AIBU for thinking my financial situation isn't sustainable and I'm heading for an almighty fall and mental health crisis

[TheHotRock98]

Hello,

I'm afraid I used chat GPT to help write this. I was asking it what I should do and asked it to convert to an AIBU query. This was inspired also by a thread by another MNer a couple of days ago. It frightened me as our situations were a little similar, though she sounds a much better/ more together person than me...

I'm 39 and my partner is 54. We've been together several years, live together in his home (he owns it but still has some to pay), and have a three-year-old together. He also has a 14-year-old daughter from a previous relationship.

We're not married.

I'm really struggling financially and it's affecting both my physical and mental health. I feel like I'm constantly on the verge of panic.

My finances are:

• £173 into my overdraft (my limit is £200).
• Around £2,042 on a credit card.
• A loan with about £2,000 left to repay.

I work three days a week and my take-home pay is £1,500 a month.

Our three-year-old goes to nursery for two of the days I work, and my dad looks after him on the third day. I'm with my child on the other two weekdays.

My partner earns around £93,000 a year. He also owns a property abroad which he rents out. I believe the rental income is around €900 a month (I think that's right )

As far as I know, he has savings in both pounds and euros. I think the euro savings are around €70,000 (sorry I don't know if I heard him correctly at the time but it really sounded like he was saying this, could have been €17,000 I suppose, and this was a while ago anyway), although I don't know the exact figure and I have no idea how much he has in his UK savings. He says both have taken a significant hit because he was made redundant previously and that he's trying to build them back up. He's now back in full-time employment and has passed probation.

He pays the mortgage (it's his house), child maintenance of around £600 a month for his older child, plus additional costs for her (school holidays, school trips, etc.).

He also has therapy five times a week at around £95 a session. From what I understand, his therapist takes around two months' holiday each year, so he pays for roughly 10 months of therapy annually.

I don't pay towards the mortgage, but I do pay for childcare for our three-year-old (currently £130 a month, but it's due to increase by around another £200 a month soon).

I also pay for a lot of our toddler's day-to-day costs - clothes, toys, days out, little treats like cake or ice cream, and I buy some of the groceries, although not all. Also things like presents for other children when we go to their birthday parties.

On top of that I have my own regular expenses:

• contact lenses
• dental appointments and hygienist appointments
• tampons
• toiletries (deodorant, moisturiser, SPF, face wash, body lotion etc.)
• vitamin supplements
• dry cleaning for work clothes
• haircuts and hair colouring because I have a lot of grey hair and work in a professional environment.
• I do also but and wear make up, and not drug store either I'm afraid I do like the department store stuff (I know thats bad given my financial situation and living beyond my means etc. )

I suspect I might have ADHD (so as yet undiagnosed) and I'm aware I'm not naturally good with money. I'm sure that's contributed to some of my debt, so I'm not pretending I've managed everything perfectly.

Recently we've also had unexpected household costs. We had a plumbing issue affecting the flat which cost me £190 to sort out(I thought it was important, he thinks otherwise and the call out was unnecessary ), and our oven broke and had to be replaced, costing him around £500.

Before payday this month he told me he only had around £1,600 left in his current account because of various expenses. He says he's trying to rebuild his savings after the redundancy, so I appreciate he has financial commitments and isn't sitting on endless disposable income.

At the same time, I'm in debt, living in my overdraft and feeling like I'm sinking while trying to cover childcare, my own costs and many of our child's day-to-day expenses.

What I'm struggling with is whether this is simply how it has to be because we're not married, or whether it's reasonable to expect someone earning around £93,000 a year to contribute more towards the costs of the child we have together when I'm earning £1,500 a month and ending up in debt.

Can he reasonably say that my debts are my responsibility and refuse to help financially? Or should we be sharing the costs of raising our child in a way that reflects our very different incomes?

I'm genuinely asking because I don't know if my judgement is being clouded by stress. I feel like I'm spiralling and I can't carry on like this, but equally I don't want to be unfair to him if I'm expecting something unreasonable. I had a health scare recently and thankfully all came back clear and fine - but reading the summary of my consultation with the Dr she said I seemed stressed and tearful though I didn't cry. I don't even remember that, I had my toddler with me so I was listening to what she was saying while caring for him.

