Have namechanged.
DH and I have been married 6 years, we have a DD5 and DS3. He has a DS13 and DD10 from his previous marriage who live with their mum and come to us alternate weekends and some holidays. I get on well with both of them, they are lovely children and this isn’t about them.
I knew when we first got together that he was paying the mortgage on the house his ex lives in with the older two. They had agreed she would stay there when they split because the children were little and he would carry on paying it for a while until she could manage it herself. He told me it had stopped before we got married and I honestly never thought about it again. I wasn’t going to interrogate him about it, I thought it was sorted.
DH deals with most of our finances because he earns more than me and is much better at that sort of thing. I can see the accounts and have my own account for personal spending, it’s just always been easier for him to deal with the mortgage, bills etc. I’ve never felt the need to check every payment because I trusted him.
We’ve been talking about moving for a while because the house is getting a bit cramped with the children. We were looking at somewhere with a bigger garden, or possibly getting the loft done and sorting the kitchen out instead. DH was quite keen at first but about 6 months ago he started saying we needed to be more careful with money and couldn’t keep spending like we were.
He was the one who brought up cutting back. He said the bills had gone up and we needed to prioritise things. He suggested stopping DD’s dance class and DS’s swimming lessons because they were too young to really benefit from them anyway. I wasn’t happy about it but agreed because I thought we were trying to save for the house. We also stopped putting as much into the holiday fund and put the kitchen on hold. I thought we were making sensible decisions as a family.
Anyway, I was looking through the accounts last week trying to work out if we could start saving properly again for the work and noticed a regular payment to an account I didn’t recognise. It was £1,450 a month and had been going out for years. I looked back through the statements and realised it was going to an account in his ex’s name.
I asked him about it when he got home and he said it was the mortgage on her house. I said I thought she was paying it herself now and he said no, he’d carried on paying it because the children live there. I asked how long he’d been doing it and he said since they split, so including the whole time we’ve been together and all 6 years of our marriage.
I was honestly quite shocked. I asked why he hadn’t told me and he said because it was for his children and he didn’t see why it needed to be discussed with me. I said well it’s coming out of our money isn’t it, and he said it’s his money as well and he has responsibilities to his older children.
I said I obviously don’t have a problem with maintenance and I’ve never questioned him paying what he needs to pay for his children. This is additional to that though, it’s paying their mum’s mortgage every month, and he’s been hiding it from me. He said he didn’t want the DC having to move house or potentially schools, and keeping the mortgage paid was the only way to make sure they could stay where they were.
I said I’m not asking him to leave them without a home, but I don’t understand why he’s been telling me we need to cut back on things for our children while paying nearly £1,500 a month for his ex’s mortgage. He said the children are settled there and he isn’t going to make them move just because I want a bigger house.
I feel really stupid now for agreeing to all the cutbacks when he apparently had no intention of stopping these payments. It’s not even that I begrudge his older children having a home, I just feel like he’s made a massive financial decision that affects all of us without telling me. And then to say it’s none of my business when it’s coming out of the money we use for our family is making me even angrier.
He says I’m making it into something it isn’t and that I’m being unreasonable. I don’t know if I’m being unreasonable expecting to have known about this or if he is right that it’s nothing to do with me.
Would you be upset if your DH had been doing this throughout your marriage?