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I would disagree. I went into my marriage with a game plan of my wife being a stay at home. Then we had a special needs child and she definitley need to stay home. With that being said budgeting has become an important part of our financial health. With a couple of tune ups and a steady budget you can make it work. I mean it does help to have a good income but having a game plan is key.
It all comes down to communications, expectations and income of the single earner.
My brother and his wife were both lawyers. She quit her job and moved to be with him when they married. She has never had a paying job since although she does a lot of volunteer work. That was 35 years ago and they remain happily married. Of course, her not working had been discussed before marriage.
My guess is the OP either did not have the single income discussion or did but there was an expectation that both needed to work to make ends meet. In that case we are dealing with a deadbeat spouse. That can become a real hardship in retirement if savings are low and an estranged couple only has a single SSI benefit.
My wife is a stay at home mom and we wouldn't have it any other way.
My wife and I were both working when we married, at the time I was earning about 3x her income; then her climb up the corporate ladder started, and not long after our second child was born she was making 3x my income. Then my income dropped to about half its previous levels while hers continued to rise, and just as she was becoming a little annoyed with my lack of income, during the recession I might add, her company imploded and she lost her job. We both managed to bring our incomes back up over the next decade or so, not to previous levels, but good enough to survive after downsizing, and then during the whole COVID thing her company was working her like crazy and all but demanding 30+ extra hours per week with no pay; after begging for months, I finally got her to quit. Fortunately since the start of the pandemic my income has doubled, so she is now free to do whatever makes her happy, even if she doesn't earn another dime for the rest of her life.
Chapter 13:
I categorically refuse to do AZEO!
no romance without finance
@Annabe wrote:
I can't stress this enough!!!!
If your S/O does not have some kind of income coming in at the very begining of your relationship/engagement.....RUUUUUUNNNNNNNNN! AS FAST AS YOU CAN THE OTHER DIRECTION!!!!!!! I repeat RUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNN! I am living a nightmare after 23 years of being married to this situation. UGH! And I am afraid that I may be headed toward a Bankruptcy (along with a divorce!)
Seems to be a common thing that women get themselves caught in and then most states they find that if they try to get out of it they'll be paying him alimony because the judge will just let him live there and eat the food for 20 years and then say his standard of living will go down disproportionately in the divorce.
I was talking to my mom about how the judges just used to give the woman everything and throw the guy in prison if he didn't pay up somehow even if he risked his own financial collapse if he tried.
Oh how the mighty have fallen, oh how the tables have turned.
I've seen two cases of the women go to college and the men drink and smoke the money and occasionally go to prison or jail in my own family.
That's on top of my mother, whose story will now commence.
Then two of them wiped my mother out in divorce back to back leading to her bankruptcy because she thought she'd leave my dad, a provider, to go chase a truck driver and a maintenance man.
She had to file bankruptcy after her third one because of him and the second one. The second one died and never refinanced his house and it's illegal to throw his widow out and take the house, even though they expected my mother to pay the house.
By this time she was in trouble from letting them spend the last twenty years drinking and smoking her paychecks, emptying out her retirement account to remodel houses she lost and get plastic surgeries for men who didn't care about her, and then she ended up in trouble with the IRS and her own divorce lawyer and the state tax people, and it all fell over.
She also gets sick all the time because she doesn't even believe in getting an MMR, a tetanus shot, or a flu vaccine. So every time you go near her, she gives you something. One year she gave me pneumonia because I went to see her for Christmas.
I have since gotten both pneumonia shots even though the pharmacist wondered what in the hell a guy in his 30s needed those for.
She also drinks random internet swill from con artists instead of going to the doctor and she states the doctors don't know anything (she's a nurse), so she's constantly been in trouble with hospital ERs for making herself sick by delaying medical care, drinking random Internet swill instead of medicine, and not getting her vaccinations.
So a lot of that went into the bankruptcy, and she still has medical bills out there that are in collections but not on her credit report from before she got Medicare and a Medigap plan.
"The doctors don't know anything. The doctors don't know anything. I've been laying in bed too sick to move or eat anything for three weeks." Bam, Emergency Room again.
All this after her latest "red meat and butter" diet. She swears this is healthy and calls it the "carnivore diet". I have no idea what made her sick and nearly die in April, but I can't imagine that this helped. She finally went to the doctor but I had to go to my uncle and threaten to involve an investigation by Adult Protective Services because she was not eating and was not able to transfer herself down the stairs and to the bathroom, and she sent my brother away to a friends house for two weeks.
The only reason she could file bankruptcy is that the Catholic Church (which has a mass layoff this year that forced her into retirement) took her vacation pay away from her that year and she went on vacation anyway unpaid, and because my 31 year old brother who still lives with her and has never worked counted as part of the household, otherwise that whole mess would have gone into a Chapter 13 plan while they robbed her blind anyway to pay for someone else's house and all her other mistakes.
So the only thing my brother has ever contributed to their household is being another person on her bankruptcy schedule in the household so she could discharge the compounding bills from her 20 years of stupidity and nonsense.
There's a lot of people out there that need to get the bolts on their head tightened.
Because of my mother's codependent personality and other fiscal imprudence, she's never been able to hold onto a dollar and would be broke if you handed her $100,000 and a solid 24 karat gold bar at the beginning of every morning.
In the third divorce she just got lucky because husband three motioned for alimony after they had been married just four years and had no children, and the judge ruled no.
Husband three was such a deadbeat that he was in arrears on his child support and hadn't filed a tax return in eight years and so she married him and slowly found out what a catch he was, and then he cheated on her. He also didn't pay his divorce attorney.
I don't want to get political, but it's just a great Nancy Pelosi quote that describes how my mom got married to all of them. "We have to pass it so you can find out what's in it."
Don't do this with marriage. If it smells like a turd, it's a turd.
The first phase of a relationship, they're on guard, on their best behavior, they lie.
You marry them after putting them on a pedestal and then you find out what you have.
Government welfare. Don't get involved with someone on government welfare SSI namely. The program provides them with a basic living allowance but when they move in with you is when the SHTF. Even though the SSI program is a needs based benefit for one person it will be revealed to you at some point others were dependent on the check as well - usually a representative payee. What's on paper and what's in real life will be different. You will have to dismiss the dependent sweetheart and whoever else leeches off them.
My own mother was a stay at home mom. Dad was a lineman for the rural electric cooperative plus the folks owned a beef cattle ranch. In spite of mom having a college degree she helped dad on the ranch until I was old enough to do most the chores out here.
It wasn't until the nest was empty mom started working outside the house.
@Brutus1954 wrote:no romance without finance
Where's my sugar momma?