I got married last year to a lovely man. At the time I knew this man had organizational problems and was a bit scattered but I had no idea to what extent. I have been lurking around the forums and blog all week and I am seeing the same patterns in my relationship that I am reading here. The most glaring issues being chore distribution and his apparent subconsious need to bankrupt us.
I am by no means an accountant, nor am I always responsible and smart when balancing (or not balancing) the checkbook. However, my husband does not seem to possess the ability to learn from his financial mistakes. I am so frustrated and I am at my wits end.
Let me bring you up to speed with our situation:
Because of his youth diagnosed ADD and his obvious adult symptoms and past issues I have tried to keep things very very simple for him. After he screwed up our bank account and nearly caused us to lose our apartment I decided that it would be best if i handle all of the bills and money from now on. Reluctantly I told him i would handle ALL the money and when he needed some he could simply ask me and i would give it to him. This always starts of great for a week and then gradually he starts holding on to more and more money and using my debit cards until we are back in the same situation. Id like to also clarify that he is strictly trying to pay bills and fix things, hes not randomly purchasing big ticket items impulsively.
This past month the situation has gotten very bad with the start of his new job. First his direct deposit got messed up and wasnt deposited. Now, he tells me it was his HR department however from experience I know he probably gave them the wrong account number. So after 3 weeks of back and forth with his job he finally gets 2 paychecks in hand. He takes this to MY bank and deposits it and then we wait for the money to go in. After painful back and forth for over 3 weeks still no money has been deposited, of course this is the banks fault not his. We come to find out that they deposited into his OLD account that he let go negative years ago..so all the money is gone. At this point i start to really lose composure. We are left with one check for 690$ to be deposited..so he takes this to the bank and deposits it. We wait another week and no money!! I take the day off of work and he has made himself physically ill with worry over this and we drive to the bank to find out he accidentally deposited into his fathers account instead of mine.
THEN
I get home and check my account online to see that my other bank account is negative 690$. It appears as though his job told him they would initiate an emergency payment to him and he knew we needed it in the other accnt i have setup just for rent. Instead of waiting for the money to go in, then withdrawing in and depositing it into the other account......he writes a personal check (of mine) from my one account to the other. So now i realize all the bills i paid with that 690, i actually paid with nonexistant money. To top that all off, the bank recalled the initial check so all the bill payments bounced (at a 35$ charge per bill). To fix this..obviously..the best idea is to write ANOTHER check from his old negative account to my account he wrote the check from. confusing huh?
Needless to say im now -1k in my bank account and I have no idea what to do. I cant police his actions at work and how much simpler can i make it than forcing him to do direct deposit into my account? But he cant even set up the direct deposit correctly.
Someone please offer some words of wisdom, empathy, help...anything
Soo sooo sorry about this situation!!
Submitted by Aspen on
I don't even know what to tell you as I can't think of any solutions either for the hole you are currently in. I think you should sit down together and make an agreement that he does NOT make deposits. How on earth does he have access to so many accounts?!!? At the very least can he get the $690 from his dad's account and back into yours?? That is a far cry from 1k, but at least it is the bulk of it. *HUGS to you* I am sure you have more than enough to do yourself, but is it possible to take your account information and meet him at HR to make sure that from here forward it is going into the correct account? I think I'd put him on probation as far as check writing also. He has proven that he doesn't understand how money (and especially checks) work (I think a brief class for him somewhere is a must at some point), so he can't do it any more until he understands.
You need to be careful not to take a parenting role, but the damage he can do financially in your family NEEDS to be limited right now. Eventually when he understands better, maybe he can participate more again. He needs to always be a participant in deciding where the money goes however....even if the decision is an obvious everything goes to plug up this hole, he is working and an equal member in your family, so he needs to participate in making that decision. And esp if he doesnt agree with it right away, you have to keep talking with him until he gets that negative accounts are NOT acceptable! They cost your family a ton of extra money that you don't have since his OLD negative accounts just bit you in the butt, and from here forward this is not the way you do business as a couple.
One concern I have is that you keep saying MY bank and MY account. Many couples do choose to keep finances seperate (esp when ADD is involved), but I would bet this is part of the disconnect you are working with. When our marriage was new, we had several money discussions that always ended with my husband agreeing that we were going to deal with our money a certain way....then if he ever got ahold of money personally, he DIDN"T do what we said especially with regard to saving--genuinely saw no benefit to savings. I was NEVER going to give up on the importance of having some savings for emergencies, so he was kinda forced into doing some saving, but once he started to see the good results of it, he slowly got on board. I even threatened to seperate our accounts several times out of sheer frustration with him not letting me know what he was spending so that I could keep the checkbook up to date. We did not have much money, and it was vital to know where it ALL was going. He'd see that there was $600 in the account and buy something that he thought we needed (he did not spend on himself either) and be baffled when I yelled at him that $300 of that was for rent and rest was for food! They just don't get it a lot of times because before marriage they NEVER planned ahead with their money. If it was there they spent it, and if not they white knuckle it to pay day.
