Husband’s business, baby - do I need to be more resilient?

[NurtureGrow]

Hello,

Im hoping for advice, especially from those whose partners have businesses, or have one themselves.

We have a 15 month old. My husband handed in his notice on his full-time job last summer, it was a 3 month notice period. He left in the autumn to start his business. Around the same time, I was made redundant and never went back after maternity leave. It was too late at that point for him to stay in his job.

The money I got from redundancy would have lasted 8 months. As he hasn’t had income yet from the business, I had to pay all bills and the money is almost gone after 4 months. We will basically run out of money at the end of this month. I’m sure we can sort it out.. hopefully.. he is hoping to get a small amount of investment and I am urgently looking for work. I had hoped to return to work max 4 days a week, but due to our financial situation, may need to do 5.. (I know not everyone can do less days.) I need to find a job at the same salary as before, or higher. I was hoping to do something less stressful.

I agreed he could try the business for 1 year, what I am wondering is, do I need to be more resilient? I feel this time should be for enjoying our baby/family and seeing family. But instead we have this pressure on us. I do try to support him; I proofread, discuss, do what I can. But sometimes I feel down/grumpy. He feels we will be better off financially if this works, as don’t have savings now.

I feel I’m meant to hold space for our baby, for him, and take responsibility of getting a higher salary again myself. I don’t have family to talk to or offer consistent support.. I’d just really like to build our life together, not have pressure for something that may happen in the future.

The question and problem:

YABU - yes, you need to be more resilient, people do this all the time. Focus on supporting him. This is the nature of supporting your partner with a business.

YANBU - it’s understandable you are finding this hard. It’s too much to do at once. It should be put on hold for an until your baby is bigger, so you can better enjoy the present

He massively let you down. He's been extremely selfish. You carried, birthed, and cared for HIS child and now it's on YOU to financially support everyone and cheer him on?

Why the fuck did he choose this fucking moment to quit???? Quitting before you even went back to work and without savings for at least a year was extremely irresponsible.

The business better fly soon or I'm afraid I'd never forgive him. The stress he has put you under, you won't forget.

Bankruptcy, I guess.
I think it all depends on the business. A restaurant, for instance, has a high chance of failure. I wouldn't be putting all on the line for that.
Bringing something that has been very successful in other countries to a new country, is a bit different (what my parents did) as it has a proven 100% success rate elsewhere so it's really just a matter of time.
If it's a case of time, I think it makes sense to go for it. What I'm understanding from Op is that it will be successful but time is the potential problem.

You keep saying should you be more resilient. Is this what he's said?

So he hasn't got funding or a product or savings and he hadn't made any money?

You cannot be resilient if you are worried about funding the basics. I had this with my ex who accused me of being "money mad" because I worried about the bills being paid when we had a tiny baby.

@Grammarninja how could anyone know if it’s just a matter of time though? Until the moneys in the bank, it’s all hopes and assumptions.

Also, the economy isn’t what it was. Picking up a successful business model from another country;

1. markets are different, countries arent always working with the same culture, budgets, technologies, infrastructure.
2. we’re on the cusp of another technological revolution with AI. Lots of markets that thrived 5-10yrs ago in another country could now be eaten up by AI
3. if it’s a good business, the chances are another large company is already rolling it out quicker than this guy who is working solo with zero funds.

Im not trying to be pessimistic, just realistic. There’s a 15month old at home who needs to eat and have a roof over her head. Bills are very high now, the risk is very high. Bankruptcy/losing homes/ going without necessities isn’t great.

It’s wonderful it worked out for your parents but they are outliers and grew their business in a different time.

OP has no idea if the business will be successful. She only knows what he's telling her, which so far has landed her unable to pay the bills next month, so I wouldn't set too much store in the DH's hopes and dreams until there's tangible evidence that what he says will materialise. My cousin has started several businesses that were okay for a while but he's now bankrupted and his family have had to move in with his elderly parents, which has messed everyone up. This is the flipside of the romantic 'we just had to hang in there on bread and water and candlelight for a couple of years and we're now millionaires', and unfortunately the business failure is often the more likely scenario, especially with no wealth to act as a safety net when investors and clients get flakey. Time is a luxury that this DH literally can't afford. If this February funding doesn't come through, he needs to work and pay the bills and plan a lot better from now on.

Over 70% of businesses fail in the first 3 years. I really don’t understand why so many men put their families in these precarious financial positions when they have babies and small children. Seems rife on MN.

THEY were thinking it would be alright as OP was working
but the redundancy has been thrown into to the mix unexpectedly that has thwarted the plans

Your redundancy changed things, he needs to accept this and both of you need to make a new plan to get income and perhaps later he can revisit his business idea.

You're in the situation, he's taken the plunge and it sounds like he might make a success of the business. Maybe the timing wasn't ideal but I would let his persevere for maybe a year or so and set a realistic goal of a time by which unless he isn't making [x] he goes back to paid employment.

It's definitely possible to work long hours in a stressful job with kids. I've done it throughout IVF, birth etc for my kids who are now 2 and 4 with only a few months mat leave each time. You just need to be focussed, determined and resilient. Get up before kids, work, have an hour or two fun with them when they wake, get them to childcare, finish work on time at 5/5.30, have a couple of hours fun with the kids and then work again. To make it possible, husband will have to do more than a fair share of life admin and work until he's hopefully bringing in more money and everything possible can be outsourced.

