I also need to vent

Post Reply New Topic

Just like thousands of other American men my age, or maybe hundreds, or maybe half a dozen, I am living with my sister and her child in a situation where I do not have to pay rent but I pay "my share" of groceries and upkeep. My sister can work all the hours she wants without affecting the welfare payments that she receives and my living there has no effect on the amount we are charged to live here.

The trouble is, she hasn't worked for six months so I buy almost all the food and she doesn't do a good job of controlling her spending. I am supposed to be saving for a car, and a lot of that is going to feed her and her child. I could be a lot further ahead if I weren't spending all that money on them and she could entirely prevent those expenditures if she simply worked part time. I had to buy an expensive part for the car this week and that took about half the money that I had saved up. In direct loans, counting that part, she owes me over $500, and she wouldn't owe me a cent of that if she worked as little as 20 hours a week. Right now instead of $200 in the car fund I think that I could have over $1000.

She reserves the right to get mad at me if I spend $100 on my computer, which I would love to do right now because there's a really good bundled deal at Newegg and it would bring my computer into the 21st century. She also gets angry if I even approach the subject of her getting a job. What the effing 'ell? This is really horrible hypocrisy on her part. She is costing me more than that every two weeks by not working. Even a token effort would make the books balance. The last year is when we could have made a huge difference in our lives by working together and all she does is drive me to work. I even still have to do the dishes. I also fear that I will have to move back to the old home town where a person is better off, uh, not living there if I do anything to piss her off, like suggest that she try to earn $100 a week.

I am so horribly frustrated. It's like I have been sabotaged. I am too old to be forced to work myself close to a heart attack and then have to save money at a snail's pace because someone is being a parasite and acts as if the rules of mathematics simply don't exist because she can get really really mad and throw me out of the house. Even worse, she really is a good person but she's got her head high up her ass on this one subject. It's a family trait, too. My mother was like this any time she felt like screwing up my life.

You haven't been sabotaged, your kindness / generosity has been exploited. As long as you let her do it, she will likely not see a problem with it.

If her kid is very young, I can understand the difficulty with work. At the same, time, its not like she's completely unable to make money. She doesn't have the right to complain about how you spend your money. How is she even paying for the rent if she isn't working?

If you are worried about her leeching off of you, keep track of your spending on her and her kid for a given month, and compare it to the rent. If they're way out of balance, bring it up with her. If she acts entitled, let her know she isn't.

I'm really going to hate this. I have to convince her that there are limits to what she is entitled to because she has found a roof that I can live under for a few months. I also have to convince her that those limits are there for reasons that she has told me herself, that I have to save up for a car and work my way up to some kind of independence.

My credit is bad so moving out will be a huge problem. I cannot live in an apartment without climate control again unless I just want to be found dead of heatstroke and I plan to live at least another 25 years which would place me at just about my quota and tolerance.

My computer is starting to die, and I don't know what's going to happen with it. If I spend money to fix it I will probably catch hell, and even if I don't, I'm not the stupid so and so who decided to spend over half a year not working and drain someone else's resources so that he could not save money for a car or afford to replace parts on his computer. Maybe it seems overdramatic, but my realistic life expectancy is not much more than another 25 years and it looks like I will be forced to spend a lot of that continually trying to save money for my own car then having to pour it down the bottomless pit that is my sister and her crap. The pouring of the money comes because she won't take care of her car and that's my only transportation to use to get to work.

I can't take it, I really can't. I have lived a lot of my life with the expectation that every time I raised my head I would be hit and hurt badly. It is as if there is a curse that affects the behavior of other people when I attempt to act normal and have a normal life. My mother had it, still does, and now my sister has it and all she has to do is sit on her continually expanding ass and give directions.

Because I treated someone else about the way that my sister treated me for a while, I may be due some karmic justice, but it is not the same thing. The person who I used to live with can buy half a dozen good cars from his personal checking account and has a lot more assets besides that. His income is somewhere north of $70,000 a year. I should never have drained anything from him, but I did not put him in danger of starvation or homelessness, either. If something does not change about the way that I am being drained I will actually DIE or worse. She doesn't care enough to get a job, and she is my sister, same mother, same father, and she pretends that she loves me but she won't make the damned effort to get a job even part time so that I can keep money and buy a car so that she doesn't have to drive me to work and so that I might work a second job to maybe earn enough money to buy a house.

This isn't justice that I am serving, it's someone's sick and sadistic idea of how to run my life.

I am sorry your sister is putting you through such misery, it does seem like a catch 22 situation, if you are dependent on her roof over your head. Is there no-one else you could stay with to get away from this leeching situation?

There seems to be no way that I can escape this situation at the moment. This is one of the hardest kinds of dilemmas, where every escape route leads to death and the current situation is survivable. I can even fix my computer or save for a car and maybe get one in a few weeks, but not both, and something always seems to happen while expanding ass seems to continue to sit. And criticize the way that I spend my money while she flat refuses to work. I have to wonder if she wants me to die servicing her.

It sounds bad and maybe I just need to burn frustration while making it sound as bad as it can sound. I'm uphill from where I was, and the situation that I was in would have been lethal in a few weeks. She and I are headed for a fight, and when it happens, she may well throw me out or refuse to drive me to work, where I am actually successfully holding the job, though I don't know how long. I guess no one who acts like she does sees herself as doing wrong. I was able to see it when I was doing it, but I have a messed up mind I guess.

