I’ve just discovered that DH has a shitload of credit card debt 😲😲

[0lga]

I will try to explain properly but I’m just reeling in shock.

We are in the process of separating and divorcing, he has already moved out. He left boxes of stuff, old clothes in bin bags etc for me to dispose of (that’s typical of him, he still thinks I’m his servant). I shoved them in a cupboard and ignored them, until this week when I started to sort them out to take to the recycling.

Among all the rubbish I found bags of old bank statements and I’ve just spent hours going through them. I’ve discovered that ever since we got married, he has been spending a huge amount of money on credit card payments . I’m talking about £30,000 a year 😡😡😡

To put this in context, we had a good income of about £ 90,000 net between us. I earn about £30,000 and he earns about £60,000. So we are comfortable, can pay the bills, run a car, go abroad each year on holiday, pay a good amount into our pensions etc. I thought the only debt we had was our mortgage, which is nearly paid off.

( These aren’t the exact figures BTW, I’ve just rounded things to make it easier to talk about ).

It turns out he has been lying to me for our whole marriage - in fact he earns £90,000 not £60,000 and has been spending the difference on about a dozen credit cards. I don’t have the card statements, only his bank statements, so I don’t know what he’s spent it on.

He’s always been very secretive about money. I’ve never seen any of his own financial details, we both get our salaries paid into our own accounts and then pay into a joint account which we use for all the bills and we’ve always had enough , so it was never an issue IYSWIM.

And now I know why the bastard has been so secretive. I’m absolutely raging, I can’t get over how much money this is that he’s thrown away.

Im assuming that he’s paying off old debts, as the payments for each card are pretty much identical each month. But I know fuck all about credit cards - I have only one which I hardly every use and if I do I pay it off in full by DD each month. So my payments are different amounts each month.

I just can’t compute that he’s paying roughly the same than I earn each year and the debt doesn’t seem to go away. And he’s been doing this for nearly 20 years !!!

I have no idea how he got into this debt but I can see he had it when we got married.

And I’ve even less idea why he has gone on buying himself new cars every few years and the newest iPhone / MacBook when he has all this debt. It makes zero sense to me.

There’s no point in asking him, he will refuse to discuss it and walk out. Or just lie to my face , like he did about his affair. Even when I had cast iron proof.

He was still swearing on his kids life that she was “ just a colleague “ and telling me that I was paranoid when she had already admitted to me that it had been going on for years.

So we are not exactly on speaking terms before this.

Please help me, I want to kill him 🤬

@0lga

why the fuck is he paying so much into his pension while he has a big debt ??? I don’t understand what he is thinking.

I hope your solicitor is getting the value of his private pensions so you get your fair share in your final settlement. 🌹

I'm sorry, if possible get a solicitor asap

You need an experienced SHL and a forensic accountant. Likely to be well worth the money.

Hopefully your solicitor can use it to demonstrate he is financially secretive and is hiding assets. I'm not surprised you are upset and angry, you have just found out that he's been financially abusing you the entire time you were married.

My thought is also ‘stoozing’ - shifting debt around on 0% deals but investing the cash elsewhere - and I see others have mentioned this too.

I think there’s likely assets available to offset the debt.

Ask your solicitor about a forensic accountant. Don’t confront your husband about any of it yet.

You could probably run a credit check on him - technically illegal I expect, but it would get the info you need and I expect you could answer all the ID questions. Savings and Investments won't show up but any forms of credit will.

Do you have access to any devices he used, laptops or old phones? Or his email account? There might be some digital footprints, statements downloaded or a note of banking logins etc.

Thanks , I’m waiting for my solicitor to get back to me. So far they have been remarkably laid back about all the financial shenanigans that he’s been up to . There’s a lot of shoulder shrugging and telling me that it’s not illegal .

He has disclosed three small pensions which come to less than 25% of the value that he told me during our marriage. The solicitor has said that if I know the name of the pension company then she can ask for details, but if not they are not allowed to go on a “ fishing exercise “.

So that means he will get to keep about 80% of the pensions he saved during our marriage.

He’s also claiming 100% of the house as he paid all the mortgage while I paid for food, bills, kids costs etc . I don’t think he will win that argument in court.

Maybe you could find a better solicitor with a focus on forensic accounting?

I second this, your solicitor sounds crap.

