Being so tight with money?

[Rockrose94]

For context I have been with my boyfriend for 4 years, we live together and split the rent / bills 50/50. Our take home pay is very similar and I have an extra outgoing of my car finance which he does not. We effectively keep our finances completely separate, I worry how this will work long term as he has said he does not want to share finances at all as he has more savings.

Anyway the main issue just now is 1) he has bought me dinner once in 4 years, for my 30th birthday present. I took him on a foreign holiday and presents for his 30th. I have paid for nights away and meals for us several times when he has said he can't afford it as I wanted to treat him. I don't do this often any more as it's never been reciprocated 2) we split all food shops evenly but usually do our own meals during the week as I am dieting. He just stood for half an hour itemising up every item on the food shops over the weekend to come to the point that I owe him £2.50. Note that he will charge me half of the food we share but he would likely eat 2/3 of the meal. AIBU to be tired of this? It feels so tight , do other people itemise everything and charge their partner almost to the penny?!

Mean with money
Mean with love.

The most insightful comments on this thread have been about how he doesn't trust you. And from your own account, it sounds like he doesn't trust women with money.

Run a mile from men like this. If a man is suspicious of women's (and therefore your) motives, they are not capable of trust or a true partnership. No wonder the relationship feels empty - you want someone who looks out for you and has your back, not someone who thinks you're out to get them (while actually sponging off you a bit).

OP you will probably find a man like that won't ask you to marry him ever. He will be too concerned with protecting his assets. Which is fine until you have children... and then you may fairly quickly find yourself trapped so do leave while you are independent and able to do so. And no I very much doubt he will ever change so don't look back.

Op
You sound lovely and deserve so much more.
His behaviour isn’t normal and it would be a disaster to bring kids into this relationship.
Get out whilst you can - don’t give him any more chances - and find someone who deserves you!

Like everyone else has said it. Let go off him. He doesn’t deserve you and you don’t deserve his penny pinching. I guess he’s only In this relationship for his own benefit. When you show him the door make sure you that you don’t hold back and tell him all of what he has done and how unreasonable he has been. All the examples you given us like the meals and drinks make sure you let him know.

And get your name taken off the tenancy….so you are not paying for it after you leave. In fact, I would contact the agent or landlord and give notice to them…
Do you have friends or family you could stay with?
Alternatively, could you stay and he move out?

Just imagine OP if you give notice on your flat in July, you can be starting your shiny new life without this judgemental miser in September!

and one final thing from me OP- you are young but once/if children come along life hurtles on at speed with many ups and downs to come, job losses, health issues, bereavements etc. I'm sure alongside loads of wonderful happy times too - but you will want and need a much better partner by your side than he has shown himself to be.

The other part you need to consider are the long term consequences of having lived with someone as horrendous as this.

I lived with a similar character, not as bad as yours, but bad enough.
4 years after leaving him for his miserliness, I still find myself becoming a bit agitated when the bill comes whilst out with friends.
I can’t help but have it in the back of my mind that there will be some problem.
I have become more distrusting and suspicious of new people.
This has had the knock on impact of others not wanting to trust me similarly.

I am having to retrain myself to become who I was before meeting that guy.

He has damaged me in some way and I’m still healing.

The longer you stay, the worse it will be for you.

Do not negotiate, do not warn, just get out. Do not tell him until you’ve got a place to go lined up and got your important documents and valuables out of your current house (I won’t call it a home).

These kinds of people can become mean, not only with money, vindictively mean. The time of departure and rejection can bring out a Mr Hyde you hadn’t encountered before. Save yourself these headaches. I didn’t deserve a chat about this until the time you’re all set to go. It’s not worth the heartache of the emotional and mental number he will try to do on you.
After all, he will be loosing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Far from you being tight, you have been brainwashed and hoodwinked into subsidising his lifestyle.

Do not give him your address. Redirect all your mail before you move.

