Spending Money

My mother in law kept the books in an obsessive, secretive way. I was only able to figure out her motivations after her death. She never let her husband have cash in his pocket, which caused problems when we drove him places he wanted to go and we had to pay for everything. After her death, the money she had saved and invested became the object of his obsessive admiration.

Because of how she told her husband only part of the truth, (for example, how much money was in the farm accounts,) the farm was able to survive. To her credit, she was as honest as she could be under the petty tyranny she lived under.

My father in law is not only appallingly greedy, he loves spending other peoples' money and is very tight with his own. He has only a rudimentary clue of how economics work at all, thinking of budgeting as something someone else should take care of.

Whenever my husband and mother in law were gone more than 24 hours at the same time, it was a standing family joke that my father in law (FIL) would go to an auction and put too much money down on useless equipment.

I remember one thing he bought for $7,000, a comminutor, a machine that breaks up solids so you can run it through a manure system. He thought he was inventing an earth-shattering new process that would revolutionize the industry (much, much more on his crackpot inventions later) so he spent hours and hours of time and thousands and thousands of dollars pursuing this while leaving the day to day grind to others.

Needless to say, the comminutor was a bust, never used, and he sold it discounted to the next person. Someone made money on the deal, but it wasn't him.

He also bought two Hereford cows (not dairy cattle) for breeding purposes. The first was named Pansy and the second Pansy 2. Both were undersized and bought for more money than they were worth. This would have been funny if it wasn't such a waste. He was going to use egg implantation to carry forth the Holstein breed using Hereford surrogates. My husband would have refused, except that FIL can never figure out how to do anything by himself. He never called anyone to do the implanting, never prepared the cows for implantation, etc. etc. He usually just expected my husband to follow through on all this for him so he could take credit for the miraculous results.

Consequently, the Herefords had regular calves by regular bulls and were sold soon thereafter, for no profit, naturally.

Three years before she died, MIL took her husband's farm checkbook away from him because he would write checks on invoices, which messed up the bookkeeping, (which by then was my responsibility,) or wrote checks for personal items, etc. etc. The Sister Twin got wind of this and told everyone that I and my husband had taken away his checkbook and wasn't it awful and how mean we were.