We've come a long way in the last two years. He's getting treatment now and I've overcome a lot of anger and frustration by realizing he didn't mean to do any of the things he did but I thought I'd share this one experience because maybe it will help somebody.

We where married about two years and I knew he had problems but I had no idea it was ADD. I also had no idea just how potentially devastating his distractions could be until a seemingly simple transaction of purchasing football tickets almost amounted to our complete and total financial distruction. It is only by the sheer grace of God that we recovered.

I was pregnant with our second child and we had decided to purchase one season of Redskins tickets. I decided he works really hard and almost never wants to spend money on himself so we had the money for one season so I told him to go ahead and do it. I talked to the sales rep and so did he. She faxed the contract to him, he signed it and we bought a season of tickets. Sounds simple right?

He never actually brought the contract home for me to see it so the following year when I started receiving collections letters for $10,000 due within 30 days or we'd be in default I thought I was going to loose it completely. We have rental houses but this was just after the 07 crash and they are still all upside down in value. We didn't have a way to get that much money in 30 days. I looked at the contract and he missed a very obvious thing on the front page of the contract that said TERM: 6 years. He had signed a contract not for one season costing $7,000 but for a 6 year contract totally $45,000 because it increased 6% every year. He later admitted to not even really reading the contract.

That was how I learned that he can't sign contracts without both of us reading them.

So a lawyer told us that the contract was air tight and we wouldn't qualify for the new bankruptcy laws and anyway it would end up with them garnishing his wages forever practically if we defaulted.

Since he was a student and his job was paying for is Masters I decided we should take out student loans to cover the contract, sell all the tickets to offset the cost (which we only recovered about a third) and try to find someone, anyone who would take over the contract.

We ended up about $25,000 in the whole but ultimately saved our credit.

I wish I'd know what ADD was before this happened. I just assumed when I married him that I could trust him. The first three years of our marrage where crazy. The last two things have been getting better. I'm just glad it took us only 3 years to get a diagnosis and not the decades it's taken some. I'm also glad my husband was never in denial. How could he be after signing a $40K contract by mistake.