I know you might not think your relationship is abusive OP - might be worth considering doing the freedom programme so that you are fully informed.

https://www.freedomprogramme.co.uk/online.php

Oh, and just to echo the others, you really do sound lovely, you really do deserve better. And I don’t mean a better partner than him but just that you deserve better out of life.
I once knew a couple who had a whiteboard in their kitchen with their names at the top, it had things like James - milk, 60p and it dawned on me that they lived like this, every penny split down the middle. It felt claustrophobic and weirdly controlling.

You deserve so much better than him @Rockrose94

It's probably too late now as I suspect any feelings you had have probably crumbled away, but if there was hope and you wanted to still be together, he was willing to listen, I'd suggest a joint account. You could both equally put in an amount each month which covers your rent and bills, including shopping, plus a bit extra for a dinner out other treats, and you can do what you like with what you have left in your own accounts.
But, your post above about you think he'd expect you to still cover your half of everything if you were ill or lost your job, but yet when it looked like he might lose his he'd probably expect you to still cover everything is very telling.

Run. Or preferably drive, away fast.

Is this how you want to spend the rest of your life, with someone who thinks £2.50 is worth a discussion?

And talking of cars, you have a car, he doesn’t , when was the last time you drove and he was a passenger? Did he even say “ thanks for driving” , has he ever offered to pay for petrol, pay for parking, let alone contribute to the upkeep, insurance, MOT of your car, which , although it is yours , has no doubt been used for his convenience hundreds of times.

OP I would get rid of him.
He sounds exactly like my ex and if it wasn't for the fact you're in your 30s and my ex is late 40s, I'd be convinced it was the same bloke.
I got rid of him and I'm glad that I did.

My ex had a spreadsheet for the bills and shopping and totalled up at the end of the month who owed what. He spent hours staring at receipts and entering things on his spreadsheets. He would go through each food shop and cross things out on the receipt that he didn't eat - eg. raspberries, lentils and a couple of other things I have forgotten now. They weren't included as joint shopping because he hadn't eaten them. So under his complicated system I would be billed for those plus half of the rest of the food shop.

The final straw was when I went away hiking for a week and came back to a pile of receipts on the table. I could see he had bought the most expensive cheeses, smoked salmon and all kinds of luxury foods which we normally didn't eat. He then said I owed him for half of that food because that was household shopping - and it was a lot of money because he'd splashed out and stuffed himself all week while I wasn't there. So I very calmly said to him, fine, I'll list all the food I've purchased while I was hiking, a lot of which was in mountain huts and therefore expensive, and we'll split that cost as well because I had to eat while I was away and you ate at home so it's all joint food. He was fuming with me.
And it was at that point that I decided to get rid of him. It took a while to get him moved out because he clung onto the sofa like a limpet and wouldn't be budged. But I did get rid of him.

About 10 months or so after he had left he contacted me asking if the annual bill for the utilities had come in. We have a system here where the house management company deals with all bills (except electricity) and at the end of the year meter readings are taken and the total for the year worked out - it means you can end up with having to pay money back or in my case you often get a refund from the management company if you have paid in more than you have used.
Arsehole ex wanted his share of the refund back even though he'd only been living there for 2 months of that billing period and the majority of the refund that year was because we had gone from two people living here using water etc. to one. I ignored him. Never heard from him again.

Someone like that is not a good life partner. Nobody should be taking advantage of someone else financially and we should all keep our wits about us to a certain extent but when you get to the stage of removing the cost of lentils from a shopping bill or billing someone for 2.50 it's no way to live and no way to build a life together.

He's a fully grown man. ALL of his actions are deliberate. He won't change because that's who he is and he thinks that's ok

Don't waste your time. Make your plans and tell him why as you're actually walking out the door

DO NOT HAVE KIDS WITH THIS MAN!

He would make you feel indebted to him, for him "keeping you" whilst you were on Mat Leave. Even though it was HIS baby and HIS fault you weren't earning.

