Getting Your Other Half On Board

drwho2011

Kwaker_Knacker wrote: »

I've also tried to involve her in the money side of things in here, again with no success. I've sat her down and showed her my spreadsheet of how much we have coming in, and everything we have going out. She looks at it, I explain when the loan and Visa payments are finished how much we'll have to ourselves and she seems keen, then she never once comes up and says to me that she wants another look at it or any ideas how we could make it even better. I tried to show her how things mount up by showing her the bank statement over the hols, and how £27 here, £36 there etc soon tots up to over £100. She got all miserable, said she wanted to get me nice stuff for Xmas, and have some nice food in for Xmas, but she cannot see my point of view, that the best Xmas present I could have is not to see 20's and 30's flying out on the bank card

Took my other half's credit card off her, she still manages overspend on her barclaycard (emergencies).

So having cleared it twice (£5,000 cumulative balance) for her in the past 2 years and most recently June, it has managed to sneak back up to £1500 again. She went for a consolidation loan about 40 days ago and............and now its back where it started circa £1500.

So I've given up, I'm going to clear the joint debts myself and start saving again. I have no idea how she will deal with it once she's not working from Feb but maybe this is the only way she will learn.

JulieGeorgiana

drwho2011 wrote: »

Took my other half's credit card off her, she still manages overspend on her barclaycard (emergencies).

So having cleared it twice (£5,000 cumulative balance) for her in the past 2 years and most recently June, it has managed to sneak back up to £1500 again. She went for a consolidation loan about 40 days ago and............and now its back where it started circa £1500.

So I've given up, I'm going to clear the joint debts myself and start saving again. I have no idea how she will deal with it once she's not working from Feb but maybe this is the only way she will learn.

I like your style... Tough Love... I wish you lots of luck, and I pray she will learn from it and you'll live debt free x

Kwaker_Knacker

drwho2011 wrote: »

Took my other half's credit card off her, she still manages overspend on her barclaycard (emergencies).

So having cleared it twice (£5,000 cumulative balance) for her in the past 2 years and most recently June, it has managed to sneak back up to £1500 again. She went for a consolidation loan about 40 days ago and............and now its back where it started circa £1500.

So I've given up, I'm going to clear the joint debts myself and start saving again. I have no idea how she will deal with it once she's not working from Feb but maybe this is the only way she will learn.

I feel for you Drwho. I'm in nowhere as bad a situation as yourself, tho I did clear an £800+ debt in the summer that I was never aware of until a letter was left lying about.

Keep your chin up

K_K

cottonhead

Me and my other half argue about this. I spend more when I go in and see things that we need / will need - that are reduced or have a deal on. Yesterday I went for milk but spotted half price pizza and reduced diced lamb. I spent more than I would have just for the milk but put the extra items in the freezer so I wont have to pay full price when I do need them ! Forward planning !
So I would say it depends what she is buying.

FireWyrm

I guess the thing is that I've always been 'stronger' than my OH. I really didnt mean to be and honestly, I dont want to be the nagging wife, but on the few occassions I've let him run things, he's nearly run us into the ground. He doesnt spend money on himself, like the others have said, I could understand it if he was comming in with new shoes etc, but it's the £20 here and the £30 there at the local co-op on 'food' that causes us issues. Ever since I've taken to monthly shopping with a list and a meal plan, that's been stopped because he simply has no reason to go to the shop now. Its my responsibility to keep our store cupboards stocked and if we run out, it's me who authorises an overspend. As for 'other' things like luxuries, he's happy with the idea that we dont have any. I have a small budget for stuff like takeaways and I run a catalogue for clothing etc. I know it's not the best way to buy clothes, but it seems to work and we can spread the cost over months. As I said, his lightbulb moment was the £850 he spent one month and we are still feeling the consequences of that even a year on. Its taken me months to get us back to within overdraft and I'm slowly chipping away. OP, there is nothing else for it but to take control. She's acting like a spoilt child and this is frankly doing neither of you any good. How can you control the money if one half of the partnership keeps frittering it away? Showing her should have worked, the fact that it didnt hints as much deeper issues. Perhaps a shock is in order? Perhaps you need to 'run out' of money for a week or two and impress on her the situation with a few hard weeks of nothing. It's all very well telling yourself that you'll stop spending, but it isnt until you truly get to the bottom of the barrel that you suddenly realise, it's not pleasant down here and you really would like to get back to the light of day sometime.

drwho2011

JulieGeorgiana wrote: »

I like your style... Tough Love... I wish you lots of luck, and I pray she will learn from it and you'll live debt free x

Hopefully.

My wife is from the Philippines and out their credit is hard to get and when you can get it its at extortionate rates.

I've lost count of the number of times I've tried to explain APR's, what gets her is she see's that her interest rate is 1-1.5% per month and think's oh that's not much.

I remember one particular conversation about taking a £3500 loan out at 1.8% and sticking it in a savings account at 3%. Suffice to say I wasn't amused.