I think that I am going to end up buying things for my computer and telling her to shove her disapproval up her ass. The ONLY chances that I have of getting out of the mess that I am in require that my computer be working so that I can use MS Word and a few other programs, and do things online. Today's frustration was just about deadly because I just fixed one thing and then it starts truly screwing up. I think that I would rather risk being thrown out on my keister than losing the use of the computer. The "C" drive needs to be replaced. At best it has errors and I have to rebuild the operating system, but something is on its last legs and now it's an emergency just like some of the car parts.

Is it just me? Do I act to place people between myself and any decisions that I need to make, and to keep them there? I thought I was in a deal where I would be allowed to save up money and get on my feet and this can't happen for the reasons that I already mentioned, and the person who makes this so that it can't happen seems to be my sister but she does not see that it costs me money when she doesn't work. I know that's stupid but that's the way it works, she can't see that it costs money when I spend money on her food and her car.

Well, what's going to happen is that an order is going to go in for enough stuff to fix the computer and I already said where she can stuff what she thinks about it.

Good, I would have suggested to get the computer fixed as that is kind of essential. I do not use mine for work, but without the contact I have on it, life would become very hard. I do not know how much you rely on your computer in that sense, but I say, stuff her, go for it. I think the situation is terrible...it has you pushed into a corner really, in a no win situation. She sounds utterly selfish to me. If only some random person would offer you somewhere to stay, then she wouldn't be able to hold you to ransom anymore for offering a roof over your head.

Once this kind of a financial entanglement starts, among family members, I assume, it is hard to end it. Your dilemma comes down to: faster computer or new place to live. You could always use computer at the library. But if you don't like the sound of giving up either the possiblity of a faster computer or a place to live, you might TRY to look for a compromise. I won't begin to suggest what things you might exchange in such a compromise, if it is possible, because I don't know all the things you have that may be "barganing chips." But maybe, just maybe, both you and your sister will get some, or maybe all, of what each wants, in a compromise.

I have an older brother that sounds a lot like your sister. Maybe there is more going on with her than just not working; HOWEVER, that doesn't give her the right to not appreciate all you do and STILL get angry over, basically, nothing.
I, personally, would have left after three months, but I don't have the WONDERFUL patience that you OBVUIOUSLY have in abundance.
I think you need to tell her what you told us, just in nicer terms. It might come to the fact that you have to leave, and that is rather emotionally painful, but you are getting buried in a rut, my friend, and you NEED to get out or fix the situation.
Yes, she is family, but either she thanks you later, or you learn that sometimes even family isn't the best thing for you.

I've had to calculate this out a bit. In this case "compromise" means leaving the situation in the same knife-edge type of balance forever, with me never gaining anything. I have ordered the computer parts and that leaves her in a situation where she has to make an uphill climb to be able to do anything about it. Seeing her get off her ass will be worth a lot of fall-out. Arguing about it will cause a lot of stress that could end up as bad or worse.

She is being utterly selfish and the only thing, I think, that is going to set her straight is to realize that I am going to do what I think is best without regards to her selfish interests. She is going to have to be the one who works to change things now.

She has wanted this to go in a reasonable manner but she has abused this by sitting on her duff and refusing to work and asking me to behave as if she is doing nothing wrong, or as if she is doing nothing that is making the attainment of our goals diffuclt to impossible.

Yes, Graelwyn, I am fairly dependent on a computer, emotionally and maybe in the near future financially, and losing the use of it will cause hardship.

sorry, privacy issues

For Calandale: Most of the story is in this thread.

The thing is, we have a sweet deal for an indefinite length of time but not forever. She isn't paying rent either. When she doesn't work I pick up a pretty hefty tab each week, like gas and groceries for her and her daughter. She acts as if she believes that most of my expenses that way do not exist, and they are enough to strain my budget and slow me way down on my savings plan. Then she has cyclical crises that wipe out my bank account. All that she needs to do is work and pay her own expenses for a few weeks and I can put most of my money in the bank, then buy a decent car, then she doesn't have to drive me to work and if she needs something badly, I have no problem with paying to fix her car or whatever, but either she has to work or I have to have a second income.

I don't even mind having a parasite as much as I mind that parasite failing to use enough of her brain power to get her own ass off the couch and support herself. At some time we will have to move and she will have no money for that. I'm probably putting $400 a month into her stuff and somehow the rest gets eaten up, and whatever she makes up to about $400 a month and maybe a bit more could go into my savings account.

She also gets pissed off as hell when I mention the fact that she needs a job. This isn't good on my tooth enamel when she acts like that. We are both too old for this garbage, we have to make progress, and this is our best chance that we will have in a while to make progress.

Still, she's responsible for finding the place
to live, from what I gather. Look, I understand your
frustration, but there are always choices. The
money that you're saving on rent is worth
quite a bit. Some people (myself included)
seem to lack the ability to work. If they are
able to slide by otherwise, they simply will.

I have decided that her finding the place fails to justify the way that she is treating me. There will be a break with the present reality one way or the other.

It's also her idea that I get my own car, but she also puts the brakes on that idea by being dead weight. I'm just waiting for another shoe to drop, when it totally screws up just before I have enough money to go and buy a used car, then I have to spend an amount of money that she could EASILY have earned, then I'm screwed again. She is also failing to achieve her goals.