To think he could carry me for a bit? (sorry, bit long)

[CashConfusion]

Please can I have your opinion on our financial situation and responsibilities to one another and whether AIBU? I really have no idea if I am.

DP and I have totally separate finances. Before DS (2.5) was born, we split all expenses - mortgage on the house we live in (he moved into mine), utilities, food etc) 50/50, with DP paying his share monthly into my account and I pay all bills. I knew that I wanted to be a SAHM for a good chunk of time - at least 2 years because DS very hard won and will be an only. DP in agreement with this. We agreed I would aim to get back to work in September of this year.

I am self-employed so when I don't work, obviously, I don't earn. I do have about £400 a month from a property I rent out. DP is an employee earning about £45k and also had, until last year when he sold it, about £1200 a month from renting the flat he lived in before he moved in with me. He realised almost 200K from this sale.

Since DS was born, we have split expenses 60/40 with me paying 40% (from my savings). That is until recently when I instigated a 80/20 split as I was running out of money. I explained to DP that I had no money left and asked if he would support me until I got back to work. I am actively looking for work and am confident that I will get something soon but it is taking a bit longer that I had hoped. DP in agreement with this.

I have willingly burnt through my life's savings (45k) funding this time at home with DS and now have £600 to my name. In this time, DP has been able to continue paying into his pension, ISAs, CTF for DS.

At the beginning of August, DP paid £2.5k into my account without any explanation. I thought it was because a counsellor we were seeing suggested that he might like to make a contribution to my savings given we were a team and in recognition of the contribution I had made as a SAHM.

Tonight DP has just announced that he is only paying £700 into my account this month (which will not come close to covering out outgoings) as he is "offsetting" against the £2.5K he gave me! I feel sick and shaky. Where does he think I am going to get money from? Effectively, this means he considers the £2.5K a loan and I have to pay him back. I feel totally unsupported and vulnerable. He says he "didn't realise I didn't have any more money". I had told him and we had agreed!

We are going to talk tomorrow night. I realise that I can't whine about spending my savings - it was my choice to stay at home and not earn. Am I being unreasonable to expect him to support me for a bit or is he being unreasonable to not want to do it?

If you've made it this far, huge thanks! I am genuinely confused as to what is the right thing to do and need an objective view.

sorry but you are working you are working at home bring up a child - if a nanny did your job the pay would be anywhere over 250 per week.

So a 60-40 split needs to take into account your wages and him paying 60% towards childcare.

He is being a skinflint tight arse

OMG, Op
You have made a massive mistake with this man. I think the only way you can reconcile this whole situation with yourself is to view it as 'you are and always have been a single parent'. You have done a fantastic job in managing to support your DS so well on your own. For that you should feel really proud.
It is time for a new start. In the future, I hope that you meet a man who loves you and with whom you can be very happy.

Nannys are £500 a week plus tax and NI.

He simply cant have his cake and eat it. He has 2 options:

1. Maintain independent finances and a "fair", business-like arrangement when it comes to money. In this case you will invoice him for the services including childcare, cooking, cleaning etc that you are only able to provide for him as you are at home. If you were at work these costs would have to be shared between you.

2. Unite your finances as a family and pool your income.

He cannot fairly or logically only do the first half of option 1, expect you to provide free childcare and live on air.

Yes, if it's all 50/50 with him, where's his half share of the cost of your childcare?

You said something about you being the one to oil the wheels socially, it sounds like he has problems in this area too. What I find surprising is, he is financially uptight and there was IVF which takes time, wasn't there a discussion about exactly where the money was going to come from while you were not earning? If there was, did you find it reasonable that you would fund this period from savings? This is not reasonable, this is you enabling him to continue earning and saving on childcare costs. What a bargain he got.

Sorry this isn't a healthy relationship...

I have been a sahm for 7 years (we are married) everything is 'ours'. Any savings, any earnings, any debts. To me that is a relationship. His job is to support the family financially, my job is to support the family practically and emotionally.

" I feel like he is doing me a favour by letting me be the one to be at home with him."

