I earn much more than my husband, and get an annual sizeable bonus. I lived alone with my son for 7 years after my first marriage broke up. In the early years, money was horrible after I went from living beyond the means of two incomes to living on one. But then I earned more, started my own business, and things became comfortable.
Now I’m married again. My husband contributes less because he earns less. This is at my instigation. It’s all cool. I don’t think about money or who pays for what ordinarily. I pay for pretty much everything - I don’t mind. I have enough. I don’t have to worry.
But my husband wants to move house and double our mortgage. He just gave me a spreadsheet to prove we can afford it. And we can. But I don’t want to. We have savings that we could use - my last bonus - to completely overhaul this one, add a bedroom, open out the ground floor. We can do this, or we can use it as a deposit on somewhere else and double our mortgage on a monthly basis.
The latter makes no sense to me. Even though we can afford it. I want to renovate.
My husband says I’m thinking like a single woman, that we should use our money to build something, that we’re selling ourselves short living in the area that we do, that he bets my business partners have bigger/better houses. He says our house is a shithole.
And he’s right. It is. But it’s a shithole I’m damn proud of having kept afloat while I was on my own with eye watering debt. His words hurt me.
But I can see from his point of view that it isn’t HIS house. He isn’t on the mortgage, I chose this house and lived in it with my ex. I’ve no problem putting him on the mortgage. It’s not about what’s mine and what’s his. Who earned it or paid for it. ‘My’ money pays for all sorts, for US.
But he thinks I’m unreasonable not wanting to double the mortgage. And I think he’s unreasonable expecting me to, just because we can. I’d far rather do this place up and know it’s paid off in 12 years, than take out a bigger 20 year mortgage. My business might be booming in 5 years and I can take enough to buy a place outright. Or it might go to shit and I lose everything. I feel comfortable living to a level where if one of us dies or is ill or can’t work, the other can carry the can for a bit. He sees this as code for the marriage breaking up. It isn’t. But having been on my own, it genuinely makes sense to me to keep overheads down.
I’m not tight. I like having nice holidays and not having to think about paying for a nice meal, ordering the nice wine. He says I piss money up the wall though, what do we have to show for it? He has done a spreadsheet of my outgoings to prove we could still do this and he’s right. We could.
I can’t see the point in it though. For 8 more years on the mortgage and double costs, we’d get a slightly bigger garden and maybe an extra bedroom - so, a 4 bed. But after renovations here, we’d have 3 beds and we only need 2. Don’t get me wrong, this place isn’t fit for purpose right now. But after an extension and a loft conversion that I can pay cash for tomorrow (as in, I don’t have to save, not dodgy VAT avoidance!) it will be.
And I see things like the bills and the mortgage as tedium. They’re not what I work for. I work for the meals and the weekends away - and crucially for someone who has been in debt and had to budget carefully - just not having to worry about money. That to me is a gift.
I don’t get why we’d stretch things unnecessarily. But my dh is furious with me, not least because he knows it’s ‘my’ income that will seal the mortgage deal.
I hope I haven’t portrayed him as grabby. He really isn’t. AIBU?