There's a comment in Orthonomics's post today talking about how people give really bad financial advice to young couples, and write off any common-sense questions with answers like "everybody has credit card debt."
We went through this so many times when we were first married, and I truly feel that choosing to stay part of the frum world at that time and listen to that advice is the cause of 90% of the issues we are dealing with 7 years later. Then yesterday, we got a re-run (only this time we know better).
My father-in-law has been ill for quite some time and just had surgery. I get exactly enough vacation days to cover yomtov (actually, I am short a day and my boss and I work around it). My husband is the full-time parent at home plus works from home. We don't have relatives or anyone else here who can watch the kids long-term. And, we are in major debt and have no spending money. So, we have not flown out to see either set of parents since we moved here.
Last night a rabbi from my father-in-law's community (who we have no relationship with) called and yelled at my husband about not coming to see his father. He did not offer to pay for a ticket or come up with any other realistic solutions of how this could be arranged, he just said that my husband "had to". Then they had the following conversation:
DH: I don't have the money to pay for a ticket.
Rabbi: Don't you have anyone you could borrow from?
DH: We're already $60,000 in debt. I'm not borrowing more money.
Rabbi: Well I'm $150,000 in debt!
So in other words, because he makes poor financial decisions, everyone else should too. (Oddly enough, this is almost an exact statement from another rabbi who gave us the horrible advice 7 years ago. He went on and on about how much credit card debt he had, when we had come for advice on how to deal with our own debt problem - which was primarily caused by listening to his illogical advice in the first place.)
We are fortunate that my DH has come a long way in being able to see through poor advice and call it for what it is. I have to imagine the person meant well, somehow, but this was compeletly unacceptable.
(My sister-in-law didn't stand up for herself, and a few months ago she was "informed" by a different rabbi in the same community that he had bought her a ticket to visit the parents for a week. She has 7 children, and had to leave the teenagers in charge of the family. She also works, but this was not taken into consideration by the person who arranged it.)
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5 comments:
You don't mind if I link to this, do you?
Please do! I updated the content a bit since my husband had more detail about what was said.
gosh, talk about obnoxious. Did this rabbi just think your husband was trying to be mean to his dad? How is it helpful to make someone feel worse than he already does.
We are thinking about you guys and your DH's dad. I hope you will have a shana tova and give me a call when you have a chance.
While I understand your predicament, there are some things worth going into debt for. I would go into debt to vist my [g-d forbid] ill parent(s)! So in this aspect I see the other side.
I don't feel the need to get into the specifics, but this is not a case of "going into debt" - we already are, and my income is such that we can't even pay the debts we already have.
That said, the issue I am discussing isn't personal financial decisions, but whether someone should be telling someone else what financial decisions to make, without taking any accountability for the results. This rabbi didn't offer us any help, he just screamed at my husband that we had to do this. And we're talking about a total stranger.
If my husband's rav, who truly understands our situation, was to approach us and say "let's figure out what I can do to help you so that you can visit your father" we'd be in a different situation. But instead, both myself and other people have had the experience where someone badgers them into making debt-causing decisions.
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