Oh right, because of dad they are relatively wealthy - live on a gated estate of perhaps 10 acres. It’s financially no stretch for them to pay for college and such. Actually, goddaughter recently learned that mother’s upcoming boob job and liposuction will cost $15,000, and she gets plastic surgery at least once a year. From a friend of mine, “I didn’t know cheekbones could be higher than your eyes.”
2 Likes
Things have been progressing nicely.
We co-titled Goddaughter’s vehicle in my name so she could be on our insurance, and I’m getting a $1M personal umbrella policy, which was vaguely on my radar before but with an additional youthful driver on my policy, thought it made sense to finally do.
Goddaughter is waiting for acceptance to her new college this week. Her parents made her go to one because it has a high number of Broadway graduates, and former mother (FM) always wanted Goddaughter to be on Broadway.
It was always about FM’s expectations for Goddaughter’s life. Goddaughter opened up that former mother instilled an eating disorder in her, because FM expected that she would stay between 100 and 110 pounds. I mentioned above that FM also pressured Goddaughter to get liposuction because she was more like 115 pounds, which thankfully she didn’t do. Goddaughter says that she’s since repaired her relationship with food, and I believe her. Over the weekend while we were gone, she ate (as I said she could) a decently large amount of candy and got Chipotle, so out of concern I gently prodded to make sure she wasn’t swinging in the direction of binge eating, and I don’t believe she is. I doubt she’s any more than 125 pounds now, and to my eye appears skinny but healthy.
We helped her fill out her FAFSA, which has a section for “unusual circumstances” for which one option is “left an abusive or threatening household.” This includes mental abuse. Called their financial aid office and waited on hold behind 178 other people for a few hours to make sure our ducks were in a row, and we need to wait a couple of weeks for the provisional FAFSA to process to them so we can start the unusual circumstances process. We will require a letter from her therapist as well as myself and my spouse explaining the situation. It’s our expectation she will receive as much as $7,400 from a Pell grant, and possible additional assistance from the school. The Pell grant alone covers a little over a semester, so if we receive that 2-3x with her existing savings it should get her through the remainder of college.
We both reviewed the resume that she competed on her own and she has an interview with Outback Steakhouse… forgot which day, maybe today? But we are friends with service industry folks and we have about 8 references lined up at different restaurants. We’re hoping for a full-time position with medical benefits, but we can always go Marketplace.
Or - has anybody had experience with getting medical insurance through a college? I understand my old university had a plan to buy into, but I was on parents’ insurance so never researched it.
She has a new phone not on the parents’ plan and we keep the old phone off. I know I could factory reset it, but it just upsets her because of all the software on there to track her location and forward texts and call logs to FM. Apparently parents have asked for the phone back, and while I believe we have legal claim to it, we’ll send it back soon. We’ve had 0 contact with parents since we picked her up on Wednesday, except a 10-second phone call from former father (FF). He had texted to inform her she was officially removed from their auto insurance and it didn’t deserve a response, so he called to say that to her, then hung up without saying goodbye.
My MIL has been long-time “friends” with FM. That’s the best I can call two narcissists who talk at least weekly, then MIL constantly talks about how horrible FM is behind her back. Anyway, according to MIL, FM is now in therapy. I’d be so curious to be a fly on the wall - I expect the therapy is mostly (A) a complete show to get Goddaughter to believe FM will change or (B) FM is more seeking validation from a therapist and tips on how to get Goddaughter back. If she actually sticks with therapy for more than like 4 sessions and apologizes and shows improvement, perhaps Goddaughter will maintain contact. I wouldn’t pressure her one way or the other, I would only watch carefully that she isn’t hoodwinked by seeming improvement back into abuse. Either way, I don’t expect Goddaughter to ever move back, and FF seems adamant that she’s only accepted back (not just financially but as a family member) if she moves back home and obeys FM.
FM also had to cancel her lipo/boob job, because Goddaughter was expected to drive her then wait on her for two weeks. I’m not sure if she was more upset to cancel the plastic surgery or to lose her daughter.
5 Likes
There is another option. She is likely framing the situation amongst her social circle as “I am suffering so much because of what my daughter has done” and is using the therapy as the explanation. They are also getting their excuses in by projecting blame to the daughter vs themselves.
This is win-win for narcissists because they get to project being martyrs to their friends (they get supply in terms of their sympathy) and also make their intended target (their daughter) feel guilty about being in therapy (more supply).
I don’t think people like FM can be “fixed” from a behavioral standpoint (based on the science that I have read), even with therapy. I would not put much hope on that front.
4 Likes
When I was an undergraduate I had the health insurance through the college. My dad was self-employed, so he was buying in the individual market and he said the college’s plan was cheaper than what he’d been paying… and it was better coverage too.
This was pre-Obamacare so the market is very different now.
It’s certainly worth looking into as it’s essentially underwritten insurance in that college students are typically young and healthy.
