Sorry if this is the wrong place to post, I really didn't know where to start.
I'll spare you of most of the details but my parents got divorced last May after 25 years. During the course of their marriage my mom let my dad handle all of the finances because he was more comfortable, understood numbers, etc. (note that nearly the entire time my mom was making roughly 50k a year, but had a few where she made closer to 80k and my dad made more like 30k which was more than comfortable for us to be middle class). Even with 80k for a family of 5, my dad would complain about every little thing that he had to hand over money ( that wasn't even all his) for. $20 to fill our school lunch accounts, $5 for a field trip, $10 for a t-shirt the ONE time he took us to a baseball game or something, always complaining. Even just after payday he would tell my mom that we only had $100 for groceries to last two weeks (Which now that I'm older and helping my mom figure out all of the bills I'm realizing my dad was a liar).
Now that my mom is on her own she has LITERALLY no savings because she's pretty sure for all those years my dad was keeping the bare minimum in their joint account to pay all the bills and was stashing all of the rest of the money, which was mostly my moms, into his own accounts. At one point he also came into some inheritance and of course lied to us about how much it he received; we found 25k in cash in my basement and another letter stating he was getting $1,000, but the check enclosed was for $13,000.
In hindsight you can see how foolish my mom was, but at the time, he was her husband and she trusted him. Lesson learned.
Anyway, now my mom is working 70+hrs a week to make it on her own and she's just barely staying afloat. My sister (22) is the only one living at home at the moment but she and my brother (21) are both in school full time and are unable to help pay any bills other than their portion of the cell phone bill. I've (24f) got a decent job and the most supportive boyfriend ever, so I'm able to pay my mom's monthly credit card bill, as well as cell phone, groceries, etc but I still feel like it's not enough.
Does anyone have any advice as to what else I can do to help? Or advice I can give her?
Sorry for this rambling mess of a post. I've been stressed out like crazy and contemplating posting for help for weeks but it feels so embarrassing to be in this situation.
also getting anything back from my dad is not an option, firstly because we have no real proof and he would deny everything, and second because he ran off across the country with some catfish from the internet to "work for the government" and we literally want nothing to do with him. But that's a story for a different sub.
Thanks!!
Submitted January 22, 2019 at 10:02AM by Hkooist http://bit.ly/2REH4ug
