Do you think parents deserve anything for raising their children? Are they allowed to demand things from their grown children? Apparently, one mom had no problem asking her son for money, a lot of money.
Former NFL player, Phillip Buchanan, wrote that his mom demanded he give her one million dollars because she raised him for the last 18 years. He was a first-round draft pick for the Oakland Raiders in 2002, the day his mother asked for the money. His book New Money: Stay Rich, shares this story and others about drawing the line with family and money.
“If my mother taught me anything, it’s that this is the most desperate demand that a parent can make on a child,” he wrote in an exclusive excerpt released to Fox Sports. He shared that he moved out of his house when he was 17-years-old because he didn’t feel safe there. He attended the University of Miami, where he played football.
I learned from this expensive lesson that big-ticket purchases for family members, such as houses and cars, should be evaluated with the following questions in mind: If you were unable to make payments for these purchases, would that particular family member be able to make the payments? Twenty years from now, who will be paying the upkeep on the house? You or your family member?
Then there’s the respect part of the equation. Are these family members respecting the gifts you give? For years, my mother left the lights on in the house without a thought as to how much I paid for electricity. This is a corollary of an old cliche that I’ve heard many times, that your kids won’t turn out the lights when leaving a room until they grow up and have to pay their own utility bills. It used to refer to kids, but in my case it fit right in as applicable to my family of Adult Abusers.
He didn’t give his mother the money, but he did buy her a house. She never sold her old house and instead rented it out to her sister, never offering Buchanon any money. His mother said she couldn’t afford to pay for the home on her own and he offered to buy a smaller and more affordable house for her. She said no and asked for $15,000 from him. It was the last bit of money he gave her.
She lost the house and Buchanon said he learned a lesson from the experiences with his mother and other family members. According to his book:
“It took hundreds of thousands of dollars, far more than the cost of an Ivy League education, to learn this lesson [about not letting relatives abuse new wealth]…I can at least attribute it to my mother. It’s true; mothers have a way of making you learn the most important lessons in life.”
This isn’t just good information for football players, but for anyone with any amount of money. You can check out his book by clicking here.
