My dad managed my long-term investment account (quarterly rebalancing, nothing crazy) when I was younger and he had access to my account to do so.

When I got married, I overhauled my accounts since I manage household finances and converted that account to a joint account with my partner. I also opened a robo-investing account that rebalances automatically and began using the old account for emergency cash and long-term investments that are going to sit there until I retire – all of which my dad knew.

I assumed that since I had converted the old account to a joint account with my spouse, my dad’s access was automatically revoked but I was wrong.

My dad invested all my emergency cash (over a third of my annual salary, in the tens of thousands of dollars) without telling me. He happened to do this right before a recurring monthly transfer was scheduled and my account ended up getting overdraft by almost a thousand dollars.

Once I figured out what had happened, I sent him a quick email asking him not to do any transactions without telling me and forwarded the overdraft notification. He took care of the overdraft and I left it at that.

I was talking to my mom several days later for the first time in over a week and she was asking how I manage my accounts (both my parents are accountants) so I ran through them all and said I didn’t have cash in my emergency account anymore and told her what happened. I said it was unacceptable that he invested such a huge amount without talking to me and without checking that there weren’t any scheduled cash transactions.

Guess what? The investment went down the drain.

My dad overheard this and became furious that I was annoyed, even though he agreed he shouldn’t have made the investment. He was also angry that I had discussed the situation with my mom but not him. I reminded him that I had sent him an email asking him not to do this again, and he said that didn’t count since he didn’t realize I was annoyed.

We do not have a close relationship and don’t normally discuss our feels.