Sometimes finances go beyond your own and involve the finances of good friends or family members. When the finances aren’t yours, but those close to you, how do you help those that are obviously having trouble keeping their finances under control? This was a question that was raised in the forums:

Over the Memorial holiday my thoughts were focused on taking a day to spend time with our children and grandchildren, enjoying a meal together and reflecting on how blessed we’ve been over the last month. Then, my daughter and her husband revealed to us that that were completely broke and had been using a payday loan company, (Check N’ Go) for the last several months just to try getting by from month to month.

But, before we committed to giving them any financial help, (since we don’t have much ourselves) I asked to see their online bank statement. That’s when it could be readily seen that there was a much more serious problem than what we had ever imagined.

After setting the query of the results to the maximum days, we counted 68 overdrafts since the beginning of this year!! All my sweet wife could do was cry. I think it was the combination of them loosing their home earlier this year due to foreclosure and this together.

We thought that maybe the problem was that they were using debit cards but, my wife and I have a debit card and we have never had an overdraft. Currently, my wife and I don’t use auto drafts either so we weren’t really sure how we could help them.

The only help we could offer was for them to attend a Financial Peace University course at one of the local community centers. Other than that we gave them some money to buy groceries, etc.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

If your family members were in serious need of financial help, what steps would you take to help them get on the correct path?