(How) do you support your parents financially?

DontShaveMePls

DontShaveMePls

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Dec 2, 2012
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Hello friend. Good luck bros.
Some of you might be from countries where there aint such thing as retirement and shit. My father is 52 years old and his company will be out of business in 2 years or so. His skills do not transition to other niches and he can't go back to 9-5 after being self-employed for more than 20 years and doing this thing. This world we live in is becoming to fast for him. I love my parents more than everything in the world and I would do anything so they could live a stress free life. However, I'm in my early twenties myself and I ain't that successful yet, but I will definitely use this situation as a motivation. Are any of you in similar situations? What are your thoughts?
 


Wait - he's been "self-employed" and his skills are non-transferable? What kind of insanely specific niche is he in that he can't apply the same concepts of whatever he was doing self-employed to another product or service?

Unless they were like.. the guys who trained the last Ninja clans of Japan, and now those last ninjas are finally dying without passing on the secrets or whatnot... that's the only example of "self-employed business for 20 years where I can't apply my skills to another.. self-employed opportunity" that I could think of.

I employ my father on occasion because he has the transferable skill of programming. Maybe you can figure out what kind of transferable skills he does have after 20 years of self-employment, and employ those to your own working businesses to have him work for you.
 
Vadym said:
Wait - he's been "self-employed" and his skills are non-transferable? What kind of insanely specific niche is he in that he can't apply the same concepts of whatever he was doing self-employed to another product or service?

Unless they were like.. the guys who trained the last Ninja clans of Japan, and now those last ninjas are finally dying without passing on the secrets or whatnot... that's the only example of "self-employed business for 20 years where I can't apply my skills to another.. self-employed opportunity".
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Thanks for the reply.
Well, we come from a small country, it was somewhat government related plus european union funding. All that could be built, has been built. You can only do maintenance now and this does not bring enough money. He has been doing this stuff all his life, but it's coming to an end as I said. Sure, you could say that he could transfer his business skills, but it wasn't business skills that brought bacon on the table, maybe it was being first, being lucky, having connections or whatever, doesn't really matter now.
 
DontShaveMePls said:
Thanks for the reply.
Well, we come from a small country, it was somewhat government related plus european union funding. All that could be built, has been built. You can only do maintenance now and this does not bring enough money. He has been doing this stuff all his life, but it's coming to an end as I said. Sure, you could say that he could transfer his business skills, but it wasn't business skills that brought bacon on the table, maybe it was being first, being lucky, having connections or whatever, doesn't really matter now.
Click to expand...

I think the same shit can be applied. If you're from a small eastern European country - then its probably still celebrating its first few decades of non-Soviet rule with things like the liberty to buy stuff and the Internet [not trolling - using Romanians as an example, brick and mortar shop owners are just now figuring out they can have a lot of stuff they used to have to look in catalogs and broker shipment deals for can now be easily dropshipped to their biz address in a few weeks.]

You know what, this shits easier over Skype. PM your Skype - I have some suggestions. Being in a small eastern european country + "maybe it was being first, being lucky, having connections or whatever" = can supply a lot of consumer people with shit if you can spot basic trends of what your countrymen need or enjoy [winter is coming - and i dont think romanians have ever actually seen the product of an electric blanket, I never saw one there in any store = bet it would sell pretty well right now based on experiencing the heating issues of individual apt buildings/neighborhoods/coldass winter], or the brick and mortars with wholesale supply of whatever shit they want. Since right now they probably go to the neighboring country [Romanians buy shit from Hungary to sell in their brick and mortars].
 
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Sounds like your dad is just tired of working and wants you to support him now. Tell him to get off his ass and get a job.
 
I have a similar situation with my mom. She's 62, I'm 31, she was a teacher in California for 18 years before moving to another state. Apparently the CA teachers union doesn't pay into social security somehow, I couldn't believe it, but they do some private retirement fund bullshit, so my mom got around $150k for retirement which is mostly gone and was never enough to "retire". Her SS is $200/mo as a result. I still feel like giving her the money to pay into SS for a few years until it's more like $1k/mo.

