Hi Enlifers! Hope your 2018 is off to a great start! Now that we’re all hopefully still buzzing from holiday cheer, I’m going to sober it up a bit! Ha! Just kidding – but seriously, something that has been on my mind lately and that is how to balance people, namely family and finances. This is an area I struggle with majorly. As the first to graduate (and actually the only in addition to an advanced degree in four generations), I have been able to earn more than my family in general. I am grateful for their influences and encouragement when I was younger and I have a great desire to help my family. This has evolved over the years. In the beginning, I usually lived out of state, so I wasn’t able to offer hands on help, so I ended up helping mostly financially. However, what started out as being cheerful giving turned into resentful obligation as I began to not agree with some of my family’s financial decisions. It took me years to free myself of “success guilt” and to only honor financial requests that aligned with my financial beliefs and spirit. Fast forward and I moved back to the area I grew up. It comes with pros and cons. On one hand, it’s great to have easy access to family for emergencies and just in general. However, it’s a lot easier to say no when you’re kinda far away. The particular situation I’m in now is letting a family member reside with me while they try to find a place to live; however what was supposed to be a couple of months has now turned into 8 months and counting. To be honest, at this point I feel this person is taking advantage of our generosity and kindness, but I always have a hard time balancing the people first and then money thing especially when you feel like someone is taking advantage of you. So I figured I’d brainstorm here on EnLife. I have thought about all of the various tough situations I’ve been in involving family and finances and narrowed it down to 3 things you need in order to successfully balance family and finances. Those three things are empathy, expectations, and execution.
- Empathy – in talking with various friends, one of the things that resonated with me was love. To express real concern and love to the family member instead of judgment and frustration.
- Expectations- work out mutually acceptable clear, fair expectations of the agreement and boundaries with the family member. This is actually best done ahead of the financial transaction, but can still be done as a reset if things have gone left.
- Execution – execution is really about respect of those boundaries and expectations. If the family member that you are assisting financially is not respecting the boundaries and expectations, then it is more than ok to enforce those boundaries yourself. This is generally when things can go horribly “wrong” and can result in feeling guilty if the family member wants to continue to overstep boundaries. However, I’m learning that it is important stick to those boundaries or else, those things that I mentioned before: resentment, frustration, etc all set in and then sometimes people say or do drastic things they don’t mean or intend.
I could go on and on regarding family and finances and I’m sure there will be posts in the future dedicated to various family nuances and relationships (e.g. couples, nuclear family, etc). In the meantime, I hope these tidbits have served as some nuggets to help your EnLife in this new year! What nuggets do you have to share in regards to balancing family and finances?