If he had supported you the whole way through it, then he would have been doing you a favour.

As you live in the same house but don't live as one household financially and you used savings to support yourself, he did you no favour at all until the recent 60-40 split.

You are an unmarried SAHM with no financial support from the father of your child. You should have gone back to work way before you ran out of savings.

Your whole financial set up seems crazy to me. You two share an expensive 24-7 responsibility but instead of pooling resources he pays you expenses.

The "fair" way to do this would be to pool all your resources and get married.

OP, all this stuff about expenses and discretionary spending - just because you're the non-earning partner doing all the childcare as well as all the household / social-oiling business doesn't mean that you should only be able to spend on "essentials"! This is your life together, not a business where you should have to account to him for every penny of "his" money that you spend! You should be able to spend on clothes, haircuts, whatever you fancy, given that it sounds like your household has plenty of money. Why are your wishes, the things that make your day-to-day life better, subordinated behind your partner's desire to save and shore up his own financial position AT YOUR EXPENSE? You are too hard on yourself.

Is part of this about the loss of identity as a stay-at-home-mum that you mention, in that you are not placing enough value on your essential non-financial contribution that would no doubt cost an awful lot more if you were at work and having to outsource all the childcare, cleaning etc? As another poster says, it is really looking like your partner wants it both ways - he doesn't have to pay anyone for the cost of childcare and gets all the other benefits of a stay-at-home partner because of financial sacrifices that you are making, yet he isn't prepared to diminish his personal financial position.

I think it's awful you have to provide receipts for things. That's no way to live.

If I want something I buy it (as long as its not ridiculously expensive !) ... you shouldn't need to provide receipts for everything that's ridiculous.

I guess I must not feel that I am worth supporting or that what I do isn't valuable enough to be bankrolled. I guess DP must feel that way too or we wouldn't be in this position.

A thing in your life I don't feel like a single parent - DP is very kind and helpful and hands on. He has provided some financial support the 60%, then 80% - up until now all I have asked for. It's just that I have to ask for it. I appreciate I should have gone back to work sooner but I am trying to find work.

It is my fault because all he has done has been to accept the share of responsibilities I have suggested (because I didn't know any better).

DP doesn't want to get married and I'm not dying about the idea either, although probably less averse than he is. We have made wills so that in the event our deaths each other and DS is taken care of, guardians appointed etc.

My DP and I live together, have been an item for a long time, have children together and are not married.

We also (to the horror of some) keep our finances mostly separate. My earnings go into my bank account, his earnings go into his. I pay the mortgage and he pretty much pays everything else.

However, we have total tranparency. I see his statments and vice versa and we also have each other's pin numbers. So if I'm a bit low I'll just nick £500 off him. He doesn't expect me to pay it back as it's probably going towards a household expense anyhow.

But your situation OP sounds very unhealthy. It's not like you're in a relationship at all

YADNBU. Your finanial arrangements sound very odd and are clearly unsustainable.

Unlike many on here, I like having separate pots of money rather than everything in one big pot. We have three - a joint account that pays for mortgage, bills, house repairs, furniture, holidays and anything else that can be considered a joint expense. We pay into this roughly in proportion to our incomes and we pay in a chunk more than is needed each month so there is some money in there for occasional things like repairs and holidays. And then we have our own accounts, that we can do whatever we like with. At the moment, and ever since we have had this arrangement, I have earned more so I have paid more for all our joint expenses. If we are lucky enough to have a child, I hope that we will keep the same arrangement but that the payments will see-saw in the other direction, keeping in proportion with our incomes.

OP. Are you seriously telling us that you've given up counseling for depression, in part because you can't afford to pay your half of it, while your DP has £200K in the bank?

Please, I beg you, when you have this discussion about finances, put your counselling down as a necessary expense, and find a way to continue (on your own).

I say this because I think the idea that your problem is communication issues might be a bit of a red herring. I think the real issue is that you do not value yourself, your health and your contributions anywhere near highly enough.