Oh dear, I thought it was just me. I don’t understand why they seem to so powerless. Though I suspect it might be a bit too far into the process to change now.

☹️

Does he have any valuable assets - eg watches or whisky? They pass very easily under your radar if you're not tuned into those interests (can look very uninteresting), and are a a good way of concealing wealth. Hundreds of thousands can be spent on such items obsessions, little by little.

The discovery of this can be devastating. 😧

Fortunately, they can be sold at specialist auctions and much of the money recovered.

You need to get savvy fast OP, or have someone fighting on your behalf who is. Many solicitors are absolutely hopeless when it comes to such matters. Do you have a wise friend who can help, at least with a preliminary search through the accounts?

Don't be too hung up on the fact he's paying the same amount every month and assume it's historic debt from 20 years ago, that's highly unlikely. In my experience, he probably has a lot of different accounts, cards, password protection apps etc to conceal what he is up to. It is horrifying what is available.

You need to consider dispassionately all the options, including the fact he may have assets, commitments such as another family or sleazy obsessions such as gambling, sex workers, sugar babies etc.

I'm so sorry you're going through this, it is utterly devastating. Get help, get the facts, get mad and hang his sorry arse out to dry. 💕

Does he work for a company? If so you can check the pension provider by ringing the company and asking as though you are a potential employee 😀

Get a better, hungrier lawyer, and a forensic accountant. It will cost. It will be worth it.

It's never too late to change your solicitor if you feel they aren't doing their best for you.

My wife ran up 5k in the 18 months from me leaving her, to us getting a financial order. Turns out her debts are my debts and her solicitors opening gambit on the form E was I should pay half.

@GentlemanJay I’m sorry to hear that you are affected by this, the system seems so unfair doesn’t it 😥

I ended up paying for half her new dog and holiday. Lol.

OP if your mortgage is in joint names then you are financially linked to your STBXH.

Before all financial ties were severed with my ex I was able to see what searches were being run on him on my Experian.

Given that he's lying about his pensions, has clearly planned in advance to show that the mortgage was being solely paid by him, he's lied about his salary for years, his affair shows he is not a "benign" liar. It's clear that he has been planning to stiff you from the start, if the marriage went tits up.

This doesn't sound like an idiot hopeless with money paying off debts year after year with nothing to show for it. Sounds like a man with a plan.

The mortgage wasn’t in joint names - he told me that the mortgage broker wouldn’t allow it as I didn’t earn enough. That turned out to be more lies of course.

And you are so right, he is absolutely a “ man with a plan “, not a hopeless idiot ( I’m the idiot here ).

I’ve been thinking about this all weekend and it’s dawned on me that there’s no way he would have been spending all that money to pay off credit card debt. Even if he HAD come into our marriage with hidden debts, the smart thing to do would have been to use some of the deposit to pay off it off. We had much more than the minimum deposit when we bought our house.

And of course the interests rate on a mortgage is always less than on credit cards.

So it must be to buy assets. I think investments or pensions are much more likely that a house. I know I need to find where these are but I can’t find any clue in an any of the paperwork I’ve looked at.

I think it’s gone into pensions or investments. Defo not gambling or drugs, that’s not his style.

My friends are trying to keep me sane thinking of more and more crazy things, such as blackmail. But I think it’s the more obvious answer.

It wasn’t a NatWest bank account , it was a NatWest credit card. They are all movements between credit cards , he has about 12.

I can see that he is paying just the minimum £5 or 10 or just the monthly fee ( like Amex ) for months. Then suddenly he will get a large lump sum , pay it out to another card . Sorry if I’ve not got explained it very well.

Sometimes the payments are a lot bigger eg £3-4,000 / month.

I don’t think it’s about maintenance ( spousal or child ) because he’s been doing it for years .

Also he has another plan for not paying maintenance . That’s to quit his job and work for the same company as consultant, at a pittance of course. While he pays tens of thousands in dividends to his other shareholder, the OW.

I know, he’s a prince among men 😡

Run a credit check on yourself.

This guy isa total prick. I think he's been investing too - I would certainly change solicitors and ask them to engage a forensic accountant and you need to see those credit card statements because it sounds like he's paying money onto his credit cards and then using money on them to buy other stuff. Make sure you credit check yourself and I think you can credit check him too if I remember correctly -