Moral Dilemma

[freerunner75]

My partner and I have been together 12 years. Both married previously, my marriage ended horrifically, my husband blew a tonne of my savings and left me in £25k debt. My partners marriage was similar, his ex left with an extremely large settlement.

We moved in together to a rented place with a view to buying something together. His marital home was sold to settle the divorce agreement, but he had one other property in his name at the time which he kept and rented out. The house we now live in - was bought at an extremely low rate from family. I had no say in this and was not given the option to be a part of it as he classes it as his 'inheritance' and is protective over the equity given what happened with his divorce. I pay half towards the bills and we have both designed and improved the house since we have been here - i have paid for only soft furnishings and a few bits of furniture as I earn a lot less than him and most of my money goes towards the bills and my kids. The house we live in has tripled in value since we have been here and made improvements.

So, we are not married, no mortgage together, no life insurance for each other, nothing. Together 12 years.

The whole lack of financial security is a big issue to me and has caused us endless arguments over the years. But he won't budge. Recently we had a huge bust up and I was looking into my options but they are few given my current situation and budget limitations.

Am willing to take a bashing on this - however am I being unreasonable to request for him to set aside some money for me in case our relationship does break down irretrievably so that I have a safety net? I was thinking perhaps £1000 per year for every year we have lived together - signed and agreed by both and by a solicitor so we both know where we stand?

I am currently earning more than I have for a while and am starting to be able to save again - but my biggest concern is that if we do finish.. i am out on the streets with nothing to my name despite contributing for years... yet he is sitting pretty. I know it sounds bloody awful, but it would take a lot of stress off me and our relationship and I don't think I am being unreasonable.

But I am expecting to be told that I am..... thoughts please.

@MiddleClassProblem

Some part of you must be expecting him to give up assets if you are disappointed you haven’t bought somewhere together to let or as you say “never transpired” but you never had anything to add to that pot.

No not at all. He was fully aware of my financial position when we got together and so now too.

The plan on moving in together was that any money he introduced as deposit etc would be protected by a legal agreement, and then moving forward we would both contribute towards the mortgage and have joint say on any equity that may accumulate. Either that or if we were to split, he would take a higher proportion of any equity in proportion with his earnings/deposit. That was the thinking of it. I have never intended to marry/get a house together with the intent of ripping away his investment/inheritence/income - whatever you want to call it.

It is shit that you have to 'get married' just to secure yourself. Marriage is so much more than that. I get that I don't have any rights at all as we are not married - i totally understand that - but what i am saying is, surely if assets grow as a result of a relationship - i.e. that you essentially work together as if you were married the only difference being a bit of paper... how is it fair that in that instance the partner without the initial investment is left completely without a penny if it all goes wrong. I appreciate that is how it is and its my own fault for going along with it, but how do you just leave someone that you love when essentially everything else is right about the relationship?? I just think it is wholly unbalanced.

I shouldn't have to get married just to protect myself. I appreciate that is one of the reasons to get married, but it seems in this case people are suggesting that I should get married just to make myself eligible to his dosh. I have my own money - I just don't have savings yet because I haven't been able to do that until now.

That's not what I want. I want to get married because we love each other and agree to commit to each other in every single way for the rest of our lives. Not because I want a piece of his pie.

I have the relationship, home etc,.... but none of the security. I know that is how it is, but to my mind it is not fair or correct. Just for the record, his ex wife married him and then kicked him out within a matter of months (after being together for a lot of years), then proceeded to divorce him 2 years later and take him for pretty much everything he had. So I totally understand why he is hesitant. But I am not her, they are not my reasons for wanting to get married, but equally - because this happened to him, how is it fair that I am the one being left out on a wing when essentially we are building a life together and I stand to lose absolutely everything if it all goes wrong.

To answer the questions about how I managed before, I had housing benefit to help towards my rent and I worked 3 jobs in order to pay off the debts run up by my ex husband. The £70k I had put away from the sale of my flat, he spent on alcohol, women and other things he fancied over a period of time - and yes - clearly that is possible.

Yes, in this situation I am in now I should have been able to save. But I haven't been as technically I haven't 'saved my rent' - as it was paid before for me. My 'rent' here is paid by me setting aside a day a week to work for my partner for which I don't get paid. That is now going to change.

The DCs are adults now. They can uprooted. In her last post the OP refused to look for a better paying job. Reason she loved her current job and didn’t see why she should leave.

She has clear choices which would have allowed her to provide security for her children. She didn’t make them. She still doesn’t want to make them. She wants her DP to give her money.

Offs

You don’t have to get married to protect yourself. Stop looking for a white knight. You are an adult. You don’t have dependents. Figure it out for yourself.