The crazy thing is she used to earn more than I did and we split the bills 50/50, then she went on maternity and I covered everything but food and was still able to save £200 in my account and £200 for the children.

1 week before we bought the house I found out that she wasn't £500 in debt but £4500 and due to the conditions of the mortgage had to deplete my emergency found.

The problem is she thinks of Income - Expenses - Debt (at minimum payments) = Savings and doesn't like the idea of Income - Expenses = Debt Repayment.

End result she sees a decline in living standards despite 30% increase in household income.

I suspect I will be fighting this battle for a long time.



Anyone once I clear our £15k debt I'm going to overpay the mortgage so I reduce it to a point that she can be removed from the mortgage and things like holidays, cars and entertainment can come from her salary.

Kwaker_Knacker

Just a quick update.

I've got tough regarding the spends. Twice this week the wife has said she needed to get a tenner out and both times I said no way. Felt a bit bad at the time, but it soon passes :rotfl: She's had 3 collections at work, and this has ate all of her pocket money, so she has nothing left. But as I told her, welcome to my world, I never have money in my pocket.

She accepted it but I could tell she wasn't happy. However I explained that this is the way it's going to be from now on. Her pocket money is hers alone to spend on what she wants but when it's gone, she'll have to wait until the following Thursday for the next lot. In the past, she's used her money to get the kids a happy meal at McD's or bought birthday stuff for people, but now I've told her not to do that. I now have a system in place that covers things like that (or I will have once I get paid ).

She seemed ok with it once I explained, and I told her that just cos she gets x amount of money per week doesn't mean she HAS to spend it all. Told her if she put a bit away every week, when any big collection week comes along in future, her pocket money won't take so much of a caning. She agreed, but I bet it doesn't happen. Makes no odds tho, when it's gone, it's gone. Hopefully this week has made her realize this.

Bit of a double edged sword this. On one hand I feel bad cos she's flat broke, but on the other it's great not seeing tenners flying out of the bank. The second feeling far outweighs the first one tho, so I'll be continuing with this approach.

K_K.

P.S. To give credit where it's due, yesterday the wife needed some *ahem* "women's products". She went to the supermarket, got them and a paper (for that day's £9.50 holiday voucher), and that was it. No £10-15 spent on rubbish. I had told her before she went mind, just get what's necessary, no looking in the offers/reduced sections, and she managed :T:T. So good on her. I may be getting thru to her

katsu

When you talk to your OH, how does she suggest the money can be managed to clear your debts? It doesn't sound like she has han an LBM, and I am concerned that it will put a strain on things between you if you have to police her behaviour.

Might be worth giving her the facts and asking her to come up with alternative plans and budgets - just to see if it helps her understand/accept things a bit more?

SpagBol

My OH is awful for this, he has a card where the balance is paid off every month and he was regularly racking up £900 a month (I do all the shopping!!) and then having to withdraw more money (+ cash handling fee :mad::mad::mad:) to pay off the previous months balance. Hence our signature debt after a few years...

The only way I have controlled this is by confiscating the card (like the others I allow it back to buy train card or essential stuff like that) and I have all the log in details of his online banking etc. so I can see what is going on. He is genuinely clueless, thinks that overdraft is our money, same with credit. I accept the blame though, I let it go on and periodically transfer to my cards at 0%, my good credit rating got us into this mess:mad:

There were a few months of negativity at first due to him feeling like he was being controlled but I think at the beginning this is because he was trying to hide his spending so after a while of being "controlled" actually he is chilled out about it because he has nothing to hide. He still doesn't get that £10 here and there adds up, he will still say "I've said I will do XYZ" "can we go to ABC" and we have to have a tedious conversation about where we will find the money for it. I wonder whether he will ever be able to sort out finances in his own head- I hope he has his LBM soon because it can be exhausting being the one who says no all the time!!

Good luck with your OH OP, I know it is hard and like someone said I think it is easier for me to control my DH than if he were to take my card away, I'd have a feminism issue with that so I've got double standards there :o:o

Wannabefree1

I am having an ongoing battle with OH at the moment. Not that the situation is exactly the same.

He doesn't use his cards at all, scared he will forget his pin! We got into this mess due to my low self esteem and being emotionally black mailed into letting him have what ever he wanted. Obviously the time came where I had to stand up and let the lack of pennies be counted.

Took a while to get him on board with the DMP as he was worries he wouldn't be able to get more finance and he wants a new car! Let me confirm the car is only 3 years old so hardly falling apart and he had it from new so it's been well looked after.

We got into difficulty when his overtime stopped, before we'd just scrap the minimum payments although we'd go the last week with no money or hardly any food! Now his overtime has been put back on and I'm talking to him about building up a lump sum to write off our smallest debt and he's sulking that he wants to save it all for the new car! When I questioned priorities and getting free as soon a possible so we can clear our file and eventually move out into the sticks he commented about having to win the lottery to get his new car and went off in a strop!

I'm finding hard being bad cop, but somebody has too. I'm just worried about the strain it'll cause on us. He is so used to getting what he wants!!!