To be fucking livid - DH, lost money

[Jamtartforme]

We’re skint, in the red every month. 2 kids, mortgage has gone up horrifically, nursery fees, COL, I’m sure many of you will know what it’s like.

DH isn’t lazy, he pulls his weight around the house but only when it comes to ‘obvious’ tasks. Such as washing up, or walking the dog. If its a task you can’t ‘see’ or doesn’t need to be done as part of routine - for example, arranging a birthday party or applying for school - it won’t even register. I do 95% of the mental load stuff, minimum.

This has caused a few rows between us, his point being I don’t let him do anything because when he does do it he fucks it up. But every time I do he just messes it up - he forgets medical appointments, fills in forms wrong, or relies on me to spoon feed him instructions to such an extent that I may as well do whatever it is myself.

Fine, I said, you can deal with the tax free childcare account for nursery. All good.

Fast forward to this evening and I discover that not one fucking payment has been made from the tax free account since last year. He’s been making the payments from our account and just assuming the deduction was being made because he had given the nursery our tax free code. He couldn’t be bothered to look into it all properly and work out how to use the account, even less actually work out how much we should be paying with the deduction, and now we have lost 2 fucking grand in the last year that we really, really do not have.

How angry would you be? I’m livid and can hardly look at him.

But should either of you want to you could make a claim for 50% and the starting point would be an equal split and your current division wouldn't necessarily be adhered to by a court

Exactly. And regardless of how amicable the split is initially, it rarely stays so once money comes in to it, and either party may take a very different view on what they are entitled to.

And if it's not amicable, the potential for using finances as a tool to inflict pain and create difficulties, is endless.

It's hard to believe people can be that naive, that the act of having separate accounts will ensure that the other party has no claim on them.

For example, in my protracted and awful divorce, still ongoing, much was made of the fact I had two accounts with very small amounts in them, as these were apparently 'savings'. I showed in black and white that these were nothing of the kind, they were monies placed there for child-related expenses to be paid later e.g. medical / dental costs and still the argument ensued, and got traction, that I was better off because I had 'savings'. You have to be be there to understand how utterly mental and destructive family law proceedings can be.

@Jamtartforme just on an admin point, have you been reconfirming every 3 months? Otherwise you won’t get the 30 hrs either.

Read my post again. It's quite clear that I was talking in general terms about baby/child admin at the time.

Those who were a few months or years ahead of me were my gurus when it came to checking on how and when to do new-to-me bits of parenting admin. Fathers don't generally have the same opportunities to have those casual conversations about school registration or vaccinations and so on.

I and many many others in north london came from overseas so this wouldn’t have applied, the whole concept of tax free childcare was new to me. And this scheme was completely new to everyone, it’s not what your mother used.

Ah, sorry! Didn't see that you'd misread and apologised here. No problem!

Again, I was talking about using my fellow mums for info. Not my mother.

Oh sorry, i also didn’t see the correction. But it was the new scheme so others hadn’t done it, I remember working through it. No help.

Honestly, why trust him with something so important when you know what he’s like? I do get you being cross though

Ouch, sorry op. Has he been reconfirming your 30 hrs entitlement every 3 months?

It seems weird he would be doing this but not looking at the TFC account page.

That's not as straight forward as it used to be though. My employer and DHs paid some of our salary to “Busy Bees” and then I would use that to pay the nursery. If DH or I had made this error, I could have asked the nursery for the money back and then paid them with the vouchers so no harm done. There was also no time limit on using the money and when I stopped using childcare I had some left so they were transferred back.

I take your word for it. I could have joined the voucher scheme at the tail end of it but I couldn't make head nor tail of how it worked. The account scheme seemed far more straightforward to me. Didn't need to do anything to get my employer to set anything up, all entirely in my control and easy to do.

I think Busy Bees set it up with my employer so I just set up an account with Busy Bees. Once I had set it up I didn't need to do anything apart from pay the nursery via the vouchers. If the nursery had been paid incorrectly as in this case, it would have been easy to rectify.

Even a year later?

Yes, as long as the nursery agreed to it.

That would be a very understanding nursery! I can't imagine ours, or any business cheerfully retuning a few thousand quid to us on the understanding we'd be paying them back immediately.

@Circumferences and that's surprising why exactly??

@BatheInTheLight

Do you have an older brother??

You would pay them first.

If this is the case, and you deal with everything else (inc banking I presume) how did you possibly not notice this in a year?! 🤔

@AllyArty

Hi, I haven't read past your post (oh the irony!) so this may have been mentioned already... but do you know you can A) go into your setting and make your own posts one colour & the OP's another, so they stand out? And B) on each post of the Zoo's you can tap 'see next' and read only all their posts. It's a handy, newish, feature.

Because nursery fees have gone up, her hours have changed and we were also incorporating the 30 free hours so overall I didn’t have a precise figure in my head. I trusted him to make sure it was correct, more fool me.

I topped up our TFC account tonight as autumn term school wraparound is due. It's a faff but one I'm prepared to do regularly to save 20%. Your DH is a knob not bothering to do the extra step for the sake of 20%

😂😂 Only a younger sister, sorry!

He sounds a bit thick. And, a liability re your financial security . I'm always wonder why on earth people are attracted to inept partners . It's NOT 'endearing', as a lot of culprits claim . I suppose you could write out idiot proof 'how to' texts for him to keep & refer to regarding tasks. But I get the feeling he'd still f**k it up. Then, as you say, you might as well do it yourself. I'd be beyond livid .

@BatheInTheLight

typical 🙄

I'm sure she's lovely, but not quite what I'm after 🤣

(& I'm probably not here either.)