Working for free is also your choice
Why would you work for free ?
He should be paying you minimum wage, plus tax & national insurance

Living together & assets
People can live together unmarried for 1 year or 100 years
Why should someone of 1 year, be entitled to take a share of someone's assets that they have built over time ?

It seems you have made some bad choices

It is shit that you have to 'get married' just to secure yourself

You don’t have to be married to secure yourself, he isn’t and managed. Likewise so do millions of others.

It’s not his fault you haven’t managed that so either need tax payers or a partner to subsidise living costs.

want to get married because we love each other and agree to commit to each other in every single way for the rest of our lives. Not because I want a piece of his pie

Yet your opening post was about him paying you for every year of living together

OP now you've realised your situation it's time to make some changes.

Stop bloody working for him for free. You have totally different ideas about what this is contributing.

Start vigorously saving.

Good luck.

Odour invested in this relationship with dedication, enthusiasm, patience and hope.

You now face the reality that not all investment yield a return. You are never owed a return on investment because investments are all about risks.

He always had more to lose from pooling you finances together whilst you had everything to gain. He himself invested once and lost badly, heavily set prpepared to do it again.

Sadly, it’s probably your attitude that made him weary of marriage. Even if you’ve never said anything, he probably sensed that what you wanted more than anything was security by ensuring you were entitled to a pot of his assets/income. It made him even more self protective.

12 years is a very long time. Why did you wait so long unless you also benefited from the arrangement all this time?

Christ some people on here are brutal!

You have literally pulled apart each individual thing I have posted and vilified me.

LemonTT - I happen to love this man and am not trying to stiff him for everything he has. Yes I am a grown adult and capable of making choices and decisions. Clearly I have made some bad ones as I have a huge heart and am far too forgiving and hopeful.

That doesn’t make me a bad person. I am not expecting him to pay me a thousand pounds per year.. that was an example of a situation. I was merely trying to see if it was unreasonable to request a ‘safety net’

Thanks all for your input.

I estimate
If you saved from working one day per week at £8 per hour
For 12 years
That is approx 50k

Plus if you worked for a "normal employer" & put that money into an employee pension they may have added extra contributions, us you may have received tax back at 20% too

Your reply to me still doesn’t make sense. Just because you always intended to pay for the joint mortgage doesn’t mean it should have happened earlier. You are only just now having spare cash so surely until now you couldn’t afford to pay towards a mortgage.

That’s not his fault. It’s just how it is. But now is the time you could look at that a an option but I think you are better off saving your own deposit rather than doing shared.

@freerunner75

Christ some people on here are brutal!

You have literally pulled apart each individual thing I have posted and vilified me.

LemonTT - I happen to love this man and am not trying to stiff him for everything he has. Yes I am a grown adult and capable of making choices and decisions. Clearly I have made some bad ones as I have a huge heart and am far too forgiving and hopeful.

That doesn’t make me a bad person. I am not expecting him to pay me a thousand pounds per year.. that was an example of a situation. I was merely trying to see if it was unreasonable to request a ‘safety net’

Thanks all for your input.

Well, yes, it is unreasonable to expect him to provide you with a financial 'safety net' because you've been living rent free for 6 years and he will not do it, even if you request it. Nor will he marry you.

It's not harsh to point that truth out or that you made choices to enable all this and whilst hanging onto this believe he owes you a financial safety net or anything doesn't make you a bad person, cherishing this belief (that he's shown you to be erroneous on every level) that he should front you cash or marry you makes you more and more resentful and is foolish in the extreme.

There's no financial reward for having a 'huge heart' and being 'forgiving and hopeful'.

The only thing you have control of now is your future, a future of relying totally on yourself financially because he will not, is not beholden to and has done plenty keeping you and your kids rent free for 6 years.

He's not on the same page. So either continue on in the relationship knowing this with your eyes wide open and putting yourself first the way he does or move on.

You never know, he may change someday and marry you. Who knows. But it's better to be prepared for worst case scenario and start saving for yourself. If something happened to him, you could be kicked out from the house without any security for you and your children, since you have no claim in it.

@Cocomarine

What gains? She isn't gaining anything by staying and paying the bills and upkeep, etc.

She should cut her losses now, get her own place and move out, before she wastes another 12 years, no?

OP, I don’t think you’re a bad person, or stupid, or anything like that. The situation you describe used to be fairly common a few decades ago except that marriage was the expectation and so people got married for a second time and then they were protected. The problem in your situation is that your partner doesn’t seem to want to get married. You’ve been approaching the financial commitments in the relationship as if you were married, and your partner hasn’t. And the fact is, you aren’t married. If he were concerned about your future financial security he would marry you tomorrow. Your idea of a financial safety net doesn’t work for him for the same reason he’s not planning to marry you. He doesn’t want to make that kind of commitment. I think the moral issue is that he seems to have promised marriage and then failed to deliver. Like many of the other posters on this thread I think you’d be better off leaving him because I don’t think he’ll ever marry you.

