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...

Old school psychoanalysis as a method is quite outdated now though.

It comes from a time when wealthy people had hours and £££ to spend exploring their unconscious.

OP, people have taken your posts and extrapolated.

So you don't use Botox and fillers, but you do seem to spend over £1000 a month on clothing, makeup and other related items.
That's not sustainable on your income level.
That's the basic point. The rest of your very long post is essentially background noise.

So your choices are to earn more, spend less, or get your partner to give you more money. You seem to be focussed on the latter, possibly because you feel that your relationship is predicated around your partner "looking after you". It's clear he won't(and probably can't on his income) do this in the way that you want. So you need to adopt one of the other options.

Well quite - I wonder why the DP is so enthralled with it, recommended by a friend (also a therapist) and now he’s been in it for three years. How does he have time for his two kids, and what does his analyst make of that.

So he doesn’t have to contribute to their child? OP has to buy everything in this area and cover childcare costs? That doesn’t seem fair and will also stop her from working more and earning more.

I suspect if she does work full time he’s not going to start doing 50:50 around the house and child related stuff (what with his hours of therapy). But he may appreciate that she is enabling him to work more and not have to think about their child.

Does he not have time for his kids as a result - is that an issue?

I live in SW London too and it takes bloody ages to get to N.London..

Sounds like he’s taken up analysis the same way other MAM take up cycling..

£4K isn’t “up to one’s eyeballs” in debt. It’s a poor pattern to get into, especially on only £1500 a month, but it’s a sum that could be easily dealt with if she set her mind to it.

Bad habits and not being particularly mindful. And it started when my maternity pay dwindled to nothing (I took 12 months) so I used what I had saved and then never adjusted to a new reality when I should have done.

Thinking back over the last few months, I think I probably overstated how much I go to the DC. My work wardrobe has for the summer so far has been more machine washable than not.

I think dry cleaning was just front of mind because I had to collect a dress from the dry cleaners on Saturday. It also needed a small repair, it's one I plan to wear this week.

The only other recent dry-cleaning experience was my everyday beige mac (more for spring / autumn) which unfortunately needed cleaning after DS had a nosebleed on it 😢. Bad luck.

Absolutely. It’s not therapeutic to engage like that, it’s a lifestyle choice.

Pleased that you mentioned the partner right at the end. It’s almost as though the mother of the child should be making all the cut backs and scrimping and saving and spending all her money on childcare and her child whilst the father spends an insane amount of money every week on therapy….and his savings and his pension and his other child. But yes she must cut back….

OP doesn’t say but it sounds time consuming, not only the getting there and back and doing it but the mental processing afterwards. So navel gazey for a father of two!

Do you think that C-suite level people have the time to write their own articles? Naive.

Technology writers are often ghost writers....

But he's not saying he can't afford his therapy and OP should subsidise it. That is what OP is saying about what she spends.

She doesn’t spend all of her money on childcare and her child per her own posts. She currently pays a small nursery fee, a portion of the food shop and bits for her toddler. Out of £1,500 a month.

Her DP has his other child as an existing financial commitment, pays for all housing and bills apart from nursery. The therapy money is a red herring because he’s not actually leaving the Op short changed to pay for it. It’s not as if she has to worry about losing the roof over her head. A roof in SW London of all places.

i honestly think some people see man equals bad.

They have a child together! Why should she be struggling financially and he be fine? They are a partnership. Why did she have to cover her maternity? To get in to debt whilst having his child? And we wonder why zero progress is ever made in the gender pay gap.

If she didn’t have his child she wouldn’t have needed to take maternity leave, get in to debt and work part time. Why is she bearing all the financial consequences of having his child?

My DP would never have seen me get in to debt whilst on maternity leave- it shows such an ungenerous character. We have a joint account and all money is shared. Why can’t the OP have that?

Agreed. It was unwise of OP to have a child without the legal & financial protection of marriage. She’s now working PT, lower pension contributions, and he could end the relationship and she’d be homeless.

