Caring For Mom

Yesterday I revealed that my Mom was laid off from her job and given her age I've had to jump in to the role of taking care of my Mom. It has already had it's challenges.

My Mom is very independent so I know it's extremely hard for her to have to listen to her 20-something daughter. It's a challenge for parents when they are put in a position where they have to listen to their kids. So our first "debate" was about unemployment. She didn't want direct deposit of her unemployment. I was like are you crazy, do you know how long you will have to wait for your checks if you don't get direct deposit. She reluctantly relented. One week later when she got her unemployment paperwork she was happy that I forced the direct deposit because she would get her unemployment checks in 2 days of her weekly check-in versus waiting 3-7 days for a check to show up in the mail.

Next "debate" was her credit cards. Now y'all know I'm a personal finance junkie. My Mom doesn't quite know the extent of my addiction. She doesn't read my blog, hell she doesn't go on computers. So first she was a little taken aback that I pulled her credit. Now I'm sure you are like how were you able to get past the security questions? I knew just enough about my Mom's finances to be able to answer the questions. I pulled her credit, paid for her credit score, they were all good (surprisingly she has a better score than me). I made her review it to make sure there were no mistakes. That was the easy part.

The hard part was enforcing a debt management plan. My Mom doesn't have a lot of credit cards but she had a Chase card with a 29.99% interest rate. With her credit score there is no reason that she should be paying that much in interest. So I told her to call her credit card company and ask for the interest rate to be reduced. Explain that she has always paid on time, never been late, always pays more than the minimum and has now lost her job. THIS almost sparked World War III. She literally said to me why should she do that. The credit card company will never reduce it....blah, blah, blah. I was like Mom just call, the worse they can say is NO but if you don't ask they aren't going to offer you a lower APR. We argued about this DAILY. Every day I would ask if she called...answer was always no. It got so bad we didn't talk to each other for a few days.

I was pissed that my Mom was being stupid about something that was so easy and she was frustrated with my lack of patience and why I was nagging her about so many different things. I finally broke my wall of silence and called her. SO she told me that she called Chase and they did reduce her interest rate by 13%!!! I was so happy. I was like do you realize how much savings that is? I'm sure she didn't but she get's that 13% is a lot less and clearly it was important to me so it should matter to her.

So I have won a few battles but the war is far from over.