3 Likes
Goddaughter has officially been accepted to college, kicking off an approximately two-week lag time for her provisional FAFSA to process. At that time, my partner and I and Goddaughter’s therapist will submit letters attesting to the abusive household.
Job interviews begin today. She has applied to perhaps 6-8 places so far and had an unexpected impromptu interview at a bookstore, where she’d mostly be stocking the coffee bar and doing light janitorial and book-restocking work. She’s also interviewing for Outback Steakhouse this afternoon. We think a better prospect is a local restaurant interviewing her on Friday, and they’ve already asked “If this goes well, can you start training Saturday?”
I am realizing she was never taught a variety of basic skills, one being how to cook. She offered to cook anytime we wanted but said she didn’t know how to make anything. I said “Hey if all you did was boil spaghetti and put sauce on it sometime, I still wouldn’t mind that!” and she admitted she “could probably figure that out.”
She noted that in her former parents’ household, everything from steak to vegetables was cut with 1 serrated bread knife that went into the dishwasher. She was astonished I made dinner (pan-seared sliced steak and bell peppers with a jarred sauce over rice) in 15 minutes (other than the pre-set rice cooker) as apparently dinner was always a 2+ hour ordeal when made in her home. So, I will teach her some basic cooking.
Adding to list: Brewing coffee (high priority), laundry (middling priority), basic vehicle maintenance (lower priority).
6 Likes
Phew, we are finally settling into a routine. This weekend was a crazy whirlwind pulling my time and attention every which way, including our friends having a baby and visiting them in hospital, but we made great progress in terms of appointments/jobs/etc. and emotionally.
Goddaughter just started her first shift on Friday. On Thursday she works her first shift at another job, then Friday/Saturday/Sunday. She intends to work both at least through the tourist summer, and decide whether to drop one (or see if one position is terminated) in the fall.
Today she slept from about 1 AM - 1 PM, out of nowhere - I think the accumulation of stress just caught up with her and knowing she had the Monday to do nothing, no FAFSA to fill out or interview call to return, she just needed that.
We’ve talked and she wants to leave a line of communication open with her mom, but she is nervous about the first talk.
Mother-in-law (MIL) now says she only continues talking to Former Mother (FM) for the sake of the youngest 14-year-old, otherwise she’d have cut it off. We’ve learned more about FM and her cycle of abuse. FM has expressed to MIL that her mom “told me once that I was 10 pounds too fat and I appreciated it and stayed skinny after that”. FM was weighing both of her daughters weekly, which is how she knew Goddaughter was outside of the acceptable range of 100-110 pound and tried to convince her to get liposuction. We found out more that Former Father (FF) required FM to get plastic surgery/etc. It seems like FF’s specific complex is about how other people view the family. Wife must be a Barbie, daughters must be skinny and perfect, nobody is allowed to do something like convert to Islam or get pregnant or be potentially bicurious because it looks bad on our WASP household. Better to kick you out permanently and blame it on the children being bad.
We’re not overly influencing Goddaughter to contact FM or not. All we’ve advised is that she has the right to set the parameters of the conversation. She said she’s not ready for a 2-hour deep conversation and we said she has the right to set a timer if she wants, or to tell FM that she doesn’t want to hear criticism and only wants to provide (would be vague, no specific) information that she is safe and happy with a job and going to college.
We are still working out how she’ll get healthcare for the upcoming year. I was hopeful she was going to get on a special children’s health (up to 26) program with the state due to her autoimmune condition, but I think she doesn’t have the specific sub-classification of that disease and therefore probably can’t get that program. We may have to discuss her cutting back on work hours to stay on Medicaid - or it’s a Marketplace plan, most likely.
We gave her the chore of scooping cat litter at least 1x/week, because it’s in the room opposite her bedroom anyway. As we teach her to cook, she’ll be expected to make occasional dinners. She already takes a fair bit of initiative to clean up, so we haven’t particularly asked her to do dishes or anything.
So far we haven’t charged her anything, but her auto insurance is costing me some ~$150/month. I’m thinking we may charge her $250/month beginning in June to cover some of the cost of food. We will discuss if at some point we want to charge her actual rent - now isn’t the time, she has a free room for months, and if we do charge her it will be a nominal amount to entirely cover the cost of her living here.
6 Likes
See what insurance is available through her college. That’s often pretty affordable.
1 Like
That is impressively dysfunctional. Glad to hear she got out of that situation.
2 Likes
Thank you, I have been looking into that. Unfortunately she’s attending college online for a university across the country, and I’m worried about what that means for in-network vs. out-of-network availability. I’ll continue to pursue that angle, and check further into the special state program for cheap insurance for specific diagnoses (which I think she only has the broad form of a specific accepted diagnosis. Other thoughts are Medicaid or Marketplace depending on income. Also worth asking her doctor how he feels about diagnosing her with the condition needed to get the cheap state program. If he says no, okay, but maybe with her vague autoimmune diagnosis he’s willing to “take a best guess” that it’s the one that would qualify her.
