Burdened by Parents; Thwarted by Banks

A quick back his­tory:  In Decem­ber ’07, my mom decided to sell her house and move across the coun­try to live with my youngest sis­ter, her hus­band, and their three chil­dren.  In mid-January she put her house up for sale and it sold almost imme­di­ately.  She closed on the house in early March.  Since her house rep­re­sented the sum total of my mom’s assets (bal­anced by a ver­i­ta­ble moun­tain of debt), I “offered” to help her decide how best to invest (pro­tect) the bulk of her earn­ings from the sale of the house.

The orig­i­nal idea was to lad­der the money into CDs but things were still a bit up in the air (was the liv­ing sit­u­a­tion going to work, should she pay off her debts imme­di­ately or bank all of her cash and con­tinue to make monthly pay­ments to reduce her debt, her innate pro­cliv­ity for spend­ing and her appar­ent fear of sol­vency) all resulted in an interim solu­tion — to pur­chase short-term CDs and save the real deci­sions for later.

So, here we are.  The WaMu CDs she opened in March matured last week and after some very frus­trat­ing customer-service-related has­sles and a some stress-filled con­ver­sa­tions, the CDs were finally cashed out on Friday.

My orig­i­nal plan was to spend some time today open­ing a lad­der of ING Direct CDs.  I started by log­ging into my mom’s WaMu account.  As we’d pre­vi­ously dis­cussed, she’s already spend about $15,000 today.  Appar­ently those pay­ments have gone toward her ever-mounting credit card debts (please, don’t ask; deal­ing with imma­ture par­ents is a respon­si­bil­ity I’ve faced my entire life and I can assure you, it doesn’t get any eas­ier with practice).

Here’s the “dashed” part:  ING Direct low­ered their rates over the week­end.  That’s right.  Their 24-month CD rate dropped from 4.25% to 3.75%.  Cr*p! Don’t these peo­ple know what I’m fac­ing with my mom?  The last thing I needed was their wrench thrown into my plans.

So I went back to the draw­ing board — in the form of a Google search.  Now I think I’m back on track for a CD lad­der plan — this time with GMAC.  But I’m not count­ing my chick­ens.  I can’t actu­ally do any­thing until I can get my mom on the phone for a few unin­ter­rupted min­utes.  If I can’t make that hap­pen today, I might have to start my CD rate search all over again tomorrow.

Please, wish me luck — and if you have any pull with GMAC, beg them to leave their rates alone until I get get the remain­der of my mom’s cash safely tucked into CDs again before she man­ages to spend all of it.

adden­dum:

After five phone calls to my mom and a 50-minute call with a GMAC bank rep­re­sen­ta­tive, my mom and I are offi­cially co-owners of 6 brand-spanking-new GMAC CDs.

Yes, you read that right, this time I’m a co-owner.  We really need to do a Power of Attor­ney but until then being a co-owner affords me the lux­ury of full access to these CDs with­out hav­ing to ille­gally pre­tend to be my mom.

Here’s the CD lad­der make-up:

Related posts:

1. Good News — Update on my IRA
2. The Daugh­ter asked about our Family’s Finan­cial Health