Can someone tell me how I should feel over DH's bombshell? Money

[ASeagullNamedDog]

It turns out H has been raiding our savings for the last 18m-ish on the secret

He has spent £45k behind my back on fuck all - 37k of that in actual saved money, and wasting at least £800 per month out of his wages somewhere else

Nothing to show for it, says he doesn't know where it's gone

I've only found out as I asked him to transfer £15k for a big purchase

This money was earmarked for our children's future

This is divorce material, isn't it?

No secret children or other women, apparently not a gambling habit

I'm very calm but I'm not sure if I'm calm because I'm gonna crack up in an hour or two and bury him

That's not just a few quid, that's a house deposit! My ds was doing that, turned out to be drugs. Don't let him off the hook. Check with the bank. As others have said - OnlyFans? Drugs? Hookers? Bastard!

you will possibly never get to the bottom of it

Could someone be bribing him op?

My husband racked up £60,000 of debt without my knowledge. I suspected gambling- he denied it of course. He tried to persuade me to remortgage our house to sort.
I divorced him.

I just love the naivety of some Mumsnetters. Possibly don't love a total incomprehension of budgets outside their personal range or shaky arithmetic, but neither of those is unusual.

That Lighthouse article's really something, @InsomniacVampire! Who remembers NXIVM, too? Seems like there's a lot of money in bossing insecure people around.

In a similar vein, findom's a big thing. It seems plenty of men get a kick out of giving money to women "probably around £150,000 in a couple of years. I live at home and often have to borrow money from my mum to pay off debts to findommes – she has no idea"

These often show up as frequent mobile payments to various names (all nicknames of the same recipient) but can also be cash, bank transfers and PayPal.

I learned about this on MN - just sharing the knowledge!

I want to know how they sold £17k of items between ...10am & 5pm (?) today.

I mean "his" money in the sense they operate separate finances.

I'd be pissed off if my DH spent £35k of our premium bonds. But if he replaced it with money from his account, he's restored the issue.

Going forward, I'd keep things in better view, as I'd be really mad if I was putting half my earnings into savings, thinking he was doing the same, but treating himself every month instead, but I wouldn't be instantly divorcing. Not when he's restored the situation.

Essentially, the scenario is "DH and I operate separate finances. He's spent £57k from savings accounts. I didn't know he had. But he's replaced it with £77k from his personal accounts. And now I have full access and control over this £77k to ensure it doesn't happen again".

Tell me, @ASeagullNamedDog what would your stance be if DH had just spent the £57k directly from his current account. And not touched the savings. Is he allowed to do that? Are you? Is this not why you operate separate finances?

Let's say this person's hobby is high-end or unusual watches. He has a couple of trusted dealers, who let regular clients know when something in their line might be coming up. If he needs to liquidate his collection, his dealers will probably buy it back. Fellow members of his specialist online groups would be interested, too.

Couple of phone calls and an optional internet post.

Surely when you're married with children such massive expenditures should and would be discussed in a healthy relationship, even when accounts are 'separate', since going forward, this could affect everyone in the family.

Imagine it was spent as you say ... he had a merry old time blowing it left, right and centre on fun and crap and god knows what ... then divorces and gets to take a chunk of his wife's sensible savings, too.

Madness to think this is ok.

I really, really feel for you OP. I had something similar with my ex when I found out he had debts of around 30k. Like your H, he genuinely couldn't explain where the money had gone, and had nothing really to show for it. I know it wasn't drugs, gambling, other women. It turned out he just kept taking out loans, putting things on credit cards, and then not paying it back, or paying the absolute bare minimum, so the interest kept climbing up.
It was horrifying when I realised that our entire life was based on his lies - and he had no reason to do it. It would just be £100 here, £80 there every week, and then only paying back about £10 a month.
He eventually had to declare himself bankrupt. I'm so grateful we always kept our finances separate - although I'm still repaying the tax credits he claimed in both of our names without me knowing.
There was no coming back from the discovery of it, so I know how overwhelmed you must feel right now - and the fact that you can't make sense of it, or realising how much you've been lied to.

@InceyWinceySpidy people can't have genuinely separate finances if they are married, as I'm sure you know. What one person does affects the other. Reckless spending, and then hiding it from the other person, is a giant flashing warning light. Clearly he has no control over what he is doing otherwise he would have just told OP about his intention to spend it in the first place. Obviously it is a significant amount of money for them otherwise the OP would not be upset about it and her husband wouldn't be feeling guilty and panicking, or indeed lying in the first place. You can't have a functional relationship where there is no trust and people are lying and hiding things. It's also understandable that the OP would be upset to be working hard and saving for the children while her husband is spending huge amounts on god knows what without telling her. How can you plan a financial future with someone like that? It's disturbing that you don't see the problem and think it is trivial.

