financially supporting our bpd daughter

[tazmania]

My husband and I have daughter that was recently diagnosed with BPD. She is 21yr old and is living with her boyfriend. She is set to begin her final year of nursing school and is asking for us to financially support her by cosigning on a loan for her. We have bailed her out numerous times financially and have said if she is not living under our roof, then we will not financially support her. She does not heed any advice we try to give her. She spends money she doesn't have and hasn't saved any money for her final year of college. Do we let her fail and take out her own loan for college, at a 10% interest rate? She barely passed her last semester and we have doubts she can get through the next year of school. She's adamant about going back to school. Do we cosign at a lesser interest rate and tell her we will help her control her spending by having possession of her credit cards( need to be cut up) and having access to her bank records so we can monitor her spending?

Our objective is to better understand the struggles our child faces and to learn the skills to improve our relationship and provide a supportive environment and also improve on our own emotional responses, attitudes and effectiveness as a family leaders

[GaGrl]

It would be highly risky for you to co-author on a loan if her academic performance has not been solid.  You are, essentially, signing up for a large loan at a time you will want to move toward being debt-free.

[Swimmy55]

I would urge caution about co signing.  You could very well be stuck with the whole loan. Are you ok with that / can you afford that?  Also , do you really want to dig that deep into her bank stuff?( having eyes on her accounts, etc) I only ask because you know the BPD flip flap mind:one minute they are fine with it, the next minute you are controlling and making her life miserable and how dare you tell her how to spend her money since she is an adult,etc etc?.  Can't you hear it now?  You have stated she didn't listen in the past.  Will that magically change now?  That is a lot for you to take on  - would it exhaust you?   .  

[LoveOnTheRocks]

Can you do one semester at a time?  Not sign a loan for all of it, but only sign up for 1 semester (if you even want to do that)?
Are her poor grades from last year due to difficulty and challenges or is she loafing off?
I have to bail my DD20 out of so much and honestly, even though this is not about school, if my child asked me for a big chunk of money, today, I would not do it.  Perhaps in the future that will change, but with what I have to work from now, this would not sit well within me, and I HATE when I do something that I really do not, deep down, feel I need to be doing, so I've worked hard at forcing myself to accept that sometimes when I do what is probably the best thing for me (almost certainly), it may not be best for the next person, and they may balk about it, but I can't save everyone...or really anyone. 
Financial aid and other grants and forms of assistance have been thoroughly researched and are already being applied, right?

Can she extend the time out, as in go to school part time and use those extra hours to earn money to pay for it?  She could pay her own way if she didn't need to go fulltime and be unable to work as a result, right?

Reading your post, and knowing you put it there in the first place, I am not feeling like you are AOK with signing these loans.  We have another thread going where another member did sign up for 80K of student loans, and now her daughter could pay her "something" but appears to be choosing to not pay her mom back anything.  How will you handle it if this becomes your situation?
Honestly, my mom taught me hard that I should NEVER loan anyone money I can't live without.  She said if you aren't willing to part with it when you give it to them, you shouldn't do it.  She was right, as I feel I've learned over time.
My husband and I used to make a lot of money (before my spine injury), and we loaned out a lot to many family members (who used to come calling constantly).  Would you believe that when my circumstances changed, none of my family members was able to help me, even if I said I would pay them back? 
After enduring the above pain, I have concluded as my own personal truth that each person should really pay their own way unless there was a disasterous circumstance and I could afford to help. I used to put a lot of pressure on myself to help others and have been heartbroken to learn that none of them put that pressure on themselves when the tables turned.
This was a serious life lesson for me.

[twocrazycats]

Can you do one semester at a time?  Not sign a loan for all of it, but only sign up for 1 semester (if you even want to do that)?

If you can afford it, this sounds like a reasonable compromise. Agree to cosign for one semester and make cosigning for the second semester dependent on X grades or GPA. That puts the consequence clearly in her lap. On the one hand, there are reasons for just saying no, but on the other, a college degree, and especially in a field like nursing, can really get her started on a productive path. After completion of the degree, she should be able to pay back the loan herself. I would also make clear that this is her loan and you expect her to pay it back herself.

My daughter is 18 and will just be starting college at the college where I taught for most of my career until retirement. Even with a tuition waiver and some financial aid, she will still need a small loan to cover part of her room and board expenses. I have agreed to cosign, but with the understanding that this is her loan. Unlike nursing, her field is music therapy, so I don't anticipate jobs to be that easy to find in her field if she does do well and finish her degree. Still, I believe it's worth it. With her uBPD, without college, she could very easily get off on a very bad track.

[Probiotic]

Is she a client of your state’s vocational rehab? We found that agency to be very generous with funds to help their clients achieve success in school/career.

We went through this debate over lending money many, many times. We co-signed on a car when we thought our DD21 was having a turn-around. She ended up making payments about half the time because she couldn’t keep a job.  It used to irk me to no-end. We finally had to chalk it up to an expensive lesson learned for us. Once I let that anger go in my mind and made myself accept that I just paid a lot to learn a valuable lesson, it was a huge load off mind. 

Until recently, her checking account was in our account “group” because her account was initiated when she was a teen. I know better.  I KNOW BETTER! But I still was a moth to a flame and continually looked at her account activity.  How much was her paycheck? She doesn’t have money for rent—should we pay it? Why did she spend money on this or that—she doesn’t have a job! Why did she make payments to a new credit card? She can’t make payments on her current ones!  And on and on and on.  So exhausting!  The worst part is I knew it was my responsibility to just NOT LOOK.

Until about a year ago, she chose to have me be able to track her whereabouts on my phone as a safety precaution.  So I used to obsessively track her.  Is she at work? Why isn’t she at work? Did she quit? Why is she at here? Why is she there? And on and on.  Again, I knew way better than to do this to myself but I did it anyway. 

So, we casually and mutually took her off our personal bank group and we took her off phone tracking. It was an immediate relief to my sanity.  I was ready to treat her like a typical adult child—the kind of relationship in which I didn’t know what was going on unless she tells me.  I’ve employed the amazing strategies I learned here (validate the valid, light as a fairy, I can only change me).  Our relationship is actually very good because I finally decided to change how I reacted, instead of trying to change her or save her.  She also has matured measurably since we quit enabling her financially. She hunts down resources for help on her own. She is also considerably more chatty; I think because she knows we aren’t going to judge/offer advice/save. She even said she feels good being able to handle things on her own.  She also said “I’m learning” when referring to how she’s changed her ways after making the same disastrous mistake over and over.  Music to my ears!  But, she had to learn on her own time, not ours.

(Don’t get me wrong: she still has a multitude of daily challenges and problems.  She’s just better able to handle things more of the time.)

I don’t mean to make this about my situation.  I just hope I can give somebody else the hope and help that I received from this board by reading other families’ strategies.  I wish you strength and peace of mind.