Being so tight with money?

God knows MN is full of this type of horror story.

The saddest part is that they had loads of red flags PRE PREGNANCY that their partner was a mean money obsessed prick but still they went ahead and chanced it🤷🏻‍♀️....only to be bewildered and regretful.

I feel so sorry for the children in this scenario.....one parent mean and the other foolish.....children paying the price.

To love someone is to value them. Hell, it's to like them! If he loved you, he'd cherish you. Treating you equally, treating you well, do things just because it makes you happy.

He sounds awful. I couldn't live like that. Meanness is the number one character trait I dislike most. It's never just money, it's meanness of spirit that goes with it.

To answer your original question, no, other people and definitely not partners, live like this.

We are a team and we both contribute equally. Not just financially, but with time, effort, house work, raising the kids. We also appreciate what the other one does. BTW, over the years we have each earned more or less, worked more or less, it doesn't mean we split contributions 50:50, it means what ever the family has belongs to everyone fairly.

You deserve a partner that cherishes you, OP.

I couldn't live with someone so miserly - it would put me right off. I am fortunate to have a generous husband, but equally I am a generous person.

An example is that I recently went on two different holidays to Spain, as I was leaving on both times he asked me if I had any euros, I hadn't and was going to get some when I got there. He went to a drawer in his office and gave me some euros to take with me - about £250 each time and wouldn't even hear of me giving that back to him.

Picture this, OP: You have a baby with this man and are on maternity pay. And he watches you struggle and burn through your savings while he hoards his income. Even though you're home with HIS child and spending money on HIS child and your survival. ANd he resents every pound he has to put towards you and the baby.

And when you do go back to work, he expects you to sort and pay for childcare, arrange pick ups and drop offs, cover any baby sick days, etc ... meaning your career takes a hit, your income takes a hit .... yet he still demands 50/50 from you.

That's where you're headed.

FUck him.

Run now.

You won't change him sadly OP, no amount of talking this through is going to change anything.

You are so young, have such a full, lovely life ahead of you, please do not accept this as your life.

My dear friend's mum is with someone like this, his meanness is unsurpassed, he helped his very elderly parents move into care homes and itemised everything he had spent helping them to move, down to a 20P stamp for a letter that had to be sent.

She is the most downtrodden woman I have ever met, her life is so depressing it hurts my heart :( :( :( my friend and I pleaded with her about 15 years ago to leave him, but she didn't, wasn't brave enough/thought she could change him etc and I just feel this huge sense of pity and sorrow for her. She could have had the last 15 years free to live her life, either with someone else or on her own. She now has terminal cancer and sits in a freezing cold dark house, eating her own meals or not eating as she feels too unwell, no friends or family can come over to help her, the list is endless. I just feel so very sad that it has come to this for her.

Run. Take everything you can lay claim to and get out. Misers never change - he’d be the same if he won the lottery or was left £2million in his granny’s will.

OP to give you an idea of what happens in our house:
When we married we opened a joint account. The full sum of both our wages were paid in. It was “our money” .
The house which was in his name was moved to joint names. No money exchanged hands. It was “our house “.
2-3 times a year we sit down and plan out our finances together. Although savings and investments are in single names it’s “our money” and we set aside accordingly each month. If we have a big spend coming up we take it from wherever is most easily accessible and build it up again over time.
We work together to reduce our tax burden as DH is a higher rate tax payer.
At no point have I ever accused DH of spending too much, nor him me. We do have some tight months where DH will say it’s looking that way (he keeps more of an eye on things than I do) and so I’m mindful not to spend as much on Amazon or I’ll take more packed lunches etc as does DH. I’m the one who keeps an eye on MSE for good deals re insurance etc
I realise other couples have different ways of doing things but we are very similar in our outlook and this has worked for us for over 25 years.
If you’re not on the same page, the outlook isn’t good.

I think you should book yourself a nice SOLO few days abroad, nice hotel, have a wander around the sights, dinner and all the rest of it, and have a really good think/plan for what you're going to do, without having to look at him or see his disdain that you've had more wine than he has. He's more or less said he doesn't want to pay up for things - so LISTEN to him when he's telling you who he is, and start going off and doing what suits you. Do not let him eat three quarters of the food you've had to pay half for. Put whatever you don't eat from your half in the bin. Show him the reality of how he wants to live. And when you've done all that, boot his sorry backside out the door.

