Managing Household Finances RESPONSIBLY

Arabella_CD

Hello all - this is my first post on here, so please be gentle!

I'm hoping for some advice on managing joint household finances with a partner. My partner of 9 years and I are in the process of buying our second house together (we outgrew our first one and have a baby on the way next month), and during the process I found out that he's been massively mismanaging his finances.

It got to the stage where I've had to apply for the mortgage on my own because there was no way anyone was going to lend to him with his credit report. He's even racked up CCJs in the last few years without my knowing. (Not because he couldn't pay his creditors mind, just because he didn't feel like it!) Pretty serious stuff.

Luckily my income just about qualified for the mortgage, so he hasn't jeopardised us buying our dream house, but my question is - what do we do now?

I no longer trust him to run his own finances, and because we're financially linked, I believe I should have a say in how he does this. Do I suggest that I take over all his finances altogether, i.e. control his spending / check his bills to make sure he's paying them etc? If not, how can I train him to act responsibly instead? He's accepted that he's a financial failure, so is quite happy to accept anything I suggest.

Looking forward to all your expert replies!

Tixy

Hi

Do you have any joint bank accounts/loans etc? If not I would say make sure you don't get any so you don't link yourselves as financially associated on your credit files.

I personally wouldn't suggest you take over everything, as he won't learn and you won't be certain that he isn't accruing debt elsewhere.

I would suggest you work out together a reasonable household budget and decide how much both of you can contribute to the joint costs of living together (depending on your salaries, other commitments etc. You could possibly set up a new account in your name to pay all these bills from and both pay a monthly standing order into that from your personal accounts.

You'll then have a personal account which you can spend on what you want or on repaying your debts and he'll have som responsibility and won't feel he is behaving like a child. Equally you'll know the house bills are being paid each month.

You could offer to help him look at his personal account every so often and make suggestions if he is struggling to manage. He might also benefit from keeping a spending diary for a few months which he could then share with you so you could help and suggest rather than dictate!

Arabella_CD

Thanks for that Tixy. Paying into one account in my name is probably the way forward. We currently take responsibility for different bills, so I wouldn't know if he'd suddenly decided to stop paying something.

And I thought we had a joint household budget, but it turns out there were lots of outgoings he hadn't included (the bills he wasn't paying for instance). I might sit down with him and re-do it, but get him to be 100% honest about everything.

A spending diary is probably a good idea, although I'm not sure he'd commit to filling it out. I don't want to make him feel like a child, but I just feel like that's how he's behaved (he's 36 by the way!). He feels very bad about the situation but does admit he needs help with making decisions. His whole family are the same!

I'll suggest the spending diary (and maybe also go through the last few months' bank statements with him as well) - with the baby coming it's a good time to do it, as we'll both need to reduce our spending drastically. Thanks very much for that!