not want to leave me with debt. She says it plainly, as if it settles the matter.
It settles nothing, because I do not want the house and I do not want the inheritance. I have told her so more times than she wants to hear. I want her to have the Carolina room while she is here to sit in it. I want her to watch the deer. The thing she is guarding, the money she means to leave behind, is the exact thing I have been trying to hand back to her for years.
I have built a blog, and a book, around a single conviction.
Blessings Come From the Worst of Times.
Losing my father was the worst of times. The blessing I did not see coming was the years I have been given to look after my mother, to make certain that the woman who spent her life taking care of me would never again have a reason to be afraid. I would not trade those years for anything. I only wish I could give her the last piece of it, the part where she finally lets herself believe she is allowed to enjoy what remains.
I am writing this for more than her, because I do not believe she is unusual. There is a whole generation of parents who spent everything they had building a life for their children and never learned how to turn and spend a little of it on themselves. If that is your mother or your father, they may be sitting in a paid-off house this very evening, going without something they want, doing quiet math on a small joy, certain the careful years are not over yet.
And there is a whole generation of us watching them do it, unsure how to say the thing that needs to be said.
So let me say it here, Mom, where you might finally hear it. You spent your whole life providing. You gave me the chance to build a good life, and you are still giving, still putting me ahead of yourself, still treating your own comfort as the one expense you cannot justify. The providing worked. I am okay. We are okay. The job is done, and you are the one who did it. Now I am asking you for the hardest thing I have ever asked. Spend some of it on yourself. Build the room. Watch the deer.
If you are the parent in this story, hear it from someone else’s child. The money was never meant to be guarded to the very end. It was meant to be lived on. Spending it is not losing it, and it is not taking it from anyone who loves you. It is the whole reason you spent a lifetime building it.
And if you are the one watching a parent go without, do not assume they know how you feel. Say it out loud while there is still plenty of time to say it. They may have been waiting their entire life to hear that you would so much rather have them happy than have whatever they leave behind.
Cheers!