ADD people are EXPERTS at agreeing without really agreeing, and you have no idea that you did not just come to an agreement that he is going to work toward with you because all the right words were there. It is the actions that really matter. My husband feels about money completely differently than I do, and due to carelessness, he had several money issues (unpaid bills that we received forwarded to us several months into our marriage after he told me--and genuinely thought--everything had been paid). It led to a lot of fights....I couldn't believe that ANYONE would be so careless about bill paying, and we lost another almost $600 paying a bill that he seriously DID NOT owe because he paid it with cash. I honestly had no idea ANYONE paid bills with cash.....esp important ones. We are still fighting to get that money back (it was garnished) 5 years later because it was all in his name and I am not allowed to deal with it, and he is at best casual about following up with the group. He has been fatalistic from the beginning.......it is gone and we'll never get it back so move on....whereas I feel like that is OUR money and he has no right to make that decision for me. I want him to follow up and get it back.
I feel like early marriage is a time of really coming to understandings of eachother's goals financially. If your husband is like a typical hyperactive ADD person, he probably thinks money is for spending and having fun with and never think about tomorrow, so you have to keep him out of the accounts until he gets the reality! On the other hand, he is a grown man who is working, so he needs access to some money. Perhaps that could be a small amount of money for him to care for that he only gets once a week or twice a month or something. He can only use THIS cash--no credit or debit cards (gas was put on a gas card)--and when it is gone anything he wants to purchase needs to wait until it is time for him to get some cash again. That is how we started out, and it didn't always go smoothly, but as he was slowly educated more about how finances work (he used to check his balance at the bank and if it seemed *about right* he'd just go on his merry way thinking everything was right in his accounts), he got a lot more responsible.
I can say now honestly that we haven't had hardly any money fights in 4-5 years. It just takes a while to get on the same page, and up till he got on ADD meds we had some fights about him not giving me receipts that I need for our business...still ocassionally have discussions about that but when you aren't in crisis, you can deal with it without fighting. There is a light at the end of the tunnel! Your husband seems focused on you guys and not on purchasing big things for himself. He is concerned about the money getting where it needs to go, he is just completely clueless about how that happens. I think you can work with this......and once you get it all worked out and you move foward and he gets educated and participates correctly in your family finances, you are going to have to let go of your resentment about what he has done to you here. It is HORRIBLE and STRESSFUL and a huge red sign screaming he needs to change some things, but it is one of things that you have to let go ONCE IT IS RESOLVED. Please don't think I'm telling you to let it go now, but I do think a mistake I made early in our marriage was hammering on the chaos he'd caused when we barely affored it, and called it lying to me, and on and on. I didn't know he had ADD and I wondered when the awesome guy I married became a financial dolt.
No one ever trained him about money. I had parents who made sure from the time we first started getting money as gifts or allowances that we understood how it worked. You may have to be part of his education, and then once he gets it try to use this situation as a bonding one in your marriage. We had to come up with $1000 to pay something or other when we'd been married 4 months. I screamed and yelled and raged at him, and he took it and apologized and kept insisting it was just a mistake. Then we bucked down and worked our butts off and got it paid off that month--thought it would have been impossible as we didn't have that kind of extra money! It honestly does show what you can do TOGETHER when you need to.
he finally got his check from
Submitted by rae333 on
he finally got his check from work..and left it in his desk.
sigh
Oh good lord!
Submitted by Aspen on
Were you able to go in and get it, or do you have to wait until tomorrow?
hes bringing it home with him
Submitted by rae333 on
hes bringing it home with him today. I had to take half a day off work to just be at home alone today lol The stress is starting to get to me.
thanks
Submitted by rae333 on
Thanks so much for responding.
You mentioned the MY account comments and I wanted to clarify that. When we first got married our account was our account, he had full access to it and full trust from me. Even after a few mistakes, we would argue and set up budgets and plans and forge ahead. After countless budgets tossed into the trash because he never followed them, I started taking more control of the money. This process began with "please dont spend anything without discussing me" and morphed into "please dont touch the cards and keep the cash in my wallet" and is now "you have zero access to any accounts without discussing this with me first"
I have been trying really hard to include him, to discuss what i do with him but as usual he makes big decisions without even considering including me. He posted a lot of my things on craigslist that i hadnt used in years in a last ditch effort to make some cash and fix the issues he had caused. He never once mentioned that he was going to be doing this.
To me it seems as though the biggest problem is that in the moment he is all about fixing the problems, being organized, and following a plan but within a week all that is gone and im back to pushing him to stick to it. I feel forced into a mother role.
Financial issues arent like not being able to clean up laundry, i cant just slowly hide all of his socks until he has none and then realizes if he wants socks he needs to clean them up. Finances are so open and ever changing, its very hard for me to manage myself and then be forced into policing him as well.
check these threads
Submitted by arwen on
for some perspectives on handling financial matters with an ADHD spouse, and suggestions about ways to set up the financial arrangements that may work better for you:
http://www.adhdmarriage.com/content/organizing-finances
http://www.adhdmarriage.com/content/communicating-add-husband#comment-4525
"It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be." Albus Dumbledore