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.

Very not PC but I deal with all money as can't trust dh. He has this inability with anything financial and im not willing to experiment and cost us money. If I want to stay married to him I accept this and do it myself.

You can't. You have to pay it from the account.

That could help with the cash flow situation, but the bill is the same, whether it comes out of the tax free childcare or current account. There's a limit to how much the government will top up each quarter. That's why she's so livid he hasn't used the account (so presumably not put any money in it) for a whole year.

I'm only an expert on this because I lost my job and maxed

Knowing what he is like I wouldn’t have left this responsibility to him.
was he like this when you married him?
I do all this type of thing and always have. I would rather as then I know it’s done. Because I have always done it my dh doesn’t know how to do it. But that’s my own fault for always doing it.
No need to make him feel more stupid than he already does.

Maxed out my account before I lost my TFC. So I've got no reason to be smug! You've all got jobs and not so much time to spend ob the internet figuring these things out! 😪😂

Tbh if he is that incompetent why did you let him do this paperwork

And then not checking bank /child tax account since last year

The first time you thought things were not right you should have personally checked

Only as you say he's such a dipshit any useless in stuff like this

As others said sounds like the money is in the account so can be used going forward

Me too, and I’m really surprised at all the posts on here defending him. I think it’s quite pathetic to be honest that he couldn’t manage to work out how to do this for the sake of £2000.

I don’t think it’s particularly complex or hard to do but if this was my responsibility and I messed up I would be absolutely mortified and gutted at the lost money, I would be apologising not making excuses like the OP’s DH.

Ic this was reverse, it would be seen as bullying.
You have no respect for him, you sound as if you disrespect and belittle him. He probably has lost a lot of confidence because of you!

Why is it the woman’s responsibility to allocate jobs in the household and check they’re done correctly? Is she the family project manager?

It’s fascinating to me how a man can be so incompetent yet so many people find a way to spin it so it’s actually a woman’s fault.

The post is really about her lacking respect and shows a basic misunderstanding. £2000 over a year may not seem like a lot, but it can still make a significant impact. As for the points about birthdays and school applications, does the op have 50 children? Some posters may be exaggerating the number of administrative tasks involved in daily life.
Life admin woes always make me chuckle.

Unless I've misunderstood and he's paid the nursery from the current account AND been moving money into the TFC account each year, but you'd have to be loaded to do that? Or the OP is on the old system where your employer pays into your Childcare account, in which case, you're fine. You'll have building up à small fortune in there.

Yes definitely this is what im looking forward to! Its like theyre a liability! If you want a job doing right, do it yourself. Ive tried to share jobs/delegate but they either do it wrong/badly/forget- or you have to spend heaps of time giving full details, you might as well do it yourself

Well, yes, you should be livid, but why did you give him the responsibility seeing as he can't do anything right...

I don’t know how I’d get past this. Yes, if you don’t have children, you might not know the system. If you do, there is so much information online about how the TFC system works. Also - where are the nursery invoices? Surely you get an invoice each month that shows how much you’ve paid and how, where your funded hours have been applied and so on? Didn’t you miss the money from your bank account?

He sounds like a proper tool but you also seem a bit blasé. We have spreadsheets of income/outgoings/projected upcoming spending and check over them each payday and adjust accordingly. Simple maths would have told you that you weren’t benefitting from the 20% saving somewhere along the line. This is one scheme where the government are literally giving away money - how frustrating that he’s basically wasted that chance. Wait until next year and the year after when it’s 30 funded hours from 9 months - would he have noticed then?!

DH fails to complete fairly straightforward admin task which costs the family thousands of pounds, but apparently it’s actually his wife’s fault 🤦‍♀️

Is everything a woman’s fault? Perhaps if we can’t blame his wife we could also try blaming his mother?

I handle the accounts for my family - not because of an incompetent DH or anything but he handles the mortgage, utilities etc and I sort out the stuff to do with the children. It is a faff, but I’m a Virgo and like to spreadsheet the crap out of that sort of thing - we get the 30 hours for DS1 but every 4th month is unfunded, so I figured out how much to pay in so that we build up a surplus in his account that we then use to pay the extra in those months. So much so that for August we ended up having to pay £100 less than usual even though the bill was nearly £200 more.

OP you mentioned being alerted to the situation because of having to log in to reconfirm the details- have you not had to do that every 3 months? Or is it just that this was the first time you checked the transaction history?

I’m confused about how your DH thought that it worked- obviously the account is set up but if he wasn’t using it, where did he think the saving was coming from? Did he think the nursery were deducting 20% from your bill? Or did he know he wasn’t doing it right but just didn’t care enough about the money to take the time do it properly?

Unless he manages childcare tax credits for a living this is a red herring. I do plenty of complex, difficult things at work including dealing with government funding schemes and I still can't work out which energy deal is best for our family or do my tax return. Can't deal with the home WiFi network. Can't put up a shelf. None of that makes me worthless or means I don't respect my husband or contribute to our home life.

It's nice that you and your partner are equally competent at all aspects of life but it's not typical.

Weaponised incompetence.

So in practice what actually happens in your household? Do you just accept responsibility for the Wi-Fi knowing that it will be a disaster, not do any research or check it’s been installed properly, and then when it fails and it turns out you’re paying over the odds for a useless service you make excuses rather than accepting responsibility?

Or do you have a grown up discussion about how to allocate tasks with your partner and proactively volunteer to take responsibility for the things which play to your strengths and do them properly? I’m going to guess it’s the latter.

That would be the case on the old childcare vouchers that previously were received through employers and salary sacrifice.

However only a small handful of people still use that as the scheme had been closed to new members for a number of years.

Now you have a government bank account for each child on the government gateway... You put money in this account and the government tops it up by 20% (up to £2,000.a year)

So you have to work out your nursery bill net of the 20% (but factor in that you only get a certain amount of the £2000 per quarter) ...then pop that in the account...it gets topped up then you pay nursery from that account.

Sounds like husband has just been paying the nursery bill from Thier normal account so loosing out on the top ups

There are problems here on all levels. DH does the household accounts and reconciles it all on the last Sunday of the month but he is anal. If you generally look after the money/admin, how come this slipped for so long?

To make this fairer I think you and your DH need to define and agree each other's individual responsibilities and focus on each other's strengths.

I would be as cross with him as you are and I think he needs to give something up until the money has been saved: beer, lunch out, footie season ticket etc. That's better than being "mad".

We all have our strengths. I tend to run all the house stuff and deal with workmen and cars. DH has no idea about how to deal with that stuff or anything remotely practical like light bulbs or packing the car boot. He's a whizz with French bureaucracy, banking and paperwork of all kinds. My paperwork gets lobbed into a box file. His is beautifully maintained and organised.

The ironic thing is that the new TFC system was meant to be simpler. Simpler for who? In the past your employer invited you to join the scheme, took the money out of your pay and put it in your childcare account. You had to remember to use it, but the money was there. I wonder how many other families have lost out because of a mistake like this.

I actually find it really easy.

Presumably this man has a job which he manages to keep where he has to use his initiative just a little bit. It's not the OP's fault that she was tricked into thinking that there must be a brain cell or two hiding somewhere.

Me too. I used the childcare voucher system before I switched employers and I don’t find it any more difficult than that.