Adults Living With Parents

[Well Spent]

Originally Posted by BCHGRL

My mom and I joke all of the time that friends and family members with adult kids my age make me look so GOOD without really trying. I have a job, I don't have kids that I expect my parents to raise, and I don't use substances. I was just showing off when I started earning more than my parents' combined salaray and obtained a graduate degree with a 4.0 GPA. I've learned to manage my $$ so well that I've actually started a separate family emergency fund, and my hubby has one for his family too.

That's fantastic! You sound like an extremely generous person.

[Joan.of.the.Arch]

I stayed in my mother's home three years after finishing high school and felt guilty for leaving, but I had to leave for mental health reasons. My family went through several years in the 1970s of woefully inadequate employment coupled with geographic/transportation isolation. We were poor, no doubt about it. Two of my three sibs older than me all stayed with our mother beyond high school or lived "at home" off and on. We were pooling our earnings and could barely make it all living together much less on our own. And I promise you we were all very frugal and continue to be so to this day. There were mental health issues in the household, no doubt about it. That is why I had to leave --to get away from the ugly fighting and depression and go to ,eh, a better place. The ugliness and depression inside my own head were quite enough, thank you.

Actually at the time I left, I was 21, the oldest child in the household, with two younger sibs still there, one just graduating high school. I felt they really needed my very small income and we really did try to support each other emotionally, too, but we were a wreck with no one really in a healthy state of mind and we were probably just making each other worse off emotionally. I left for my own sanity, moving out of state to live with friends. Uh, I sent money back home when I could over the next few years. Twice, I found part time work to help with dental work my sister, then my mother, needed.

Now it is decades later and BCHGRL's emergency funds she and her husband are building for family sound familiar. My husband and I see our own emergency fund as being available for extended family needs --especially for times when we may need to go to them, or even bring them to us. (No one is any closer than a six hour drive. Some are around the world.) I think most of both our family members would do the same for us. We may not live together, but our desire to be family never ends. Yet, I have to say, I think I saved myself by moving out of my mother's household.