Out of relationship and finally meeting financial Goals

[RobDub]

I was in a relationship with a woman, that had 3 kids, for 11 years.  The 2 oldest had already moved out, but I had been supporting, basically, the entire family on my single income for years. I lived paycheck to paycheck and supplemented with credit here and there (nothing too bad) and could NEVER save money. I didn't mind, as I loved my family, but in 2022, she decided to leave. I knew that the family had been a huge financial responsiblilty, but I did not realize how much until the last 12 months.  Within the last 12 months I've been able to raise my credit scores from the low 500's to upper 600s and low 700s and I can finally put money in the savings and am building an emergency fund and have paid down my debt. The amount of stress that I did not realize I had, tied to my financial situation has been absolutely life changing. I will never put myself in that situation again. I'm excited to have found this forum and have already put plans and goals in play that have raised my credit scores already.  My goal is to raise my scores to about 750 in the next 6 months or so, if possible and hopefully EVENTUALLY make it to the 800s!!! Here's hoping.  I really enjoy reading all the information and sharing on this forum and am excited to get into the community here more.  I am curious if others have expereienced similar situations.

[MarkintheHV]

Keep up the good work.  Credit is a marathon, not a sprint.  Be patient.

I had similiar situation a few years ago.  Wife and I separated (we have since reconciled), but, that year of separation allowed me to see what I had, what I wanted and how I needed to get there.  I paid everything off, set my financial goals, and vowed never to return to carrying a credit card balance.  It is a great feeling.

[RobDub]

Thank you!  Yes, slow and steady wins the race.  I'm just happy I'm finally seeing increases in my credit score after years of trying to get it back up to the 700s.  This forum has helped a ton with strategy and learning better habits. 

[LakeLife]

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@RobDub wrote:

I was in a relationship with a woman, that had 3 kids, for 11 years.  The 2 oldest had already moved out, but I had been supporting, basically, the entire family on my single income for years. I lived paycheck to paycheck and supplemented with credit here and there (nothing too bad) and could NEVER save money. I didn't mind, as I loved my family, but in 2022, she decided to leave. I knew that the family had been a huge financial responsiblilty, but I did not realize how much until the last 12 months.  Within the last 12 months I've been able to raise my credit scores from the low 500's to upper 600s and low 700s and I can finally put money in the savings and am building an emergency fund and have paid down my debt. The amount of stress that I did not realize I had, tied to my financial situation has been absolutely life changing. I will never put myself in that situation again. I'm excited to have found this forum and have already put plans and goals in play that have raised my credit scores already.  My goal is to raise my scores to about 750 in the next 6 months or so, if possible and hopefully EVENTUALLY make it to the 800s!!! Here's hoping.  I really enjoy reading all the information and sharing on this forum and am excited to get into the community here more.  I am curious if others have expereienced similar situations.

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I've been in a similar situation via step-kids, but my wife is a hard worker and a real asset as a partner.  We've been able to thrive together, and that's what it takes.  I would never advocate being single (not saying you are) as a way to do well, but definitely having the right person in your life with like goals and ethics is huge.

[RobDub]

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@LakeLife wrote:

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@RobDub wrote:

I was in a relationship with a woman, that had 3 kids, for 11 years.  The 2 oldest had already moved out, but I had been supporting, basically, the entire family on my single income for years. I lived paycheck to paycheck and supplemented with credit here and there (nothing too bad) and could NEVER save money. I didn't mind, as I loved my family, but in 2022, she decided to leave. I knew that the family had been a huge financial responsiblilty, but I did not realize how much until the last 12 months.  Within the last 12 months I've been able to raise my credit scores from the low 500's to upper 600s and low 700s and I can finally put money in the savings and am building an emergency fund and have paid down my debt. The amount of stress that I did not realize I had, tied to my financial situation has been absolutely life changing. I will never put myself in that situation again. I'm excited to have found this forum and have already put plans and goals in play that have raised my credit scores already.  My goal is to raise my scores to about 750 in the next 6 months or so, if possible and hopefully EVENTUALLY make it to the 800s!!! Here's hoping.  I really enjoy reading all the information and sharing on this forum and am excited to get into the community here more.  I am curious if others have expereienced similar situations.

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I've been in a similar situation via step-kids, but my wife is a hard worker and a real asset as a partner.  We've been able to thrive together, and that's what it takes.  I would never advocate being single (not saying you are) as a way to do well, but definitely having the right person in your life with like goals and ethics is huge.

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I absolutely know what you mean.  And you are correct, I wouldn't advocate for that either.  We made it work through difficult times while it lasted, and I definitely didn't want it to end at the time, but I have maintained a good relationship with my bonus kiddos and grand kids that came from that relationship.  

Having a good partner is essential!!

This life change has allowed me to learn and work at bettering myself and my situation. Thats all we can do, I believe. 

[visionsdivine]

I would advise any childless man to not get involved with women who have children from previous relationships. I'm not trying to be mean to single mothers, but it's true that their kids will just become a liability with no benefit for the man. She'll expect you to financially support her kids, but you will have no say in raising or disciplining the children since they're *her* kids.

There are plenty of fish in the sea. My current partner is a childless woman ten years younger than me.