I also don’t like the way the finances are divided up. Better to have a joint account that both pay into for bills, and everything is divided according to income. Much easier to keep track of.

@Delatron sounds like they both need to cut back and he should also be contributing to kids clothes etc too but OP does seem to spend beyond her means. I am on a similar wage and I've had to really cut back but my partner and I pay 50/50 for child's clothes, rent, bills, food. We get the kids clothes second hand, dont have a cleaner etc etc

OP will be significantly worse off if they adopt this sort of arrangement

You don't have to be married to have a better financial partnership than this.

How committed is he to your relationship?

It is WILD that anyone in a relationship with one partner earning £93k pa and the other on who knows what (because you've only said the take home at £18k so I don't know the actual salary) can be in debt and struggling to balance things.

If you're expected to pay for the dry cleaning and house cleaning and you're on £18k that has to stop. I hear that you have smart stuff for work but you're going to need to shift to machine wash gear while your child's young. And no cleaner. I've never had a cleaner whether PT or FT because that's a luxury for rich people. If the house is massive or whatever, at the very least you should cut back from weekly to monthly.

Great that you're not paying rent/mortgage but you two really need a grown up sensible conversation about how your SHARED finances work. You're in a relationship yes? You're in a partnership bringing up a shared child in a family home yes? I'm not saying he needs to give you all his money but there's a gross imbalance going on here.

On a more positive note, that's not actually a lot of debt to be in compared to lots of people. It's under £4,500 and you're earning. What's the interest like on your credit card and the loan? Are you able to apply for a 0% interest credit card then balance transfer and prioritise paying off one of those debts so at least you're not spaffing it all on interest.

Have you talked to him about it? You're panicking about the equivalent of 4.8% of his annual income. I'm going to guess your annual income is £22k based on your take home so that would be the same as £1,056 compared to your annual income so you could pay it off in 2 years for £50 a month. (more depending on the interest but I'm just trying to give you some perspective here).

I get that he's got money tied up in other things but it also sounds like he's prioritising his own personal and individual FUTURE wealth over the current and present financial wellbeing of his real and current family. Which is grim to me. At best he's naïve and thoughtless, at worst he's a raging narcissist with financial abuse at the core of his coercive control.

And no cleaner. I've never had a cleaner whether PT or FT because that's a luxury for rich people.

Fuck that. All working women need a cleaner. I’ve always had a cleaner. I hate cleaning. Why on earth OP should add cleaning to her domestic chores while her DP is analysing his dreams is unclear.

I get that he's got money tied up in other things but it also sounds like he's prioritising his own personal and individual FUTURE wealth over the current and present financial wellbeing of his real and current family. Which is grim to me.

Agreed.

Yes they both need to cut back. He needs to stop spending what £400 a week on therapy and she can definitely cut back a bit.

I don’t think she should ditch the cleaner if he does nothing around the house or to do with the child. He doesn’t get to spend ££££ in what likes whilst she is in debt after maternity

Exactly! This thread is like going back to 1954. Women know your place!

Would you tell a woman in her 50s, with retirement approaching, who had just secured a job after redundancy to give unlimited access to her money to a younger partner (who has 20 plus more years of earning potential than they do) who says they are bad with money?

The OP took 12 maternity leave during which time all of her major outgoings - housing and bills were covered. She could have planned for it as many if not most people do.

THERE IS NOTHING OP CAN DO ABOUT THIS!!

should do this or that is just a waste of time. She can’t force him to give her money and he never has, so presumably doesn’t want to

They have a child together! They are a partnership. Why should she be in debt and he pays nothing towards that child? This is preventing her from working more. She took the hit in her career, he now won’t cover childcare or pay towards that child.

Gosh there are some funny ideas towards parenting ok this thread. However it’s made me happy I married a generous, kind man who would never have let me get in to debt whilst off work looking after his child. Who also saw the value of what I did.

Well lucky you, but OP didn’t have her child with such a man.

Yes but I’m pointing out what is normal so the OP can have some perspective about how awful her partner is. And then she can choose to leave him.