Sacrifice To Win

**Rachel Cruze** (0:30)
If you have any questions about life and money, so give us a call at 888-825-5225.
First, we have Sue in Tampa, Florida. Hi, Sue, welcome to the show.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:42)
Hi, how are you?

**Rachel Cruze** (0:43)
Hi, we're doing great. How can we help?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:46)
So the reason why I reached out to you guys is because you're very Christian based. And so my dilemma is my mom's in her seventies, never worked a traditional job where she could get social security on her own. So my parents got divorced when it was time for retirement. She did the calculation based on my dad's income. So she has a very small amount of social security. In her fifties, my dad helped her buy a house. She sold it and went on the mission field and basically funded herself. Never was funded by a church. Whenever she'd have a financial crisis, she would reach out to my sister or I and we had to help her, right? So she's used a lot of this, like the Bible teaches us to honor our parents, and she uses that pretty much as her weapon to get me and my sister to continuously support her. So I wanted to reach out to you guys because you are a Christian based company.
Morally, like I'm remarried with a blended family, and we still have three minor kids in the house that we provide for. And like morally, are my sister and I responsible for our mom for her choices?

**Rachel Cruze** (1:54)
Well, I mean, from a basic level, no. I feel like we're all adults.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:58)
Yes.

**Rachel Cruze** (1:59)
And we all get to make our decisions. And as much as an honoring and respecting and taking care of are all three different categories of wording, right? So honoring is a very different thing than even just respecting, right? Some parents are like, you need to respect me. It's what the Bible says. It's like, no, no, no. It says I should honor you.
What does that look like?
It doesn't say that you have to fund every member of your family, including your parents, financially, when they have been adults and haven't made good decisions. It also says, Sue, in there, you reap what you sow. Decisions that you make about your life will come to fruition. It also says, take care of your family first or you're worse than an unbeliever. So you're taking care of your nuclear family first before anyone else, right? So I'm like, you can bat around Scripture as much as you want, and people can pull their punches in their own way of looking at it. And so I think, you know, what you're feeling is not wrong. And where you feel like you're being maybe taken advantage of and stressed of taking care of your own family, you have to figure out priorities. And so where I would push you is to say, you're probably going to have to have a conversation around some boundaries, but also taking care of your family first, and then out of the abundance of what you have out of that, if there is any in the season and you guys choose then to help her, then that's one thing. But this idea of having to be forced into it is tough.

**Jade Warshaw** (3:32)
I agree. I almost if I were in your shoes, I believe I would try to remove her from the conversation as much as possible because there's obviously some whatever around that. And if I would just say, hey, there's an opportunity here for generosity.
How do I feel about it? Do I want to do it and do I not? And really, that's the bottom line. Do I want to do this? Do I not? And if you don't, that's fine because you want to be a cheerful giver. And if you can't do this with a cheerful heart and it doesn't feel right and it doesn't feel good, you shouldn't be giving under compulsion. And that's exactly what this is, is somebody's compelling you and trying to guilt you into something. And I think like removing all that aside, you can really just feel that and go, it just doesn't feel good to me. And I think that's enough to make your decision, at least for today.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:21)
Right, okay. I just don't know where that line is between honoring her. And I feel like when I've had to put her on boundaries, she's like a get rich quick scheme person, she gets sucked into that.
And so she has a lot of credit card debt and instead of just giving her money, I've been trying to pay off her credit cards, but I've been limiting how much I pay towards it, knowing that she's just going to re-rack it up, if that makes sense.