You are cutting your DP way too much slack. So what if he has issues about money? That doesn't mean he's allowed to treat you unfairly, it means he has to get over his stupid issues and treat you properly.

This is a tricky situation. You both have quite substantial assets. So it's not as if you have no money and he is refusing to support you. I would have liked to be a SAHM Mum for bit longer but DH decided we couldn't afford it. He was probably right but it still annoyed me at the time. A lot of couples do have separate financial arrangements and it does seem to work well for them. Just seen he has moved into your house. Well in that case I'd make him pay rent. He can't have it all ways.

x-post

'I guess I must not feel that I am worth supporting or that what I do isn't valuable enough to be bankrolled. I guess DP must feel that way too or we wouldn't be in this position.'

Yes, exactly.

This is what you need to work on. Especially before you make any more big financial plans, new mortgages, etc. Before you tie up all your money, I think you should have at least some of your savings compensated. You should not have had to spend all your money, it doesn't matter if you did it freely, it was a bad setup and you should not have to keep paying for it (especially as you aren't married).

dreamingbohemian has summed it up perfectly.

Also you say a salary of £45,000 pa is £1,800 net a month. I think it's a fair bit more than that but not quite sure how much

It doesn't sound healthy to me, but that doesn't mean you can't work things out, and end up a stronger family.

The first stage is being honest with each other. Sounds very clinical, but I'd suggest a spreadsheet, with details of how much you both have in every account, investments and assets.

You also need an idea of your income and outgoings.

Then you need to discuss who pays how much for what.

Your DP may be horribly mean, who doesn't feel he should share his money with his partner, the mother of his child. Or he may be very careful with money, keen to save every last penny, and genuinely think that you still have lots of money to spend (I know you've told him, but that doesn't mean he's actually understood).

(As a partnership, if you are the lower rate tax payer - or below the threshold if you haven't been working - it makes sense to have money in your name, to maximise the interest.)

Viviennemary the monthly figure is the money I have spent each month over the 2.5 years and he is currently paying 80% of the mortgage.

I would feel really uncomfortable asking for some compensation for my savings and I wouldn't know what was fair anyway. I also know that DP will say that he eaten into his savings too. But not decimated them like I have.
dreaming bohemian I was being a bit flippant about the counselling. DP now can't get home from work in time to attend counselling (he has a new job with longer commute) so whether I can afford it is academic.

I really can't understand why a couple who share a child - whether they're married or not- don't either have complete joint finances or a very carefully worked out and fair way of apportioning costs.

It's always going to be the case that one person is more capable than the other of paying their way, especially when children are involved. If you made a joint decision that you would be a SAHM for a couple of years then all the financial rules should have changed, IMHO.

Test him out on this scenario - DC goes to nursery/school, you start working again and earning a decent amount of money. DP loses his job and has no income. Would he still expect to have to contribute a significant amount (20% or 40% or whatever) to the family budget, even though he was only 'earning' JSA?

eurochick that was the arrangement DH and I had before having children. It was nice to think I had 'my' money and he had 'his' but when our incomes went from being roughly equal to very unequal (after we had children) the 'joint' pot always kept going overdrawn and we ended up paying bank charges on it. It was a hell of a lot easier to get a joint account.

I think you will have to sit down and write out exactly what money is coming into the house. And what outgoings you have. And also if the onus is on you to pay all the bills and he just pays you that doesn't seem quite right to me.

If you want to keep finances separate, could you not have a joint account into which you both pay and out of which all expenses come. Of course if he earns a lot more than you do he will have to pay a lot more in. Otherwise it's a complete waste of time.

How much more than him were you earning pre-dc? Did your savings come about because you were earning a lot more and still paying 50/50?

spoons3 Not loads more I don't think but he just saw my day rate and thought that's a lot, not thinking I have to pay tax, NI, accountant etc out of it. Most of my savings were accrued in the years before I met him and we were only living together for a year and a bit before we had DS so I didn't get my savings off his back as it were.

at the very least he should also be paying 50% of what a full time child carer would cost. your contribution is actually doing it.