Quite personally, I think the only thing you can do is change who your mother is, which isn't going to happen easily. She blew $25 grand that quickly? Wow. Anyone who blows money that easily isn't going to be easy to tame. (If she'd used it to pay off debt that would be different, but sounds like she just spent it all.)
If she can't keep $25 grand, how do you expect her to keep $8? And that isn't very much money, and at her age, is relatively nothing compared to what she needs at this point towards retirement. (Even the $25 wasn't near what she needs to have at this point.)
Some people are just like that. I think about the only thing you can do is show her numbers -- make her see what she's doing. If she stuck that $8K into something earning 5%, by time she retires in 12 years, it'll be worth a big whopping $14K. She'll get real far on that, huh? (Of course, you don't want that to make her think it isn't worth saving. She needs to learn to save something, starting with that $8 grand.)
Go to a retirement calculator such as this one:
Calculators - Retirement Planner
(Or just google retirement calculators if you don't like that one.)
I just played around with it, making up a salary for a LPN, with apparently no savings, and only $8K to work with, it estimated S.S. by that time (based on assumptions she's been making that kind of money her whole life), and it said she needed to earn 35% average per year and there was ZERO percent chance of making the goal of needed money in retirement.
Now... keeping in mind that we can't really count on social security... I've seen some things recently that predicted that about the time she retires she might get about 70-75% of what is estimated that she'll get. Assuming she pays any attention to those statements they send every year.
Make her play with that calculator so that she can see she's getting nowhere really quickly. And she can use that to figure out about how much she needs to be putting aside. You almost have to
scare her into doing it, if she can see she's not going to have anything to live on. Most definitely she needs to start saving, and that means budgeting and accepting that she can't have everything she wants.
If you can manage to get her to save, then you can come back later and ask what she maybe should be doing with it.
And then...
stop bailing her out. This has to be a joint effort of your and the siblings. It isn't your responsibility and your younger sister shouldn't have to be stressing out over it. It's not your stress to bear. It's your mom's. When you continually bail someone out, they continually do the same things because they've gotten away with it. It's your choice to stop doing it. I think that's one of the most important steps you can take to make sure she understands she has to be responsible for herself. A one-time thing is one thing, but it sounds like it happens all the time.
That might be tough since she's your mother, but it's very sad and wrong that she's taking advantage of her daughters in that manner. It was supposed to be her responsibility to teach you, not the other way around. Looks like the deadbeat brother followed in her footsteps.
I do wish you luck. I'd be curious to find out what you do.
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