Basically I give her around $12k/year to eat and she's living in a trailer on a couple acres she bought. She works her ass off running a dog rescue but it's not really sustainable as she gets older.

I suppose eventually she'll have to move with us or one of her siblings.

Sad to watch cause 10 years ago she owned 14 houses in Ohio and had her shit together, ended up losing most of it in 1 property.
 
i support my mother a good bit even though my father is a wealthy enough (by west of Ireland standards) businessman but he's just tight with the pursestrings. i don't blame him to be honest, she's useless with cash. support one my sisters as well who's married and both of them working but middle class in Ireland pay extortionate tax to support the pikey underclass. but mostly support my brother who's a wannabe filmmaker and pretty good, but absolutely no business hustle at all. also gave a few loans to my other brother, only totalling to €1k outstanding

yeah, i support my whole family lol, apart from my Dad and other married, rich sister. charles ngo is right, supporting family feelsgoodman, can't think of anything else to spend my money on really.
 
if the guy was running a business for 20 years, how is he not able to adapt in order to find another means of supporting himself?

sounds like you are worrying too much and not giving him enough credit

you should just focus on your own success so that you are in a better position to help your family should they really need it
 
I try to support my parents buying my own clothes, foods and more. They can then save their money to take care of themselves. I think it is a way to SUPPORT your father. He has two years or so to find a way to save earned money; you can help him.
 
Just deleting this because I thought my comment was far funnier than it actually is 5 minutes ago.... 4am, drunk, been flashing Android all evening etc.

Depends on what country and what your old mans skillset is tho tbh. Hard to give serious advice without knowing that (and the country.)

Could always get him to move and get on the social. I hear Germany is good, friend.

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I throw my Ma a twenty spot here and there for watching the kids. Sometimes she'll pop in and ask for $100 to go blow on the slots at the casinos. Least I could do for a women who spent 24 hours trying to pop me out of her vagina, and the hundreds of thousands she spent on my brother and I raising us, with little appreciation (until we got older). I'll take my Pops out to lunch here and there. Luckily, both have good pensions and don't need the money.
 
My father in law had similar situation. He is now 73 but still full of energy and ideas for businesses. But the problem is his business was always focused around production. Back then in 60, 70, 80 and 90 (before country's transformation) he was a small to medium scale manufacturer. He was producing simple things like some car parts, cheap jewelry, heating systems etc. It was kind of a gold mine back then when market was empty (virtually no competition) and he did very well (most people didn't). Once a month he was driving around country and coming back home with suitcase full of cash. Anyway, after 90's transformation from communism to "free market", his business was getting slower and slower. The reason? Chinese crap flooding our market. At some point production became unprofitable and he sold most of machines and stuff.

Yes, he should have switched his focus to import but, he didn't.

His last attempt to get some business up and running again was year ago, he invested some money (again production but based on parts bought from China), but it didn't worked out. Again, cheap stuff from China is what people want over here. No way to compete on price with them.

So if OP's father is in similar situation I know something about that. I would say if it's still possible and father have some connections and can get into the market, tell him to import and sell stuff, or to produce high ticket items. Knowing reality of post commie countries, people want mostly cheap stuff.

If you are in EU then you should try to get money for business from EU founding wallets. Even in my country people still can get some nice cash to start a business, it's getting harder but is still possible. $100K isn't much but always good to start something.

As a side note, my father in law never took a loan or borrowed money from banks or anyone. He is totally against borrowing money so that option was out the window for us anyway.

I would say suck-in from EU as much money as possible and go ahead. EU is turning into dust anyway so probably you won't need to worry about paying it back anyway. On the other side there are even some EU founds that don't have to be paid back at all (you just need to keep all spending and stuff well documented so you can give them back good reports, proving that you are managing money in a right way). Check your options and if possible go for it. And the most important thing if you are dealing with EU money, hire GOOD accountant.

Trust me, EU and your own corrupted and greedy politicians are going to fuck you up anyway. It's jungle mate, what you take is yours.
 
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