And then if you divorce and the hisband has blown all his money the wife ends up having to subsidise him from hers in the asset split. To pretend you can have entirely separate finances if married is a nonsense, by definition.

Imagine it was spent as you say ... he had a merry old time blowing it left, right and centre on fun and crap and god knows what ... then divorces and gets to take a chunk of his wife's sensible savings, too.

Exactly. The previous poster acting bewildered as to why the OP is ending things now that he’s paid back the money doesn’t seem to grasp that

• You don’t know who your partner is any more. When you learn that your partner has been deceiving you for months or years while acting normal, you feel like the rug’s been pulled from under you. I couldn’t stop thinking about how if I’d been siphoning money away for my own use for years and hiding all the purchases I’d have been beside myself with guilt. Yet he just carried on like it was nothing. I realised our basic values were very misaligned.
• If you stay, you’re no longer a partner, you’re a jailer. You have to be responsible over another adult’s behaviour because they can’t be trusted to be responsible themselves. The trust is gone. It breeds resentment.
• This kind of extreme behaviour doesn’t come from nowhere, and it doesn’t disappear overnight. It’s an unhealthy behaviour pattern founded in much deeper issues and will almost certainly re-emerge in a different form if one “outlet” is blocked off, unless the OP’s husband acknowledges he has issues and seeks help. As he’s currently playing it off as sort of accidental, he’s clearly in a form of denial about what’s driven it.

I want to know how they sold £17k of items between ...10am & 5pm (?) today.

I think there was mention of a dealer or broker relating to his hobby.

My friends DF has a very specific hobby, he’s one of a very small handful of collectors in the UK. He once told me he set himself a budget of £10k each year, but he never stuck to it, he once spent £10k in January alone. He could quite easily pick up the phone and another collector would snap his hand off immediately.

It’s so easy to blow up and react strongly in a situation like this. For me I was just deflated rather than angry, I’m also a very logical pragmatic person, which is how I approached the situation.

I also took responsibility for my part. I knew DH wasn’t an organised person when it came to life admin, I also didn’t check in with him and just left him to it living my happy little SAHM life ignoring everything else. I had an incling something wasn’t right for a long time but just decided to leave him to it.

My narcissistic mother controlled every aspect of my DFs finances, his pay was put into her bank account, in the days of cash wages she’d be stood outside his work and he’d have to hand over his pay. I swore I’d never micromanage or control my DH like that which I think was part of my problem too.

But there was no reason to sell everything below market value in one day on a bank holiday weekend. Especially when he's apparently already transferred more than he took to OP from his savings. It doesn't make any sense. None of it does.

Some of us suspect that the hobby items were firearms, based on comments that OP made about not feeling safe with them still in the house. Worrying that she's going end up as the next Emma Pattison is an excellent reason to insist on selling the lot asap.

I think you're over reacting somewhat. It sounds like you have plenty of wealth given that he's got another 60k laying around in savings accounts of his own. The only question I'd be asking is why he didn't just spend that in the first place? A bit off raiding the kids savings, but at least one of them is still a baby, so plenty of time to build up funds again (even though he's already replaced what he spent from there).

Without knowing what his hobby is, it's difficult to suppose if he could've spent all the money on it and only have 17k worth we it came to liquidating it.

I get that it's a shock and there's a significant breach of trust, but suspect you could work through it if you can come up with a financial plan that works going forward - e.g joint account (for monthly expenses) and savings account in your name with agreed contributions. Then what each of you have left after is your own to do what you want with. Make sure he doesn't have access to withdraw from the kids or your savings though.

Never tell someone they're overreacting.

His "hobby" is probably drugs 🙄🤔

@altmember you're missing the point. He might have replaced the kids savings from another pot, but the fact remains that he has spent almost £60k over 18 months that he can't - or is refusing to - account for. The family as a whole are £60k worse off.

OP, has the spending escalated over time? You say he has spent £5k his parents gave him in less than 3 weeks. If he'd been spending at that rate over 18 months, he'd have spent over £100K. I would suspect gambling, where he's started off small and then gambled more and more to try to recoup his losses.

There must be something big within that amount that's somehow been forgotten. Car or car payments?

It's even worse if you watch the actual documentary. I was screaming into my hands and only watched the preview and the interview with the maker and the man (and his girlfriend) who was scammed.
Obvs OP would know if her partner is spending hours on weird phonecalls, but I bet there are other schemes out there that suck you out dry without having to, like the example you mentioned.

WTF? OP has updated the thread several times. She didn't sleep yesterday, maybe she is sleeping now.

She doesn't owe any of us anything.