My dad is 78 years old, and my mom turns 69 this year. My dad plans to work for another year because he “can’t afford to retire”. Here is their financial overview:

Assets

• 401(k) and IRA savings totaling just under $2 million.
• Total income of roughly $109k according to last year’s IRS filing (including mandatory Social Security disbursements, despite not yet being retired, due to my dad’s age) in a low cost-of-living area. Excellent health insurance through my dad’s job.
• Outright ownership our single-family home. No mortgages!
• Full-ownership of two SUVs, each purchased new less than ten years ago. No auto loans!
• ~Fifty acres of rural real-estate, including a mid-sized tractor and a giant metal barn/shed that is almost twice the size of our house, and has a loft. No mortgages on the property.
• A sailboat.
• ~$20k sitting in their checking account right now
• ~$400k of (non-retirement) stock investments ALL IN ONE SINGLE GOLD MINING COMPANY!

Liabilities

• ~$70k of credit card debt at ~30% APR (!?), which I just recently this week convinced my mom to pay off, after a year of begging and pleading.
• ~$150k in student loans at ~7% APR in my mom’s name which she took out on behalf of the educations for me and my two siblings (I also would have paid these off years ago if I had any say).

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What’s Wrong?

They choose to live in poverty (of sorts), to forgo basic necessities, and to let their home—which they’ve lived in for nearly forty years—rot in disrepair.

• About half of the house’s exterior paint has flaked off completely. The rest is “boiling” off.
• Our roof leaks every time it rains because we have needed new shingles for maybe twenty years (IDK). The shingles are boiling and warped, just like the paint.
• ~40% of the walls in the house are bare, unpainted drywall from half-finished renovations my dad started thirty years ago.
• ~20% of the walls have drywall on only one side. The other side is studs with bare wires running through them.
• ~30% of the flooring is literally the concrete foundation, also from half-finished renovations my dad started thirty years ago.
• One window in one of the two guest bedrooms has been half-made of duck tape for the past twenty-five years, because it was broken and never replaced.
• There are several inch-wide gaps in the hallway ceiling surrounding the drop-down ladder to the attic through which 130F air pours directly into the central AC intake.
• Our one and only working shower broke last year—the water would only trickle out. Instead of calling a plumber, my dad just suffered with for nearly a month, because it was no biggie—it just took twenty times as long to take a shower is all.
• I thought that the one nice thing we had in our home was a proper stovetope range hood that blows the air outside instead of recirculating it into the house. Yesterday I found out that ours has been blowing the greasy hot air into our attic (where they store belongings) for the past twenty years, because my dad hasn’t yet finished its duct work.

Our energy bills are huge. Did I mention we live in swamp-ass Texas and it gets 110F for much of the summer? In the past forty years they haven’t invested a dime in energy efficiency improvements. It gets worse.

About ten years ago, our central air conditioner (which was probably installed in 1975 and came with the house when they bought it) broke down.

Instead of shelling out the cash for a new central unit, they bought one of those horribly inefficient portable ones that attaches to the window via a long hose. This brought the indoor living room temperatures down to ~89F in the summer. My dad would sit on the couch in his Walter White tidey-whitey underpants, sweating, two fans blowing on him, complaining constantly about the summer heat. They used shitty window units in the bedrooms. When the shitty portable unit in the living room died after just two years, they replaced it with a slightly less shitty portable unit from another company.

We finally got a new proper central air conditioner to go with our existing central air infrastructure (!) three months ago, after much pleading, protesting, and shaming by me.

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A Vignette

Last night, I interrupted my parents nightly Netflix binge to talk to Dad about the roof. I mentioned how it’s a no-brainer which pays for itself by adding value to the home (their financial asset!), and that every day we go without a new one, more damage accumulates—which will cost even more to repair.

His reply has been echoing in my head ever since…

“A new roof could cost almost $10,000. Where am I going to get that kind of money?”

My dad refuses to hire contractors, because there are none in existence that he “trusts” to do it right. That’s why the paint is peeling. Because before painting the house, he plans to REBUILD the sides of the house with lumber and his own two hands. Because you don’t want to paint a shitty house, right? His plan is to wait until he retires, and then just do everything.

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Similarly, I talked to my mom days ago about how how a couple professional HVAC renovations totaling about one thousand dollars could drastically improve the airflow, efficiency, comfort, and noise level of our home.

You know what she said?

“Oh, no. I don’t want to invest that much money into the house. We’re not going to live here forever.”

They do not communicate AT ALL. They are both living in the future in separate fantasy worlds.

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My entire life I grew up thinking we were destitute, because *gestures around*, but mainly because my dad does nothing but complain about money and how everybody else is a rich doctor. My parents have been extremely cryptic and weird about finances for my entire life. My dad refused to tell HIS OWN WIFE his income for DECADES. The ONLY thing I knew about their financial situation until a few months ago (I’m 37) is that they had tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. This has caused me and my siblings incalculable anxiety and stress. I was in bed with depression for years, thinking we were going to be thrown onto the streets at any moment. My mom could only tell me “not to worry about it”. Yeah, that helps.

Any mention of finances will launch my dad into the same fucking speech about how his income is “going to go down to almost half” when he retires—he basically guilts you for bringing up the subject, in a condescending tone. He is an extremely miserable, dour, joyless man who emits an energy field which doubles the cortisol levels of everyone in a ten meter radius. He is incapable of warmth and affection. He is short-tempered and belittles my mom. My mom puts up with all of it because she’s an evangelical and Jesus told her that he will one day make my dad a Christian and a good person, basically. She told me that circa 1997.

I asked my mom why she has all of that money on the “roulette table” (extremely un-diversified, volatile investments). I asked her what in this world she wanted the money for… She said she wanted new underwear and a new couch. That’s it. Oh, and she wants her family to be happy. Finally, she revealed the true reason: Jesus tells her when to buy and sell the gold company stock, and she will one day make SO much money on the stock market that my dad will have no choice but to see that God is real, and accept Jesus Christ into his heart as his Lord and personal savior (and make their life and marriage perfect, I guess). She can’t imagine or articulate any big-ticket item that she actually desires, she just wants to be “rich”. She doesn’t want to spend the money she has RIGHT NOW to improve the lives of her family RIGHT NOW.

I am still unpacking the C-PTSD I accumulated from a childhood of extreme emotional neglect. BOTH of my siblings have been involuntarily hospitalized for schizophrenia that manifested in the past three years. During our childhood, my mom spent all day in bed asleep with depression, and my dad didn’t know I existed, even though I was right in front of him the whole time. Neither of them have any social skills whatsoever. We ate family dinners at the table together in complete silence for eighteen years. I didn’t even know that wasn’t normal.