Also.i.paynfot the cleaner to come once a week (68 pounds) but I do.all laundry and ironing of clothes and bedding. He does 85% of cooking, but I do the clean up afterwards....

If you've got this far thank you. I don't know how I've fallen so far, when I started maternity leave I had around £8000 in the bank...

I wasn’t quoting the OP. I was quoting the random poster who thinks a ChatGPT answer is going to instruct someone who’s actually worked in mental health and has real lived experience…

Whatever.
Carry on. 🤷‍♀️

I'm sorry but I thought the whole post was bonkers

If the only thing holding you back from increasing your income is Training, then he needs to pay for your training.
Go to him and say I have looked into this. It’s going to cost two grand but it will increase my salary by 10 grand or whatever the numbers look like and tell him you would like him to send you over the two grand so that you can get started immediately.

I'm just pissing myself at Milano

He needs to pay for his kid! Not just one of them!

I completely understand the cleaner - again he should pay half.

He should pay for childcare for his child.

Nobody needs therapy 5 times a week.

You should have insisted on marriage as he sounds at best tight and unravel and at worst financially abusive.

If you leave him you could at least get him to pay maintenance?

Also - don’t buy dry clean clothes, then that is one huge cost gone.

Can you not just buy cheap ones for day to day? I'm a Dr so have to look vaguely smart but my coats are from Dorothy perkins and chuck in the washing machine once a year at the end of the season

I was being facetious...so [whooshhh]

Your husband needs to pay for 2 days of extra nursery so you can work full time. I would expect him to cover 80% of the child you shared expenses tbh.

Why is he having £1,900 of therapy every month? Is he deeply unwell?

Also just FYI OP, as a copywriter you should know it’s ’panda eyes’ not ‘pander eyes’. Because it makes you look like a panda bear…

I find it interesting you're avoiding answering the mental health questions.

I can understand that being very specific could be outing. But it would be easier to answer if you gave some general idea. There's a big difference in spending that much a month due to mild depression vs something far more serious like ptsd or schizophrenia.

Does his mental health impact your spending decisions? For example if the house isn't clean enough is that an issue?

I write:

White Papers
Reports
Articles and bylines (my writing has been in the New Statesman, The Guardian, The Times of London, The Financial Times, and others)
Q&As
Industry award entries
Blog posts
Website copy
...and more

I used to do pure marketing before I transitioned into writing, so I help out a bit there too.

Sorry that's not good enough for hoity-toity people like you, but I earn an honest living and I don't harm anyone with the work that I do (which I couldn't say if I worked in the charity sector or for NGOs). I take very esoteric, complicated, dry technical information and distil it into copy that everyone can understand and that people can find interesting. As I say, I started as a translator.

Before they retired, my mum was a nurse working in the NHS and my dad was a secondary school teacher teaching in some of the toughest schools in South London. When they were working, would you have told them what they could or couldn't afford? Please have some grace and decorum.

His salary is 3.5x OPs on a net basis. So she would need to pay 20 to 30% of the bills if you’re doing proportional to salary. Which would probably leave her worse off than she is now, with minimal nursery fees.

If you can clear the debt, you’ll have more each month to spend, as none will be going to service the debt. If you can have the mentality it I’ll be a short term blitz, ie cut the cleaner back temporarily, cut treats for a few months etc, it’ll be easier maybe. Maybe move the debt to an interest free card,m. But also speak to him. He may be able to help out with one of the debts

A copywriter who uses ChatGPT?

God help the industry is all I can say to that.

Oh my god.

I don't know what's more depressing on here - the OP and her situation, or the amount of women telling her she is into a good thing, or to pay for this and not that.

FFS! YOU HAVE A CHILD TOGETHER.
THE TIME FOR 'MY MONEY, YOUR MONEY" STOPPED WHEN YOU BECAME PREGNANT. THE END.