It's great you were both able to give each other support when you needed it. But your contribution to his financial health is to your own detriment given he is unable (not surprisingly given his history) to agree to make the finances a joint situation.
Personally I'm his position is would want to be offering a recognition of this contribution in some financial firm so the person I love isn't without any form of buffer. But, people don't always do what's fair if their emotional reaction to someone claim is tangled up with a difficult history.
That being the case, you need to now test your relationship as a completely separate thing to your finances.
If this makes you reassess how you feel about him, fair enough.
If you love him, he can be your partner and lover in your personal lives. While you view him as a landlord and employer from a financial pov.
The trouble is that your view of your joint future included finances but that not a reflection of the reality you're in. You need to adjust even though your expectations and wishes are fair and ethical. They aren't going to happen because there is damaging baggage.
You sound like a great partner, but just need to find a more business like attitude of you want to continue with him

I totally thought I'd spotted all the errors in that. Hope you speak fluent autocorrect. 😬

@freerunner75 You still haven't answered what your financial position now would be like if you hadn't spent the last 12 years in a relationship.

Has living with this man made you better off, worse or about the same overall?

@agreatmistake

It’s hard to say really.. I given that he pays his mortgage which equates to the government paying my housing allowance and that I have incurred additional expenses living here (as in higher bills for a bigger house etc) then financially I guess I would have been better off. Plus the benefits etc a single person/parent could claim would also give me greater disposable income to be able to have saved sooner.

But I didn’t come into this relationship to profit from it. I came in to it to build a future together with someone. This has been thrown into question lately when we had a massive blip and I had to look into my options.. that’s all. It’s then I properly realised how bare open I had laid myself financially. Bit late to go back and try and arrange things differently now and that wasn’t the thought in my head when I got with him.

Does that make any sense?

Hindsight is a wonderful thing OP, and I can easily see how this has happened.

But you really do need to take matters into your own hands now and gain some financially security before you are truly left high and dry.

@AhNowTed

Hindsight is a wonderful thing OP, and I can easily see how this has happened.

But you really do need to take matters into your own hands now and gain some financially security before you are truly left high and dry.

Thank you. Yes I agree.

Thanks for all feedback folks. It’s been interesting!

@freerunner75 Damnit, I started writing you a really long reply and it got deleted!

In short - I think the £xx/year contribution is a really bad idea. It would definitely get my back up.

However, I think it's reasonable to start a conversation about how Covid has got you thinking about what financial provisions you have in place for you/your children if anything were to happen to you/him. You've been working for his business, and whilst you haven't minded helping him, it's occurred to you that his business could perhaps make some increased employer's pension contributions for you/him, and pay for critical illness/life assurance. You want to put your kids as nominees to some extent, but percentage does he think you should leave to him, given he's less likely to need the money?

It's reasonable to ask him if he would want to step parent your children after you were gone - would he still want to stay in their lives? Would that be full-time or part-time?

If you frame a conversation around what happens if one of us gets really ill and/or dies, it's a difficult conversation, but an easier one than what happens if one of us cheats and runs off.

At the end of the day he hasn’t treated you like a partner at all. And hasn’t necessarily made you better off.
Doesn’t he have any feelings about what might happen to you in the event of the break-up? Have you even talked about it..?

Thank you. That all makes sense... and yes I am grasping that the whole him putting some provision in place for me is a bad suggestion.

I will have that conversation with him, we have spoken about it before several times but nothing has transpired. I think given recent happenings it needs to transpire now if he is serious about us in future but not willing to commit.

Thank you for your measured and sensible responses.

@TheLastLotus

At the end of the day he hasn’t treated you like a partner at all. And hasn’t necessarily made you better off. Doesn’t he have any feelings about what might happen to you in the event of the break-up? Have you even talked about it..?

@TheLastLotus yes we have talked about it recently. He did say he would help me to get back on my feet, but then things got particularly nasty.. before they got better again. And that’s what made me think perhaps we should both agree an ‘escape’ plan.. for want of a better phrase... so that if it does turn nasty ever (god forbid) .. there is something in place that I can rely on.

As has been said, I fully appreciate that is my responsibility to provide this, and I will do everything I can now to do this. I guess my priorities have been in trying too hard to put into a relationship and prove myself.., and it essentially is likely to backfire quite sorely.