2 Likes
We heard via MIL that FF is furious that both MIL and myself & spouse knew about their family dynamics. It looks bad on the family for other people to know that he’s an abuser and he’s very upset that Goddaughter talked to others about the abuse.
Through the grapevine, it sounds like FM wants to re-establish contact and potentially wants to continue supporting Goddaughter, but FF is too proud to budge and will only accept a complete move back home, resumption of the job underneath FM, back to the college and major they picked out, etc. Since FF controls the family finances and decisions, that’s how it will be. She was the first child born of FM to be kicked out, so FF is used to it while FM is upset.
5 Likes
J.F.C.
After ~45 minutes with TransUnion, we can’t get the dead mom’s credit report without court papers establishing someone has control over the estate. You know, the estate that she left without a will, that has basically no assets and whatever debts. 
I may have to go drink and do some research and think about this some.
2 Likes
Someone at the bar might know.
5 Likes
Heading to trivia at the bar right now. There are lawyers there. Will ask, even tho not their specialty…
1 Like
I think I’m going to try and work around it by resolving directly with the one company we know we have to deal with, and then a 2nd company that it appears she may have tried to take out cards and didn’t / couldn’t / did and we don’t know about it for some reason. There’s a few other inquiries about the time she took out the two credit cards we know about, so I may play “wait and see” on those unless I have reason to think we need to go address it.
My worst-case scenario: we really do need that credit report. At that point, we’ll have to go to court to get a POA in one of the kids’ names. Which, that means we’ll have to either get the stepfather to agree not to contest or we’ll have to drag him to court to compel him to take action. Which, I would think he would want to address since she possibly / likely took stuff out in his name as well, but then I realize I’m talking about someone who has lesser thinking skills than your average sheet of wet particle board at room temperature.
1 Like
So probate laws vary by state, but if kids are her only children and she wasn’t married at death, they can petition probate court to assign an administrator.
Not sure why you need mother’s credit report, only those items on the kids’ reports impact kids’ credit.
1 Like
She was married, hence the difficulty in just going straight to the courthouse.
I want mom’s credit report in case there’s anything else that shows up that we’re not aware of, or someone gets a wild hair up their *** and decides to come after any of the kids. But I also think it will help with arguing with one specific creditor to show her credit was utter shit, she couldn’t get a card in her name so she resorted to taking it out in her kids’ names.
Do I think it’s likely someone does that? No, but I’m an actuary, I practice risk mitigation. I want it so we don’t have surprises, but I think we may want it to show one kid look, I know you want to believe your mom wouldn’t do it, but she did … and it wasn’t for a good reason.
1 Like
Excellent development. I believe I mentioned above I was worried that Goddaughter’s eating disorder was cropping back up, but I think it was just nervousness about eating our food.
As the days pass and I get used to what she likes (thankfully not that picky) and have different snacks on hand, she’s been eating a bit more. This morning for breakfast, she ate both a ~350 calorie breakfast burrito and a ~250 calorie banana bread muffin that I make ahead of time and freeze, then pull a few out at a time. I’m going to keep buying a few bananas per week to make more muffins as long as she keeps eating them most mornings. Or switch it up next time and make something else similar, some kind of cinnamon/apple thing maybe.
5 Likes
I had to send the bonus kids off on an assignment today: do you have or have you ever had accounts in your name at [financial institution]? This was important because in dealing with [credit card company] where Mom took out cards in their name, there was a call where “the cardholder” called to confirm a payment had been made and [company] called [financial institution] to confirm. So, they had to go say out loud “I need to know if I’ve got or ever had an account in my name, because my mom committed fraud against me.”
I hadn’t seen anything on their credit reports to indicate that, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Thankfully, the answer to the question was no. Now we need a letter from the institution stating as much, which they’re going to check on. If we can get that, it + reference to the other credit card + comparison of where charges were incurred should be everything we need to prove fraud and get it wiped off their credit reports.
4 Likes
Today’s fire drill with the bonus kids involves 529 accounts.
The uncle that has control over their 529 wants to transfer it to them, setting up separate accounts for each. Motivations for this are unclear at the moment, I think there’s a >50% chance it’s a cousin that’s “trying to be helpful” but has a grudge of some kind against the uncle. Doesn’t matter for the moment. What matters is that we’re talking ~$25K total; from what I see, 20% of that counts toward what they have available to pay for their own college which would be a direct hit to financial aid offered.
Ideally, the uncle keeps this in his name; then we don’t have financial aid concerns. Not sure if transferring it to me would be possible, with them as FBOs, since I’m not a direct relative or even an indirect relative. But it sounds like the uncle wants to do this ASAP and I’m delay this for a bit so we can get clarity and some answers on this and not create unintended problems.
5 Likes