Yup, I can relate here too. It's my older (former) sister, who began working at a young age, got her employer to pay for her education even if it did take her a decade to graduate, and generally made a very decent salary up until the economy fizzled a few years ago. It was like pulling teeth to get her to contribute even 6% to her 401K, b/c she felt she was too young to worry about retirement. Not that it matters now, she's liquidated the account in recent years.
She's never lived out on her own, never has had to pay rent or a mortgage, got her first two cars as freebies from my parents, and spent every last cent on clothes, designer purses, manicures, etc. My parents both tried to make her more responsible, but it all fell on deaf ears, and they refused to push her out on her own so she could learn responsibility in the real world. Dad passed, and Mom got dementia. Long story short, Mom lives close to us now, in assisted living. After a year, I got my sister to move downstairs into the smaller apartment, and my Mom's main floor unit was rented out, roughly covering the cost of her care here.
My sister still couldn't hack it, so she "borrowed" $$ from my Mom's accounts every time taxes needed to get paid, repairs, you name it. Never paid a dime of rent for her apartment either, and never adjusted her lifestyle when she lost her financial services job and started collecting unemployment. When unemployment ran out, she presented paperwork of a revokable trust she got my Mom to sign, even using a chunk of my Mom's $$ to pay the unscrupulous lawyer! So, she revoked the trust, cashed it all out, and shut down all my mom's accounts so I no longer had access to funds to cover my Mom's care. We have joint power of attorney, which is utterly useless.
Luckily, I started to see heavy activity on my Mom's accounts, so I acted quickly and pre-paid her final expenses and dumped a few months of assisted living payments into her account at the facility. When she found out, she attempted to get a refund from the funeral home and the assisted living director! I was done at that point, so my lawyer sent her a notice reminding her that my mother has survivorship rights on the house, so if she stopped paying for my Mom's care, we were prepared to return my mother back home, and she could deal with it. This was a threat, we would never put my mom in that situation again, but we knew it was the only card we had left to play.
It did the trick, and she has been using the rent money to cover my mom's care, and traveling with friends quite a bit, so I'm sure she's running through my mom's savings at a very fast clip. A recent image from Google earth shows that the fence that was blown away by Superstorm Sandy has still not been repaired. This is an affluent neighborhood, I'm shocked that the neighbors have let that slide for so many years, but it seems like everyone is willing to cut a break to those who deserve it the least. :(