Christ alive... this would drive me insane. Can you imagine if you had children with this man?!. He would be billing you if you used too many nappies out of the pack he bought.
Only you can decide if this is driving you mad enough to leave. People have all sorts of financial arrangements, but they have to work for both parties. He sounds way too tight for this not to be a problem.

I can't fault a man for not wanting to buy an engagement ring because that is a silly tradition. But generally speaking, you want to be with someone generous, don't you? And he isn't generous. Even if he agrees to change, and tries to - deep down he isn't generous and it will present in different ways later. Don't have kids with him or you'll find yourself in a difficult situation to get out of.

This kind of person rarely changes OP.

A family member was married to someone like this and she eventually divorced him. She would be scraping around to make the £5/week housekeeping he gave her stretch far enough (this was the late 60s/early 70s). That plus the child benefit was her only income. As part of their divorce (he committed adultery) he signed an affa davit saying she was a spendthrift and this had forced him to take on extra work, which (he said) ultimately led to his infidelity(!). (This is just for context, not saying that adultery is the ultimate end point).

During his second marriage he kept separate accounts from his wife, which suited her fine. He continued to be mean throughout his marriage - she had a good income of her own, so it didn't affect her.

Until she developed dementia and he gained power of attorney. He was so avaricious with her money that she neither went into a care home, or had carers in. In the end she was sitting in her own urine soaked clothes, unwashed and largely uncared for until Social Services intervened - someone had called them with an urgent safeguarding report. The general belief is that he moved her money into his accounts.

He recently died. He was alone, having driven anyone who cared about him away, although plenty of people hung around waiting for the money. He had a assets worth almost £1m. Was he happy? No - he never wanted to spend it. Never went on holiday, never enjoyed his money, well...apart from the totalling it up, keeping that figure in his head made him feel good.

They never change. They always find ways of justifying not spending money - to hoard it means a life of misery for everyone around them. It's time to move on OP, leave him to his piles of gold.

There is a sickness in these types of people. I’m not sure that it is a mental illness. It is simply wicked.

To try to hoodwink and short change someone (down to the smallest penny) who loves you, is generous with you, and wants to establish a life with you, is a poverty of the soul.

There is nowhere to go with that.

Someone who would exchange their good standing for the sake of £2.50 is dead inside.

@fleabites This reminds me of the Arnold Bennett novel, Riceyman Steps, which is about a bookshop-keeping miser who snares a poor unassuming woman, drags her into his apparent poverty, then turns out to be loaded after death. Your version is even sadder, though!

He won't change even if you give him an ultimatum. I left the mean man I posted about on this post and I told him I couldn't live with his meanness - he then bought an engagement ring for me - a cheap one! He bought me flowers and had them delivered to my work and my mums house, bought himself some smarter clothes to replace the scruffy cheap ones and even got himself a proper haircut, he'd been cutting it himself.

All to try and get me back. it didn't last long and it made me realise how deliberate all this meanness was and that he thought by spending a bit of money he'd win me back but I knew he'd never change. When I finally went to collect some of my possessions from his, he had a friend there to watch that I didn't take anything that wasn't mine

My fanny dried up reading the OP.

You deserve someone whose attitude to money is compatible with your own.

Just read that you are 30. You must get out of this ‘relationship’ - he’ll be rinsing your good years at finding a decent partner if you do want kids. He is a RINSER. I wouldn’t try to tell him why it isn’t working, just that it isn’t. You can do it OP! Onwards & upwards to far, far better things!

A discussion on working finances won't cut it at all. This type of relationship with money is often a deep seated psychological issue that you might compare to physical hoarding - all tied up with fear and control. There are financial therapists who specialise in this sort of work but even if he agreed to it, it could take years for him to change and what a risk it would be to wait around and find out. Ultimately sad for him as he will be deprived of good human relationships through this behaviour if he doesn't change, but not your problem to fix.