My wife and I live in Southern California. I discovered MMM and Fire "by accident" about 2 years ago and it has completely changed the way I view money and everything associated with it. Luckily, my wonderful wife is on board with this.
My wife's daughter -- her dad surprisingly died at age 36 when she was only 3 -- will turn 30 next month. She is really into environment, healthy living, animals, etc.) and graduated from a California State university with majors in Environmental Communications and Political Science. A few months after graduation she moved to Asheville, NC, to volunteer at a major health clinic, eventually got hired as an employee, a year or so later promoted to be in charge of their animal farm. She then changed jobs and worked for an no-kill animal rescue. Roughly a year (?) later she quit that job to pursue her lifelong passion of dance (she started ballet as a child). She works at a dance studio and makes some extra money in arts and crafts. While I don't know her exact income, it can't be much more than $1,200 per month take-home from the dance studio and perhaps a few hundred bucks from the side gig.
She rents a 3-bedroom house in Asheville. Rent is about $1,600 and she has two roommates to help with the rent. As you may imagine, she is struggling financially. About a year ago she got roughly $17,5K from her late dad's life insurance policy, and she spent probably $9K on her teeth, $7K on Invisalign alone. She just told me that's she's paying it off at $300 per month, for another 18 months. Some of the money went to help her transitioning from her previous job. Long story short: it's all gone. She has no savings and still drives the 2003 Scion we bought her before she moved to North Carolina. Must have about 150K on the clock now, if not more.
Our daughter has a 3 year-old Carolina dog, her "baby." It's pretty, and pretty big. Not long ago, the dog broke one of her K9 teeth, and it got infected. Options are to extract the teeth or, as the vet suggested, to do a root canal and then get a crown to the tune of $2,5K. Since she has insufficient credit, she asked us to co-sign a no-interest credit application for the procedure. She would pay it off in 2 years, at about $60 per month.
My wife and I have stellar credit. We could also just loan her the money, but since it's zero interest, I don't think we want to do that. In addition, we have really never gotten any money back from her for previous . . . expenses, like partial airline tickets and that sort.
So my question for you is 2 fold:
Part 1: what should we do regarding the dog's dentist issue?
Part 2: what would you suggest we can do to show our daughter the light when she visits us over the holidays? I'd love for her to make more money, save some money, get an emergency fund, etc.
Thank ya'll for your input!