A Poll For Anyone Who Doesn't Speak To Their Family: Do You Think Estrangement Cost You Money, Or Saved You Money?

“It costs money. It costs money because it saves money.”

I’ve been thinking lately about some of the smaller, stranger details about familial estrangement. There’s more than a little bureacracy involved in the process; you can’t just hang up the phone once and have done. Besides blocking email addresses and phone numbers, you’ve got to consider location-sharing apps, group chats, shared accounts (from checking to Netflix), family plans, life insurance, online trivia leagues,¹ and so on.

I remember being surprised, for example, by how difficult Venmo made it to block people. Venmo really doesn’t want you to end relationships with anybody, and I had to jump through three or four more hoops than usual in order to make sure none of my relatives could contact me there. If Venmo had it their way, no one would ever break up, just keep trading money back and forth until the end of the world. This made sense, since it’s in Venmo’s interest for you to continue sharing money with everyone you already know.

If you happen to be estranged from your family — whether you consider that arrangement temporary or permanent or contingent on future events — I wonder if you’ll consider participating in this informal poll! (I assume, for example, that I’ve been written out of any wills I might once have been included in, but I don’t know that for certain. I also assume that if any medical crises were to arise in my own parents’ old age that I would be perfectly cheerful in declining to help out, either financially or logistically, but that’s easier said than done, isn’t it?)

Everything is entirely anonymous, but I’m curious to know what kind of a role that money has played in other people’s estrangements.

I don’t have any sense of whether people are likelier to become estranged from relatives who are wealthier or poorer than them. I imagine that money can play a role in either direction. In some ways it might be easier to become estranged from a relative who’s got money, because you won’t feel guilty about removing a source of financial support from their life; I can imagine that if my parents had been even only partly dependent on my income, it would have been far more difficult to end our relationship. And of course anything can change; they were wealthy the last time we spoke, but life is long and the market is volatile.