No absolutely do not do this OP!!!! If he's this controlling now, he'll be even worse if he has access to some of your money too.

You've done the right thing keeping your finances separate, now separate them even more by leaving the bastard. And do not feel bad. He'll be too busy counting his coppers and calculating what "exit fees" you owe him to even be concerned about the fact he's been dumped.

A discussion on working finances won't cut it at all. This type of relationship with money is often a deep seated psychological issue that you might compare to physical hoarding - all tied up with fear and control. There are financial therapists who specialise in this sort of work but even if he agreed to it, it could take years for him to change and what a risk it would be to wait around and find out. Ultimately sad for him as he will be deprived of good human relationships through this behaviour if he doesn't change, but not your problem to fix.

Just read that you are 30. You must get out of this ‘relationship’ - he’ll be rinsing your good years at finding a decent partner if you do want kids. He is a RINSER. I wouldn’t try to tell him why it isn’t working, just that it isn’t. You can do it OP! Onwards & upwards to far, far better things!

My fanny dried up reading the OP.

You deserve someone whose attitude to money is compatible with your own.

He won't change even if you give him an ultimatum. I left the mean man I posted about on this post and I told him I couldn't live with his meanness - he then bought an engagement ring for me - a cheap one! He bought me flowers and had them delivered to my work and my mums house, bought himself some smarter clothes to replace the scruffy cheap ones and even got himself a proper haircut, he'd been cutting it himself.

All to try and get me back. it didn't last long and it made me realise how deliberate all this meanness was and that he thought by spending a bit of money he'd win me back but I knew he'd never change. When I finally went to collect some of my possessions from his, he had a friend there to watch that I didn't take anything that wasn't mine

@fleabites This reminds me of the Arnold Bennett novel, Riceyman Steps, which is about a bookshop-keeping miser who snares a poor unassuming woman, drags her into his apparent poverty, then turns out to be loaded after death. Your version is even sadder, though!

There is a sickness in these types of people. I’m not sure that it is a mental illness. It is simply wicked.

To try to hoodwink and short change someone (down to the smallest penny) who loves you, is generous with you, and wants to establish a life with you, is a poverty of the soul.

There is nowhere to go with that.

Someone who would exchange their good standing for the sake of £2.50 is dead inside.

This kind of person rarely changes OP.

A family member was married to someone like this and she eventually divorced him. She would be scraping around to make the £5/week housekeeping he gave her stretch far enough (this was the late 60s/early 70s). That plus the child benefit was her only income. As part of their divorce (he committed adultery) he signed an affa davit saying she was a spendthrift and this had forced him to take on extra work, which (he said) ultimately led to his infidelity(!). (This is just for context, not saying that adultery is the ultimate end point).

During his second marriage he kept separate accounts from his wife, which suited her fine. He continued to be mean throughout his marriage - she had a good income of her own, so it didn't affect her.

Until she developed dementia and he gained power of attorney. He was so avaricious with her money that she neither went into a care home, or had carers in. In the end she was sitting in her own urine soaked clothes, unwashed and largely uncared for until Social Services intervened - someone had called them with an urgent safeguarding report. The general belief is that he moved her money into his accounts.

He recently died. He was alone, having driven anyone who cared about him away, although plenty of people hung around waiting for the money. He had a assets worth almost £1m. Was he happy? No - he never wanted to spend it. Never went on holiday, never enjoyed his money, well...apart from the totalling it up, keeping that figure in his head made him feel good.

They never change. They always find ways of justifying not spending money - to hoard it means a life of misery for everyone around them. It's time to move on OP, leave him to his piles of gold.

I can't fault a man for not wanting to buy an engagement ring because that is a silly tradition. But generally speaking, you want to be with someone generous, don't you? And he isn't generous. Even if he agrees to change, and tries to - deep down he isn't generous and it will present in different ways later. Don't have kids with him or you'll find yourself in a difficult situation to get out of.

