|
A 24 year old on that income with that much debt (particularly accrued around those key areas - furniture, car, retail) is very worrying. 27k is a pittance in the grand scheme of things and considering your girlfriend's financial patterns I'd really recommend viewing this as an opportunity for reform rather than a windfall problem solver. The problem is not lack of money, the solution is not a few thousand dollars cash inheritance. As everybody else said, pay off the high interest loans. I'm not sure whether I agree with the guy saying to sell the car, it was a really bad idea getting a loan for it in the first place but now you've got it you'll just be losing even more money getting rid of it. Instead figure out how much it's going to cost to own and maintain it for the next 5 years and put money aside for that -- this includes insurance, rego, 6-12 month check-ups, etc. That goes in a separate bank account and does not get touched except for those specific things. The real problem is that your girlfriend's fiscal responsibility sucks. If she has money sitting in her account, as the above poster said, she will just spend it on dumb poo poo. So don't keep an emergency account that's too big. You presumably live in a ridiculous country like America, so get some decent insurance (not just medical but home and contents, etc). This brings up another opportunity to re-evaluate your daily/weekly spending. Do you spend a lot of money eating out at lunch or buying dumb lazy meals? People who get loans to buy cars out of their income bracket and furniture etc will probably also buy a lot of impulse lunches. Take a few hundred (or half a grand if you know you'll use it) and go to costco and buy a shitload of olive oil, tuna, pasta, canned food, etc in bulk. Stuff that you know how to cook with and use anyway (i.e. don't buy ingredients you've never used before). Buy it in bulk and chuck it in your cupboard and start eating at home more, buy a slow cooker and make big meals on Sunday that you portion out, freeze, and take to work during the week. You have the potential to save possibly several grand a year by investing up-front in cheaper bulk supplies that force you to switch to a greater ratio of home-cooked meals. It's the same general principle behind "poor people can't afford to buy cheap shoes". In short, this money doesn't really mean or do anything in and of itself. It's not enough for that. What it represents is an opportunity to draw a line in the sand, psychologically, between your girlfriend's previous financial irresponsibility and her future life. Pay off the dumb loans, drop a bit of money on the insurance that you've probably been avoiding in order to pay off outstanding debts, and focus on living within your means and not buying dumb stuff. I mean every day people throw away a hell of a lot of furniture that you could be picking up for free, or for the cost of a day's ute rental. Buying fancy themed furniture is something rich people do. Another psychological trick to help this shift might be to open up a long-term savings account. Find a good one that has one of those deals where you sign up with a $2k deposit, and deposit in at least $500 a month (numbers pulled out of my arse) to be eligible for a higher interest rate. Don't put the whole amount in but use the remains of the inheritance to pad out what you can't make from your own income. Hopefully she'll find that the process of accruing savings is addictive and she'll start to re-evaluate her monthly budget to facilitate a more comfortable money-saving pattern. Anyway, just to reiterate, hopefully your girlfriend is a bit smarter and self-controlled now than when she got herself into this mess. But the 27k is an opportunity to distance herself from the mistakes of her past, it's noway near enough to offset the lovely financial behaviour that got her into it. So if any of that behaviour or mentality still exists, you need to help her stamp that out, otherwise the inheritance could have been 270k or 2.7 mill and it still wouldn't make a drat difference. Also I'm very sorry for your girlfriend's loss. Tell her to consider starting a diary where she records her own feelings and thoughts, all the things she wishes she could have said to her mother, but also all the memories she has of her mother. Any questions she has, however mundane ("What did we eat for breakfast on the second day when we holidayed in X country again?") need to go in there and be answered as soon as possible. The longer she gets from the death, the more the memories start disappearing and, at least from my vicarious experience, around the 2 year mark that really starts becoming a major problem with the long-term depression. You're probably better off taking control of her finances now anyway because she's likely in no state to be making big decisions or kickstarting a more disciplined life. It'll be really hard to think about the future or any of the boring administrative stuff so try to help her with that as much as possible.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2014 18:47
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 22:32 |
|