Your sister and your brother-in-law are sitting in your living room. They've come to you because they are in bad financial trouble. You saw this coming but now that they've laid the facts out for you to see, you are stunned at the depth of the mess.
Your brother-in-law was incredibly foolish. He got himself involved in a whole series of pyramid schemes and is now in debt well beyond his ability to pay. In fact, he's in debt beyond your ability to pay but he wants you to take on his debt because you are steady. You have a house, some savings, some investments and a secure job. You can't cover his debt but you can borrow enough to set up payments; these payments, of course, will have to be made by you for years to come.
You love your sister and her kids. She's come to you because she's frightened and the last few weeks in her home have been filled with one revelation of disaster after another. As you look at her, you realize how much she loves her husband and wanted to believe in him, but now she is filled with pain and loss. Her kids are in the kitchen eating ice cream. You know that if some thug came into your house right now and tried to hurt those kids, you would do whatever was necessary to protect them.
Then you look at your brother-in-law. He's the thug. He has hurt your sister and is a danger to his own children. He had no stop button when he was making his decisions and acted out of greed so obvious that you always wondered what that smell was whenever he entered a room. What hits you in your gut is how often the s.o.b. made it plain that he thought he was smarter than you. He thought you were small time and boring.
It comes to you that this situation is something out of the movie, "Parenthood." Tom Hulce has come to you, Jason Robards, to bail him out.
You're thinking. You can make the offer: you'll bail them out. You know that this will force you to work beyond your retirement. In fact, you will die still in debt. Your kids will have to service this debt. It will cost them something from their lives.
You've been slapped fully awake. You can't save them. You know you will do whatever is necessary to make sure your sister and her kids have a home, food on their table and you'll treat the future of her kids as if they were your own kids. If you have to, you will buy their house (or one smaller). You'll go to the bank on Monday and set up college funds for her kids.
But you're not going to let your brother-in-law just start over. You're going to let him sink and lose what he has. You'll have some documents drawn up to make sure a large percentage of any money he makes for the foreseeable future is locked-up in the safety of your sister, the future of his kids and paying the debt. You're going to demand he attend classes, meetings, whatever it takes to get him to admit his faults, own-up to his failures as a man and deal with reality.
In your heart, you want to save them and take away all the pain. Your head is thinking about how much danger you are in, right now. Your gut is telling you to punish this damn fool.
And it comes to you: Even if he agrees to your plan, he's a liar. He has an addiction. If you try to tie him up in agreements, he'll go along only for a while. Then he'll either take off or he will start a campaign, and it will be a campaign, within the family to show how mean you are, how small-minded you are, how needlessly restrictive you are. He'll start borrowing, secretly, from others to finance his big ideas.