WIBU to divorce due to DH quitting his job whilst I’m a SAHM?

[Ilovechristmasssssssssssss]

We have young children under the age of 5.

I’m a SAHM whilst DH works (which we are both in agreement with). He has a high earning role, but has been increasingly unhappy with the politics of the job.

He came home and announced that he is quitting tomorrow. Nothing lined up but says he will ‘make it work’. Worst case scenario we will have to sell our home and downsize.

Despite him having a well paid role, we have zero savings as our outgoings are high and due to some other factors. We have a minimum debt payment of £3,000 per month (DH brings home approx £10,000 per month).

I am considering telling him that it’s over between us if he does this. I am fed up of picking up everything family-wise for him to just throw our lives into turmoil like this.

Because it’s stupid. Who is going to pay this money? I work, who pays me to get up in the night every 2 hours with my baby? What’s the point in me calculating how much I’d pay a night nurse to do it?

We both work and we manage about getting our children to and from school and we manage them being sick. Would life be easier if one of us didn't work? Absolutely. But it would be a luxury, not a necessity.

He could be having a breakdown. You need to tone down your outgoings and live more moderately if you can't afford to save. Is that all he is to you - a cash cow?

He should see his GP.

I guess you’d have to have experienced doing 50% then …to truly understand..how a SAHM lifts a huge load and frees the parent working outside the home

OP you seem to have different financial outlook to your DH, to put it mildly. Reasonably, you value financial stability. Many people just want to feel financially stable, no matter what that level of income/spending is. Your DH does not have this as a priority, it is not something he appears to value (also not uncommon). This will never change and makes married life and family life fraught with conflict, tension and stress/distress. This is exacerbated if the main earner is secretive/dishonest about how much they earn/what they spend it on/their career plans etc, if they don't involve the lower earning partner in their financial plans leaving the lower earner feeling in an unstable financial position with all their control over their own life taken away. At an extreme level it is financial abuse, a type of domestic abuse. Some of things you say about your DH changing jobs and lying about the salary to such an extent that your family got into 6-digit numbers of debt, about making drastic career changes that will leave your family with no secure income without consulting you fall within the financial abuse spectrum, no matter whether you are a SAHM who wants to privately educate her DC or not. It isn't about your spending, it's about having full information about how much money there is in the family to spend on family expenditure and being able to feel financially secure at some level and being able to have enough time and input to adapt to what is in the future.

In this case the DH wanted his wife, OP, to stay at home ..they have an agreed plan..he is now imploding …the whole point of the thread

I work and raise my children.There is no fifty percent, there is no huge load.I am a woman who had children and was a single mother and was still high earning.I have married and had more children.At no point has my wife ever said anything like what people are saying on here if she did, it would be a serious problem for our relationship.So what I would say back to you is you clearly have got no experience of earning a large salary and running a home

Your husband thought that if he died he would just carry on exactly as he was, not perhaps look at some other work options that didn't have him out of the house for 13 hours a day? He'd just get in night nannies for his grieving children and head straight back to it? That didn't concern you at all?

I had something similar (I ended up hating my very well paid job, my SAH spouse (no kids) refused to let me quit or discuss it. In the end I solved the problem by getting myself fired...)

Because it LITERALLY values the work women do and how they contribute to our families and society

I wouldn’t jump straight to divorce, but I’d treat this as a serious breach of trust. Quitting a £10k-a-month job with no savings, young children and £3k minimum monthly debt payments isn’t just “following his happiness”, it affects the whole family.

I’d tell him clearly that he needs a realistic plan, another job lined up and a proper budget before resigning. Selling the family home should not be his casual backup plan.

If your children are a baby and toddler then who’s school fees are you paying?

Speaking as someone who has been pushed / pushed themself / allowed themself to be pushed into work overwhelm and close to breakdown, I'd observe that dropping back from 70 hour weeks to 50 hour weeks and caring a lot less about work doesn't actually affect your pay packet or work relationships much in the first year. I would recommend to the husband that he continues where he is with a different mindset where he protects his income, family and mental state whilst planning an exit strategy from work, in a better timeline.

@Ilovechristmasssssssssssss I think people are missing out on the point that it's clearly best for children to be with their mother who loves them rather than employed people who just make sure the children are safe. It's ridiculous saying it's the same to be with your mother than a nanny! Or..those people might have had abusive mothers.

But in your post before this one, you said that you'd have a problem if your partner said that the "only" reason you're successful at work is because of the sahp support. But that's not what anyone said, and is black and white thinking on your part. Nobody is saying that sahps are the "only" reason for a spouse's career success. They're saying it's very helpful to a working spouse to have the entire domestic burden lifted off them.

Because they chose that instead of working. They could work and then it would truly be 50/50.

How strange ..history of Director Level multi million pound personal budgets, 2 homes to manage able to retire at 52 …I value SAHM who make our staff team members so much more able to be present and I value the childhood support they give to the children in their families often children with additional needs…when you have to stoop to personal criticism it doesn’t sound like you feel safe in your assumptions.

Home work and childcare is work…it’s simple. Degrading this unpaid work is degrading women and unacceptable to me ..in childcare AND in elder care

Firstly, I love your username though.Secondly, no, i'm responding directly to the people on the thread that have said that

Sure. But OP can't afford that anymore so will have to figure out an alternative.

Is it a choice when someone needs to do the childcare?

But to me, if my wife ever said that the only reason I was successful in my career was because she stayed at home, I would be furious.It's just it's so insulting Your ego is getting in the way of your common sense. Your career success is not just because of your wife, but the fact remains that you could not have a successful family life and a successful career without her. There is a reason that working mums are told they can’t have it all. Are you under the impression that the same wouldn’t apply to working dads?

God forbid, but if your wife vanished tomorrow, you would have only two options; to pay out huge sums of money to pay people to do her role, or drop your hours to be family friendly. Do you think you would have achieved similar levels of career success working 10-3? Or having to leave important meetings because your youngest has been sick at nursery and they want you to go and collect her? Or logging off at 3pm to do the school run?

I really don’t understand why some men are intelligent enough to rise up the ladder at work but are too fucking stupid to realise that their relationship with their sah wife is a partnership, with both contributing equally. No, she wouldn’t be able to afford school fees without you. But neither would you if she wasn’t there to carry the load at home.

Is the 150k all credit card debt? That could be 30k in interest a year. His 3k payments could be almost entirely going to interest. You need to divert school fees towards the debt in order to make some headway. This is the time for bigger sacrifice. I understand it's hard with a baby but maybe you could look after a child or two to bring in some extra income.

You may need financial counselling as a couple.

If he’s actually serious about these actions, then yes, you do need to divorce him. It’s absolutely disgusting.
I have responsibilities towards my dog cat and car repayments that I wouldn’t walk out on
Without a plan
And here he is prepared to throw his children into turmoil. He is not a good father
Yes, you do need to do all the things suggested in terms of sorting out your career but that’s as well as not instead of

The mother doesn't need to do the childcare.

Either you're missing it, I don't really get your point.Women contribute to the society in many different ways to suggest that staying at home is the way women's contribution to the society is measured is so deeply misogenistic.It's actually shocking.I don't know what generation you're from.I'm not sure if what this thread is doing is showing that there's real generational differences, but no, the thing that is being devalued is actually what's being devalued is him as a person, because if the.Relationship is based on what he earns, what kind of relationship is that.