Christ alive... this would drive me insane. Can you imagine if you had children with this man?!. He would be billing you if you used too many nappies out of the pack he bought.
Only you can decide if this is driving you mad enough to leave. People have all sorts of financial arrangements, but they have to work for both parties. He sounds way too tight for this not to be a problem.

DO NOT HAVE KIDS WITH THIS MAN!

He would make you feel indebted to him, for him "keeping you" whilst you were on Mat Leave. Even though it was HIS baby and HIS fault you weren't earning.

He's a fully grown man. ALL of his actions are deliberate. He won't change because that's who he is and he thinks that's ok

Don't waste your time. Make your plans and tell him why as you're actually walking out the door

OP I would get rid of him.
He sounds exactly like my ex and if it wasn't for the fact you're in your 30s and my ex is late 40s, I'd be convinced it was the same bloke.
I got rid of him and I'm glad that I did.

My ex had a spreadsheet for the bills and shopping and totalled up at the end of the month who owed what. He spent hours staring at receipts and entering things on his spreadsheets. He would go through each food shop and cross things out on the receipt that he didn't eat - eg. raspberries, lentils and a couple of other things I have forgotten now. They weren't included as joint shopping because he hadn't eaten them. So under his complicated system I would be billed for those plus half of the rest of the food shop.

The final straw was when I went away hiking for a week and came back to a pile of receipts on the table. I could see he had bought the most expensive cheeses, smoked salmon and all kinds of luxury foods which we normally didn't eat. He then said I owed him for half of that food because that was household shopping - and it was a lot of money because he'd splashed out and stuffed himself all week while I wasn't there. So I very calmly said to him, fine, I'll list all the food I've purchased while I was hiking, a lot of which was in mountain huts and therefore expensive, and we'll split that cost as well because I had to eat while I was away and you ate at home so it's all joint food. He was fuming with me.
And it was at that point that I decided to get rid of him. It took a while to get him moved out because he clung onto the sofa like a limpet and wouldn't be budged. But I did get rid of him.

About 10 months or so after he had left he contacted me asking if the annual bill for the utilities had come in. We have a system here where the house management company deals with all bills (except electricity) and at the end of the year meter readings are taken and the total for the year worked out - it means you can end up with having to pay money back or in my case you often get a refund from the management company if you have paid in more than you have used.
Arsehole ex wanted his share of the refund back even though he'd only been living there for 2 months of that billing period and the majority of the refund that year was because we had gone from two people living here using water etc. to one. I ignored him. Never heard from him again.

Someone like that is not a good life partner. Nobody should be taking advantage of someone else financially and we should all keep our wits about us to a certain extent but when you get to the stage of removing the cost of lentils from a shopping bill or billing someone for 2.50 it's no way to live and no way to build a life together.

Run. Or preferably drive, away fast.

Is this how you want to spend the rest of your life, with someone who thinks £2.50 is worth a discussion?

And talking of cars, you have a car, he doesn’t , when was the last time you drove and he was a passenger? Did he even say “ thanks for driving” , has he ever offered to pay for petrol, pay for parking, let alone contribute to the upkeep, insurance, MOT of your car, which , although it is yours , has no doubt been used for his convenience hundreds of times.

You deserve so much better than him @Rockrose94

It's probably too late now as I suspect any feelings you had have probably crumbled away, but if there was hope and you wanted to still be together, he was willing to listen, I'd suggest a joint account. You could both equally put in an amount each month which covers your rent and bills, including shopping, plus a bit extra for a dinner out other treats, and you can do what you like with what you have left in your own accounts.
But, your post above about you think he'd expect you to still cover your half of everything if you were ill or lost your job, but yet when it looked like he might lose his he'd probably expect you to still cover everything is very telling.

Oh, and just to echo the others, you really do sound lovely, you really do deserve better. And I don’t mean a better partner than him but just that you deserve better out of life.
I once knew a couple who had a whiteboard in their kitchen with their names at the top, it had things like James - milk, 60p and it dawned on me that they lived like this, every penny split down the middle. It felt claustrophobic and weirdly controlling.

I know you might not think your relationship is abusive OP - might be worth considering doing the freedom programme so that you are fully informed.

https://www.freedomprogramme.co.uk/online.php