A family attended a counseling together, needing help with the parent-adulting child relationship, the issue at hand being children stepping into independent-ish adulthood, and the parents being critical of their choices, most especially their spending habits. We might commend the parents’ willingness to care enough to do the hard work to preserve the family unit. We might. And also you may want to withhold your judgment.
The adult children, claimed the parents, had egregious addictions to spending on credit, though their mother and father had the same bad habit, and did very little to hide it. The mother, an heiress of her family’s four generations of wealth that was founded on good old American work ethic and business acumen of running businesses that upsold cheap goods made in South Asian sweatshops.
The father had come into significant fortune due to some gray-ish business decisions that included discreetly sharing insider knowledge of investments and acquisitions information to a few choice fellow back scratchers.
To bolster their public image, they formed a 501(c)3 called The International Institute of Research to Further the Knowledge of Human Trafficking Trends and Victimology (IIRFKHTTV) based in El Paso, Texas with the parents serving as the entire Board of Directors.
The parents provided a monthly stipend based on their three children’s interests and whims on the basis that they adhere to the following requirements: to make a line item budget, spend all of it, and send an invoice to the IIRFKHTTV and receive a payment within ten (10) business days.
Despite the esoteric nature of family business practices, the three children had their feet firmly planted on the terra firma. Let me introduce you to their stipend-funded projects:
The first child, Leslie, lived with disabilities that required a full-time assistant. Both Leslie and the assistant , Vera, were brilliant musicians, and gave music lessons to children at a reduced cost.She was able to fund a music studio and hire staff to provide music, voice, and puppetry lessons for children in care who also lived with disabilities.
The second child, Aaron, served on Leslie’s board and was a generous donor for another nonprofit that matched businesses with employees who had recently exited incarceration, who had paid their debt to society and faced enormous challenges of obtaining housing and finding employment because of checking the “box.”
The third child, Brett, worked with businesses to fund mobile health clinics for rural communities. It was innovative, and wildly successful among the business community. It also saved many lives.
Apart from the children’s noble efforts and achievements, the current spending situation was unsustainable, the parents explained to the counselor. What they didn’t share was their decision to retire and move to Italy, having purchased an estate in Tuscany with its own vineyard. They had already ordered furniture, fine art, and hired a housekeeper, and a team of vintners.
The counselor, nodding deeply and seriously, suggested a plan that worked for everyone, meaning the parents. The plan required a decrease in their children’s stipends, and a step down approach was preferable so they could secure funds elsewhere to continue their philanthropic pursuits. Initially, the parents agreed to this, buuuuuuuuut things were not moving along to their desired timetable.tThey had put their house on the market, were ready to sign contracts for the estate, and they needed more capital immediately. The meeting grew tense.
The counselor, only aware of the children’s generous stipends and atrocious spending habits, ultimately concluded that the stipends were the barrier to the relationships. And as relationships should never be transactional, the most loving action was to terminate the stipends immediately . The parents, though grieved, could not agree more.
The counselor was pleased with himself, thinking how he impressed the wealthy S—---’s, especially with the fake certifications and diplomas on display. He gave the parents a business card of a well-known and flashy financial advisor whose practices were very popular with second marriage spouses who wanted to financially cut stepchildren out of wills. Sketchy, yes, but with results, and the parents were in a considerable predicament.
Over wine and cheese with close friends who had long held that they were way too liberal with their children, and ought to require a more responsible return on their generosity. Charities, they lectured, propped up by entitled wealth reflects poorly on the parents, who, up till now, enjoyed reputations of holding to the American principles of fiscal responsibility, shrewd budgeting, manageable debt, and opportunities based solely on merit without a trace of nepotism or prejudice.
That their conservative principles were being questioned was the last straw for the parents. They retained the flashy financial advisor who ran through all the financials of each family member, toured the mansion, the children’s homes, even the papers of all their pedigreed dogs. He tallied, calculated, assumed, conflated, tabulated all of the expenditures and holdings, then drew up his official recommendations, entitled “Actions to Sustain the Fiscal Responsibility and Waste Management of the S— Estate.”
From their moral high ground, the parents not only immediately revoked all future stipends, they ceased payments, changed the locks, wiped files, changed passwords, demanded repayment of any funds received within the last 90 days. They sent Animal Control to seize the children’s dogs, and cancelled the family Netflix account.
As a result, the children became, at once, unemployed, unhoused, uninsured, and most certainly estranged.
The parents, admitting their personal hardships, comforted themselves that they retained their high principles of liberty and responsibility by not enabling freeloaders who used the family name to create entitled freeloaders who did nothing to earn the generosity of the family dollars other than being poor.
Thus, it was really devastating to learn, as their private jet touched down at the Leonardo da Vinci Rome Fiumicino Airport and eager to inhabit their gorgeous Italian villa, that it had been torched to the ground by an arsonist with possible ties to a motorcycle gang founder from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, who had just completed a 20 year prison sentence.
