Parents charge young adult $87k in "back rent" they claim was accrued over 5 years of living with them: 'They don’t need the money, and I genuinely thought the “rent” was a budgeting exercise'

A grown child finds out that what they thought was a budgeting lesson was actually a five-year rent tab, and now their parents want 5 years of rent and expenses, totalling $87,000, back.

Money is a means of control, and these parents certainly mean to wield it. And, for parents, this is some real landlord-type behavior.

I don't think anyone who has ever paid their own expenses would ever argue that asking an adult for a contribution towards living expenses is unreasonable. But, I suspect, that is maturity and responsibility that comes with knowing just how much money needs to be burnt every month just to keep up with the most basic expenses. And know that adding yet another person to the household will only increase those expenses and might cut margins that were razor-thin down to being entirely unmanageable. 

Still, it would be reasonable to expect that if someone was expecting incremental payments from you, they would actually seek to collect those payments, not hit you with them all at once, 5 years down the track. Especially when it's your own parents you're continuing to live with, or moving back in with, it's a little harder to establish different ground rules and change a dynamic that has existed since "forever." And when you're the "kid" in the arrangement, it can be a little hard to stomach having to pay your parents rent.

Still, when you're a kid or young adult trying to find your feet, money to live on is hard to come by, and it becomes a means of control for parents, employers, or others who might seek to take advantage of you or steer you wrong. Looking at the sum of the value of 5 years of rent in this way is a great reminder of what a privilege it is to have a family that can afford to put you up for any extended length of time. That amount of money saved in rent could well go towards a house deposit or otherwise fund a future.

$87k is a lot of money to have in savings and even more money to owe someone. It does stand to reason here that there was an original "agreement" that the young adult simply didn't expect their parents to uphold, and that does carry some weight. But overall, the timing of everything makes this seem like there is some other way they are now living their life that their parents don't like, and their parents are using this as a way to reel them back in.