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 the task was for her DH to take care of the tax-free childcare account. If she has to go through bank statements and nursery invoices each month, and his only task is paying into the TFC account and paying out from it, he’s still not taking on her mental load, he’s only doing half of it. She’s still the house manager who delegates tasks and he’s the employee who gets to use his brain for his own thinking and doesn’t have to think about the house or tasks at all. The whole point of dividing labour is that you can trust each other to do it, in full, to an agreed standard. And paying nursery from the TFC account is a pretty easy standard to meet.

Tbf it’s more the way she speaks about him. I don’t personally think he’s useless.. just lacking executive function skills

Can’t he explain to the nursery that this has happened, ask them if they can refund and he pays again via the childcare account?

Like the skill of asking her, or googling what to do??

Yep, useless

Yes. He should cancel that cheque.

Exactly this.

I still can’t believe how many people are claiming that not only is it not the DH’s fault (because the poor man is just too simple to cope with such a complicated system 🙄 ), it’s actually OP’s fault for trusting him / not giving him detailed training / not checking every month that he’d actually done it properly. Like he’s an underperforming employee and she is his line manager.

Is he competent with admin and organisation in his job and just not bothering to concentrate at home? Or does he genuinely lack the skill set to plan, research and execute tasks? If the latter, then you need to decide if he has other attributes that compensate so you can split tasks in accordance to your strengths. If he hadn't got enough to offer to compensate, then you review the future of the relationship. Because if he can't help it because he genuinely lacks the competence, being furious at him won't change that.
Has he always been like this? What drew you to him if so?

Amen to this. Me too.

This post isn't the win you think it is. And bless you taking all that time to edit and adapt the ops original post ...🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Ahh bless @ladygindiva only takes 2 minutes to copy and paste with a few * don't worry your little head 😂

This is my husband to a tee. Send me pictures of things because he can't cope changing from screen to screen. For example setting up a new payment on banking. He would do something like this. It is infuriating and nothing is ever his fault. .
He 'lost' a charging cable when out recently and blamed everyone else for 'stealing' it instead of handing it in. It was in our bag all along he just didn't look carefully.
He also lost a pair of prescription sunglasses (all black) and was adamant someone had stolen them. He had taken them off inside a sporting event for our child and would not listen to my point that someone may have thought they were theirs and picked them up accidentally. They were handed in within a couple of days!

I constantly question if it is blind ignorance or just taking the easy path and assuming they are better than everyone.

Sorry just realised that turned into a rant. How do we change these men to take some responsibility?

@Jamtartforme you are Carrie Johnson and I claim my five pounds

Yes, I wonder if anyone ever gave the OP detailed training and checked she’d done it correctly each month? Or is that not necessary on account of her vagina?

I think this is one of those that first month both parents do it together-

It's a complicated bill -with free hours and maybe it varies. Then the payment pano straight forward, having to discount by 20% then pay one place, then another.

I can't think i'd just leave it totally to one person. Just like any new process. Like getting a new washing machine and doing a sense check of "is program x the right one to use for this load" with this new machine.

(To be fair I'd not allocate any complex financial task to my other half, as an accountant I'd do it - and he can set up the new wifi router and explain how it's working to me afterwards)

Hard pill to swallow and a lesson learned. I would be miffed but what’s done is done and the money cannot be claimed back.
just forget about it and move on or it will just fester away at your relationship and it’s not really worth it when you can’t change the mistake.

I also lack executive function skills. Yet I am the mental load holder, the bill payer, the money shuffler, the tax accountant. When someone has a leg injury, they get a crutch, they don't wallow around on the floor and expect people to drag them around.
We all have personal assistants in our pockets. It is as easy as setting a reminder in your phone/alexa/siri/google to say, "remind me to pay X out of X account on the X day of the month."

One thing I don't understand is when people respond with "do you want ot be doing all of this stuff yourself for the rest of your life? If not LTB" has anyone who writes this down spent a second to consider what life post LTB is like? He is not suddenly going to do this stuff when he is on his own, we still end up doing it all and even more. I never understood that response. Unless you sre going to magically meet another man who is going to sort this sort of stuff out for your children which is highly unlikely and Mumsnet would be quick to state it isn't his job either. I personally do ALL of the home administration, contribute 50%financially, all housework and 90% childcare. I am under no illusion that thus would somehow be better if I left my partner. The only thing guaranteed to change is my financial contribution would increase.

I personally do ALL of the home administration, contribute 50%financially, all housework and 90% childcare.

That sounds awful. Do you not feel angry about the situation? Or are you just used to it now?

Sounds fucking awful. But if you prefer it to being without him, that's your choice.

I think what a lot of people like is the fact that their workload has decreased without an extra adult to parent, and the resentment is gone since he now lives elsewhere so whatever shitwork you're mopping up, at least it isn't his.

It feels a bit to me as though you want things done in a particular way. Okay, the loss of this money is a biggy, but not everyone thinks the same, not everyone's brains function in the same way or have the same priorities. And some people have particular strengths that others don't, such as understanding systems and organising stuff. And I say this as someone who generally takes on the kind of mental load you describe.
I don't think I would expect my partner to take on something I knew they weren't great with, not check in (at least in the beginning) then have a bluey when I discovered a year later that they'd got it wrong.
Also, people have different learning styles, and just telling someone how to do something doesn't always work. Honestly, is there stuff that your DH does better than you or is more adept at?
So he made a mistake, you both lost out. I would give him half of what he's transferred back so you both take on the loss.

The fact that OP didn't spot this for a while suggests her brain doesn't particularly function in a way that makes admin or "mental load" easy either though and she clearly doesn't enjoy it or she wouldn't have passed on to him in the first place. She may only be better than her DH because she has had to do it and/or she has tried harder.

If they both don't like it or aren’t good at it why is the man always the one that's allowed to opt out and the woman told she should do more than her share and it's her fault if things go wrong because she hasn't?

@WomblingTree86
'If they both don't like it or aren’t good at it why is the man always the one that's allowed to opt out and the woman told she should do more than her share and it's her fault if things go wrong because she hasn't?'
I wasn't specifically talking about men, I just said different people have different skill sets.

I know you said different "people" but when people say that it always is in defence of a man not doing his share of the mental load. You have no reason to think OP naturally has a skill set that makes it easier for her to take on the mental load than her DP.

I think that's the issue here. If she enjoyed doing it, or at least found it quite easy, she wouldn't be trying to pass some of it on to him. She finds it all quite stressful, and a 'mental load'.

I do all life admin as it's the only way I know it will all be done and correctly.
DH is v intelligent and does a job that I couldn't possibly do and yet he can't do simple things at home. I find it baffling.