[Amwar73mf]

I've been through having to rebuild credit after a relationship, and it's tough, but you're doing great! Next time, make sure she has a well-paying job. LOL

[IsambardPrince]

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@visionsdivine wrote:

I would advise any childless man to not get involved with women who have children from previous relationships. I'm not trying to be mean to single mothers, but it's true that their kids will just become a liability with no benefit for the man. She'll expect you to financially support her kids, but you will have no say in raising or disciplining the children since they're *her* kids.

There are plenty of fish in the sea. My current partner is a childless woman ten years younger than me.

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My mother had an open and notorious affair with a man who was a gigantic loser. She ended up marrying him, and she got custody of me and my brother using a dirty lawyer (who helped her pretty much slander him in open court) when it was her fault for breaking the home.

After we were over there, this guy turned out to be a chain smoking alcoholic. He had been a drill instructor who was only in the military because that was the other option, the first one being going to prison for carjacking. (Well, truckjacking or whatever you want to call pulling a gun on a trucker and stealing a load of tires. Back in the day, apparently, the US court system/government used to do what Putin does now and put all the violent and other undesirables in the military whenever they had some huge war raging that they didn't care if they came back from, only by the time he was in, the Vietnam War was unfortunately over and he unfortunately didn't have to go anywhere and therefore unfortunately lived a while longer, and did what undesirables are known to do. Multiply and multiply, like a cancer. He even had 8 great-grandchildren when he died at 59. Which will happen when they all start having their own at 14 or so. Not a respectable member of the family, almost all of them doing life on the installment plan in the Indiana prison system.)

He beat me several times, severely. One time, I'm sure that he would have murdered me if I hadn't managed to make it outside where there were witnesses who called the police. My brother was the only one that was "off limits", as in if he hurt my brother, my mother would leave him and quit raiding her retirement and working overtime to remodel his house and prop up his cigarettes, booze, and fishing trips, so he left his hands off my brother (who is still living with her, unemployed, and she is almost 70, and he's 31). She ended up divorcing him for reasons that are too horrible to even go into here, but it was him that finally filed for divorce (and then he called her panicked that he was out of money with the same bills and 40% the income).

I did not get a good night's sleep for many, many years, until I heard that he died in 2017 of a heart attack. I watched his funeral, not because I liked him, but because I had to see a dead body to make sure that he was really gone. That's when the almost nightly panic attacks finally ended.

A broken home is not a good home for children. That all happened in Indiana between 1999 and 2003 (at least my part of it....they divorced in 2008). When I heard that New York repealed their Adultery law I was not happy. I think all states should pass one and make it a low level felony.

Even as a single woman, she's never saved two pennies to rub together. After that mess she got married a third time and he wiped her out again, and now she has a tiny pension and a Social Security check, and the co-dependency thing with my brother living there rages on. She's never been able to have normal human interactions, and I think that after witnessing her, I understand why divorced people are more likely to get divorced again, and again, and again, and faster each time.

It's like a sort of cascading failure, where the participants to each marriage are increasingly older and less desirable and are marrying other people that had something wrong leading to their previous divorce. It's like a process of refinement.

So yes, if you've been divorced your odds are not great the second time, and are even worse the third time. There comes a point where you need to give up on the idea.

In my observation there's usually only really two kinds of divorced people, and neither one are good. There's the one that's most directly responsible for the failure of the marriage, and there's the one who stood there and put up with it too long and did nothing to assert themselves.

In a vacuum people can live in this kind of hell, but they shouldn't be allowed to put their children through it without some sort of punishment from the court system.

We don't live in a vacuum. We have laws against carjackings, arson, and bank robberies to stabilize society, and I think the system is just sort of giving up on that mandate.

I would say my mother is probably the typical triple divorcee. She didn't take a gap year (or more) and do any soul searching or introspection, doesn't have any drive for self-improvement. Just bam bam bam, on to the next, and the next one was always worse. After that, she dated and fooled around for a while. One of them was real bad. She ended up dating a guy in a wheelchair (not a dig at the disabled, but tangential to what's coming next) who hobbled out and dragged himself through the dining room to tell her she was making Christmas dinner wrong. Something about too much pepper. His whole family ganged up on her and told her to mind her own business when she was trying to get him to a doctor that cared about him, and then a few years later they messaged her on Facebook saying he died and that she was right and it was Lou Gehrig's Disease.

(Let's see, you were mean to her, chased her away from him, buried him, and then told her she was right? Oh my god.)

Anyway, divorce is always bad. The only people who win are the lawyers. Like the rest of our court system, we all have to play a game called "Let's pretend there's anything honorable or just happening in that building." when we know full well there's not.

And if there's kids, that's another issue, because while divorce isn't the ultimate form of trauma or abuse a child can be put through, it's easily in the top 5, and is usually accompanied by other forms, like what happened to me next. I feel for child victims of divorce. They didn't get to choose their parents, and they are usually not self-sufficient and able to just get up and leave as the situation deteriorates, like the adults are.

Children are not at issue in my marriage. After growing up like I did, I decided that it would be a bad idea to have any children. I'm not financially or emotionally capable of raising a child properly, few are. If you go to Europe and visit a well adjusted country, you see what there's so little of in America. Happy families. Happy families are more likely to happen when you don't have people in debt slavery like what's become normal in America.

[RobDub]

hahaha yes, aint that the truth!