You and your sister sound like my husband and his brother. Their parents paid for his brother to go to a good college. He screwed around for a couple of years and dropped out. Hubby volunteered for the Army during Vietnam, so he could get the GI Bill and paid his own way through college, graduated with a degree in a good paying field. Brother never has managed to keep a job. Oh, he has LOTS of grand “get-rich-quick” ideas and has borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars off family members over the last 35 years, but he’s spent the last 7 years living rent free in another family member’s rental property, because the family member “can afford it.” He was supposed to be looking after their widowed mom’s finances, which I thought was like the fox watching the hen house, but Hubby trusted his brother. He thought there were limits to what his brother would do. So, after his brother spent all their mom’s money on stuff for himself and ran her $75K into debt, guess who got to bail her out? Then we moved her out to live with us.
This is the same genius who told Hubby that spenders are better with money than savers, because spenders know a lot of things to do with with money, where savers only know how to do one thing-save.
Amazing, isn’t it? And I hear stories like that every day on how different siblings from the same two parents can be when it comes to money. A good friend of mine has been tied up in court for years because her brother raided their father’s money and spent it all, leaving her and her sister without any inheritence.
The brother basically got away with it, filed bankruptcy, etc. and they can’t touch him or his assets, which are in the millions. Grrr!
But, there WILL be a ‘judgement day’ down the line for him. :)