The plans were poor though not to factor in that risk or have any savings buffer. And according to the OP's later post, he presented her with this plan in the midst of her dealing with the new baby so she was more trusting of him than she should have been. Blaming it all on the redundancy is short-sighted, shit happens and that's why most responsible guys don't give up their secure job when they've just become a parent to pursue their dreams with no savings.

The fact he voluntarily gave up a paid job while you were on mat leave is insane. He needs to get paid employment and pay you back half of his bills for the last year to replenish your redundancy pay. It would be different if he was made redundant but he is just a selfish twat.

Nailed it

If your money is going to run out soon then you'll obviously have to look at claiming benefits - or what are you going to live on. He can claim UC as a self employed person but there will be expectations that he makes money from it after the min income floor is lifted

DH was already running a business when we met, but then expanded largely into another sector which meant we had to sell our house to fund it. We moved house when I was 9 days post C section - not recommended and lived with my Dad for 6 months before moving into a tiny flat above the business premises. We had a small amount of savings that paid the bills but there was little money for anything else and truthfully it was a miserable 3 years before the outlay had paid off and DH was bringing enough money in for us to have another mortgage. He had been putting in 14/16 hour days by this stage making it impossible for me to work.

However I did trust him completely in the process as he was already running the business successfully - and the investment was 100% the right thing to do as we're now reaping the forward for it. I'm not sure that I could have trusted him doing something unproven.... like a complete start up. I would set a deadline for which he has to put this dream down and face reality.

So she's got to go out and work full time to prop up his failing business?

Maybe the timing wasn't ideal but I would let his persevere for maybe a year or so and set a realistic goal of a time by which unless he isn't making [x] he goes back to paid employment.

How do they persevere for a year or so with no money? They can't eat perseverance.

Perseverance with a sprinkling of resilience on top ! Sounds delicious and definitely pays the bills.

Props to you but this sounds dreadful and I think might give most people a complete breakdown! The OP was hoping to cut her hours, not join the 5AM club!

Plus no need for it, they could just both get normal jobs at this point? The only reason the husband appears to be doing it now is because otherwise he thinks he’ll be “too old”- no commercial reason so far as we know.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but It sounds like there ought to have been a lot more open discussion about savings, finances and the expectations that your husband had wrt you earning before he made the leap. And that’s before the redundancy came in to play. Basically a large part of what made his plan viable (ie your return to work/income ) was something he assumed rather than discussed with you.

are the investors okay with his plans to draw a salary from day 1? Some would not be. And what are your childcare plans once you are at work? When we had our DC, I took a years maternity, then my DH took a year off, and built a business during nap times and working in the evenings - is this something that might be viable? Businesses - especially when they’re starting out p are very greedy of time, so I think you need to be very clear with your DH that childcare responsibilities need to be shared so that you’ve not got all the pressure of earning and arranging all of that too

i don’t think it would be fair to say that you need to be more resilient, because responsibility of bankrolling this seems to rather have been foisted on you. What’s done is done, so the best thing you can really take from this now, is insist that he is much more communicative, considerate and transparent moving forward

Now you need to be resilient enough to ask your husband some challenging questions - such as, what does he plan to do to help your family's financial security if (when!) the money doesn't come through during February?

In this economy?! Not that unexpected. You HAVE to plan for worst case scenario, business is no place for rose tinted glasses unfortunately.

Will your husband consider giving it up and getting a salaried job? Entrepreneurship can be an addictive disease. And how much pain would you consider worth it for the chance of a big payoff?

(This post involves some seriously first-world problems and I know I'm in many ways very lucky...)

Depending on your husband's personality and the nature of the company, you may need to be pretty resilient long after the financial woes settle. My husband wanted to start a company just as we contemplated starting a family. I asked him to wait, but he suffered a mental breakdown when I was pregnant and believed that founding a company was the only way out. So his company was birthed with our first child. No major financial woes, because I had a decent salary and he had savings. And things were manageable for a while -periods of intense fundraising stress, but also some flexibility for him to help with childcare. Ironically, it stopped being manageable when businesses like his started getting billion dollar valuations. Billionaire investors started circling and he IPO'd the company to maintain control. The level of stress this entailed was entirely incompatible with mental health or family life, and I was a solo parent with a very unwell husband for several years.

In the end it worked out OK. He sold the company and regained his sanity. He exited with enough cash that we're much wealthier than I ever expected to be (although, thank goodness, the company was never worth a fraction of some of the silly valuations in the space). He's taken time off work and reconnected with our children. I think it was, in some sense, psychologically necessary for him, and hence perhaps unavoidable. But given that the alternative was a quiet existence on two comfortable professional salaries, there is no sense in which it was worth it to me financially. (If his product ever comes to market it could help a lot of people, and hence it might be worth it by that metric.)

So don't assume that your resilience only needs to take you to the point of first investment. Assuming he needs multiple rounds of funding and many years to bring a product to market or exit, you may have to dig deep for a long time...

And what happens to the funding if it doesn’t work. Are you then in debt?

I have some experience with this. My DP set up a new business (albeit in the same industry as his former paid employment) and ran it alongside his paid employment for around 4 months, until it was really clear we could rely on it. Then he resigned and ran the business full time.
I continued my paid employment for another approx 6 months after that until it was clear the business could support all of us and then I joined the business too. It was all calculated and very much a joint decision at each step. Your DH’s business sounds very different ( re the need for funding etc) but I wouldn’t say you need to be more resilient regarding finances. In my experience the resilience/ patience needed is with regard to the ridiculous number of hours needed to do everything in the early days and the all consuming commitment required.
I think the key is that it needs to be a joint decision and level of risk that you’re both happy with and that each partner understands and agrees to the plan.