Dear Moneyist,
I am panicked and feeling boxed in and would like an outside opinion.
My husband and I got married in 2013 with a combined $193,000 in debt. The debt consisted of credit cards, medical bills, wedding debt and car notes, with student loans being the biggest debt between us.
In January of 2014, we decided we would follow the debt-snowball method to get out of debt. At 31 and 34 years old, respectively, and no real urge for children at that time, we decided to focus on working and paying off the debt. It was such a huge amount that we didn’t discuss our thoughts and wishes for our life and money after the debt. We focused on the week-to-week, month-to-month process of getting through the debt.
‘In six months we’ve been able to save $35,000, and the current plan is to keep living below our means, working and saving. Working and saving.’
Our combined income has ranged from $65,000 a year in the earlier years to somewhere in the $130,000 to $140,000 range, depending on bonuses received and overtime worked in a year.
Flash forward to this past February. After years of budgeting, cash-only spending, tension, intermittent spurts of excitement at what we were accomplishing, lots of overtime, resentment, driving really old cars, no Christmases, and a second job for a short while, we made our last debt payment. It felt amazing and I was proud of what we had managed to accomplish.
In the immediate two months following, we saved up a nine-month emergency fund and started saving the money left over from our monthly income after our cost-of-living expenses were paid. In six months we’ve been able to save $35,000, and the current plan is to keep living below our means, working and saving. Working and saving.
So why am I so stressed and panicking?
Because now that we have no debt, I have enough clarity to realize that we don’t have much of a life either. We don’t have children, we don’t travel, we don’t see or experience many new things, and we don’t have much of a social circle at all. Now at 37, I hear my “biological clock” pounding in my head and feel like time is running out.
‘Where in all this saving are fun memories made? Where in all this working do children fit into the equation?’
Before you jump on me and say “37 is still young,” consider this. My husband is 40, says he doesn’t want to have children and is perfectly content working forever and saving at a really slow rate. Also, he says he never wants to have debt again. So he’d rather save and pay for upgraded cars with cash (not too much of a huge deal), save and purchase a home with cash (we are still renters), save and pay for potential real-estate investment properties with cash, and then save and pay for renovations with cash.
When I hear him say these things, my head wants to explode. Saving up those huge amounts of cash will take years and years and years. And when one thing is finished, he will have to continue working huge amounts of overtime. He swears that if I “just get a second job,” we could do it.
Where in all this working is our quality of life? Where in all this saving are fun memories made? Where in all this working do children fit into the equation? I am now of the mindset that to make money, you need to spend money. And at our ages, I feel we need to be aggressive in doing so to make up for all the years we spent getting out of debt.
‘These are differences of views on life and money — differences that might have stopped us from getting married, had we been able to see beyond the debt.’
I want to start investing in small house flips and rental properties even before we purchase a primary home, because I feel like we are in a prime opportunity to grow our money and get good returns. But he swears time is of no consequence and would rather we keep our life as small as possible, and just continue to work our jobs and save our paychecks.
I’ve gotten to the point that I’m anxious about spending money at all because whatever we spend, it means it’s going to take even longer to save up enough to do anything in this long list with cash. I literally feel like we don’t have money because all our money is spoken for with all these high-cost life items on this list.
These are differences of views on life and money — differences that might have stopped us from getting married, had we been able to see beyond the debt. They are factors that would have called our compatibility into serious question.
So what do I do? I feel strongly about not feeling like I have to live paycheck to paycheck for the rest of my life. I feel strongly about the need to “grow our money.” And I feel strongly about time being against us, and wanting to be a parent. What other decent return investments are out there to consider that wouldn’t require us to take out mortgage loans? How do we meet in the middle on any of this so we can stay together?
Debt-free, panicked and scared with the clock ticking in Richmond, Va.
Dear Debt-free,
First of all, congratulations on tackling this debt together. It’s a huge achievement and it says a lot for your relationship and your ability to commit to something together. It also takes not a small amount of discipline to resist temptation to go down the rabbit hole that is eBay EBAY, +1.47% and Amazon AMZN, +0.93%. I take my many hats off to you both.
Your life should get bigger — not smaller — when you are in a relationship.
On the one hand, paying off this debt brought you together and gave you a joint goal. It’s probably one of the best things you can do with a partner. On the other, it makes me wonder whether your husband is a man of extremes, whether he has acquired a taste for a frugal lifestyle (nothing wrong with that) or whether he was always living for tomorrow.
Decide what issues are a white or red line for you. Some couples can compromise on children and decide together that they want to be together so much that — for the partner who wants kids — it’s a sacrifice worth making. From what you say, this is a red-line issue. You are looking ahead to the rest of your life, and it seems like not having a family would be a big regret.
Most people run a mile from a partner who spends money like crazy and/or has a lot of debt. I can understand anyone being cautious about that. This man wrote to me recently to ask whether people with $1 million in collective debt should get together. Financial stability can be useful for people using dating sites like Tinder, Bumble, OKCupid and Match.com MTCH, +2.47%.
‘Divorce is like going through a terrible recession.’
In fact, similar credit scores can help predict trustworthiness and are “highly predictive” of whether couples stay together in the long term, according to a 2015 paper by researchers at UCLA, the Brookings Institution and Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C. “Credit scores reveal an individual’s relationship skill and level of commitment,” they wrote.
Getting married is expensive, but divorce can be even more costly to a person’s financial and emotional health. Or as Sterling Neblett, a founding partner of Centurion Wealth Management in McLean, Va., told MarketWatch, “Divorce is like going through a terrible recession. Often couples must split their assets in half, which feels like losing 50% of your wealth.” Best to decide sooner rather than later.
There are other red (or amber) flags in your story that give me pause. I don’t believe we choose a partner to maintain our single lifestyles. There’s nothing nicer than spending downtime with a partner and enjoying the peace and serenity of domestic bliss, staying home on Saturday night, riding the train or bus to work together and creating your own world.
Relationships take work, but they should not be a 24/7 heavy lift. Your life should get bigger — not smaller — when you are in a relationship. Here are three questions to ask if you are contemplating spending the rest of your life with someone: 1. Do we laugh a lot? 2. Do we laugh a lot? 3. Do we laugh a lot? (It’s my romantic version of that real-estate mantra: “Location, location, location.”)
Bottom line: Relationships should make you happy. If you’re not, there’s something wrong. You can love a person, but not like them. You can like a person, but not love the way they live their life. The combinations are endless, but love is not always enough to keep two people together. Figure out those red lines now. It does appear that you have several irreconcilable differences.
I suspect you would have paid off these debts with or without your boyfriend, but doing it together helped give you both courage. Sometimes, people seek out in others what they don’t believe they have in themselves. But the differences can be too much to make a long-term relationship work. As my dear Irish mother would say: “Opposites DON’T attract!”
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