Sorry to shout in capitals, but seriously, what is wrong with people? How can two parents share their DNA to create a child but not share finances? Imagine the father of your child being secretive about money! How can that ever work? What model for a child is that? Terrible!

Because I get the feeling she wastes money hence why she doesn't have any despite over £1000 to spend each month.
I think she tried to raise her socio-economic class by marrying well, but now is unhappy as it turns out getting pregnant by this man hasn't worked and he isn't willing to hand over money freely.

Apologies I'm not intentionally avoiding I just don't have the time to respond to all questions, but that doesn't mean I'm not interested in people's comments or what is being asked.

I don't want to share too much about my DP personal stuff and background as it is outing and not fair on him. As I say, he's Jewish and grew up on the continent so you can probably extrapolate from that his family suffered greatly during the time 1942-1945 in particular,, not a great childhood (I won't share much about that, not my place), and then later on a really bad toxic marriage with constant fights and shouting.

Outside of the therapy it doesn't impact our spending or mine (I'm the one who likes cleanliness and order, he's a bit more relaxed).

I was a deputy editor at multiple broadsheets and I and everyone among my colleagues bar the CEOs themselves wore M&S and Zara etc. Cut your cloth.

He has another child too, so the my money/your money is somewhat important. There are plenty of fair ways to split money. Putting it all in one bucket when one party has built up a lot of assets and the other hasn't (without that difference being down to the less well off party having given things up to benefit the well off party) is a pretty unfair way of doing it.

Did you read my original OP at all? I said I was using chat GPT as a means to help me figure out a difficult problem I was having in the moment and I was extremely upset at the time. I then asked it convert that into a MN style post that I could copy and paste for ease. I was completely transparent about it, because I have nothing to hide.

My follow up posts haven't been written with Chat gpt because I'm a bit calmer now, a lot less upset and I have slightly more time to express my thoughts.

But I guess someone needs to brush up on their comprehension skills....

Lots of engineers I know use LLMs to write code and test software now, people are actually evolving.

Really not seeing how all this has to come to more than 18k a year unless you're not even trying to spend within your means when you take the toddler out. You really should be able to easily pay off those debts with this kind of income and those responsibilities.

On the therapy issue, is he actually training as a psychoanalyst? Is this his stated aim?

I did a masters at the Tavistock in Hampstead many years ago, and the only people who committed to therapy at that frequency were the ones who went on to do clinical training. They had therapy 4-5 times a week and had to find a clinical placement. This went on for 4 years.

The vast majority of psychotherapy training programmes do not require this level of personal therapy, Nowhere near. Most therapists would be very dubious about the merits of 5 sessions a week - indefinitely. There is a fine line between self-help and dependency; self-understanding and narcissism.

On your family income (as in both of your incomes combined, as they should be) - and with 2 children to support - his therapy is taking up a third of your family's income! What kind of selfish man and father would carry on like this?

He could easily have psychodynamic or integrative-approach psychotherapy once a week with someone nearer to home. I'm in SW London - these therapists are everywhere and should be around £70 for the hour. And you should have therapy as well OP,

How does he justify his therapy? How does he justify the financial set-up and lack of transparency in your family? Why do you even need to ask if you are BU?

It feels like financial abuse to me. He could easily clear all of your debts.

You have a child together so you should have access to a shared account that you can use to pay for everything related to the child.

Who gets the house when he dies? Does his will leave it to his children but with the condition that it cannot be sold as long as you need to live in it? This is what it should say.

If he has enough money for a property overseas then he has enough money to give you weekly costs of maintaining your life for you and your child. I hate this ‘he earns X and I earn X-tonnes’, it should be ‘we earn Y’ and from there all bills are paid

They always went to Bognor Regis to the caravan site for their holidays too I guess? Get real.

I never take fancy holidays or fly long-haul. I've done one trip to the Sates for my cousin's wedding in Texas, and another trip to Buenos Aires for the wedding of a close friend. That is it. People spend money on travel, that's fine. It's not for me but I don't judge them for it nor the amount of money they spend to get their and back. We're all different.

And when are you going to include the £900 monthly rental income from a property he owns abroad ?