Hi all,
Tldr: what happens when credit card debt gets into the millions?
My mother and father split up a number of years ago. Father was a private practice doctor. My parents would would spend about $800k a year, $100k of which would be from my dad and $700k from my mom.
Now they are divorced and my mom is spending 40K+ a month still, which is fine for now but will be far from sustainable in the next 5 or so years, with no sense of personal finance. I was with her three days ago and she spent $4k in Bergdorfs on clothing she later said she didn’t even like.
I have tried to approach the subject around money but she gets incredibly defensive and informs me she uses an advisor. The primary issues are:
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My mom is a compulsive liar and gets defensive when asked about things, especially money. Everything I know I discovered one day by snooping because I was fed up with the lies
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She is addicted to spending money and buying strangers luxury gifts (which is nice but she has zero knowledge of the value of a dollar and is spending how she always has)
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She pays the monthly minimum on her credit cards instead of the statement balances and doesn’t understand why that’s bad. She also has 300%+ utilization on some cards which does seem predatory
Essentially, my mom is wrapping herself up in credit card debt and will not pay off those bills despite being able to. Eventually this will snowball out of control. I fear that in the future she will require money so she’s not homeless at this rate but anything I give her will just be burned on luxury goods and I’d rather her save now with the high alimony payments.
My question is this: what happens when the debt gets out of control? It is my understanding a decent amount of these situations are actually not so hard to get out of from a legal/collections perspective but just how screwed would she be if she had $2M+ in credit card debt and couldn’t pay? She is currently burning the candle at both ends by overspending and being charged interest on past balances.
Thanks in advance!
Submitted December 20, 2022 at 12:52AM by Samomac97 https://ift.tt/qrwK5jb
