Background information: My husband and I have been together for 7 years, married for 4, and have a 2 year old daughter. My parents (55 F and 56M) live with us, providing childcare for our daughter.
I have a joint account with my husband who manages all of our finances - more out of convenience for me, and also neuroticism for him. We are both financially similar - our goal is to live in a way that we will have the power to “retire early,” neither of us does big splurges, and we share similar values. He has 270k student loans whereas I technically have none.
My parents paid for my college and medical school and I always told them I would eventually pay them back- my plan was to give 1K per month (hubby currently pays 3K / mo on his loans), but I am currently giving my parents nothing since my spouse says we financially cannot afford it now. My parents have never stressed about it and currently live with us and provide childcare for our toddler.
More background: I am an employed internist; he is a physician with his own outpatient practice/ small business. I earn about 200K/yr and he probably earns similar, maybe 20K more. All was fine until tonight, when I purchased some furniture and he commented that we “hemorrhage money.” Yes, there’s certainly more expense recently due to a new home, but I don’t see how my small, sporadic purchases are over the top. I have no expensive habits and very rarely spend money on myself. Our biggest non-mortgage, non-loan, non-bill spending is to Costco, where we do our shopping together. I tried to rationalize by listing current expenses in broad categories, stating that eventually I still hope to pay my parents back for my medical education- then he argued that it’s crazy that they’d ever take money from me, since that is “fleecing me.” He falsely argued they just gifted my sister money (she verified that this is incorrect). To him, it is enough that my parents live with us and he states we will care for them in their old age anyway.
I feel affronted and angry. I have this sense that this is MY money and my desire to give something back to my parents is NOT that unreasonable. I always told them I would, and they always said “only what you want and can, and at least it will always be interest free.”
I have for too long not even done anything with my/our finances. I don’t even know how to log onto our accounts! I feel annoyed with myself for blindly trusting my husband. We jointly pay off his medical school loans every month, while my informal loans to my parents are on the backburner. I also feel sad about this too because my parents prioritized my education over saving for their own retirement. My husband also occasionally makes passive aggressive remarks about how I spend money.
What next? Separate accounts? My worry with this is that he will perceive it as a sundering of our unified front - and other than being a bit tight with money, he is a good man and I love him. I feel pretty lost, freaked out over the logistics of how to even deal with separate accounts, etc. I also get scared when I see stories of divorce, which revolve into thinking of whether I am financially getting taken advantage of. Any thoughts, advice appreciated. :(
TL;DR: I want to pay my parents back for putting me through college and medical school, and my husband thinks that my parents are "fleecing me."
Submitted November 14, 2018 at 06:47PM by throwawaymoney89 https://ift.tt/2Dku2dc
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