It's always sad when someone is estranged from family like that. My condolences to you.

You could check the laws in the place where he last lived. Maybe you could get a court to appoint you as personal representative for his estate.

However, if it has been 2 months and his roommate knew he had no contact with family, my guess is that whatever belongings he had have probably already been given away or thrown away since the roommate probably needed to find a new roommate quickly and would have needed to clear out your brother's stuff.

I'd probably start by contacting the roommate to see whether there is any reason for you to do anything more.

Based on my experience with several exes, I think it's pretty common to still have positive memories of a relationship and ex unless it was an ugly breakup or the other person was badly mistreating you (and sometimes even then you can still remember some good times) and those memories can last a long time. I don't think that's love though, but just positive feelings about the past.

You have to be the one that decides what's most important to you because that could be different than what someone else wants, but I think it would be a good idea to look for someone that

- you can communicate well with (meaning he both listens to you and talks to you)

- respects you

- is responsible

- is willing to compromise (which doesn't mean always doing exactly what you want, but does mean not always insisting in exactly what he wants)

- is both willing and able to satisfy whatever your top two love languages are.

With that core set of qualities, and assuming you do the same for him, I think your odds of success are pretty good. There might be other specific things that are important to you though that you would also want to look for.

Well, being more frugal than necessary is a lot better for your long term financial success than being less frugal than necessary and if you're happy with your life as it is I don't see a need to worry too much about it, but if the frugality is keeping you from doing things that you really want to do and can afford, then maybe you can try asking yourself whether spending a little more on something you want is going to create any financial hardship in the future and if you see that it won't, perhaps you'll feel a little better about doing it. I think you just want to be careful not to loosen up so much that you go too far - like sports stars or lottery winners that have many millions of dollars and then end up bankrupt because they adjusted their spending habits too much.

If it's really bothering you, maybe therapy could help with adjusting your thinking to a level of spending that's reasonable and still financially wise for your situation. But of course you'll have to pay for therapy so you'll have to decide if you think it's worth it.