My wife (35F) and I (37M) are currently fighting over what to do about her mom (63F) and I need some advice on how to reach some kind of understanding. For three years, my wife and I have been financially supporting her mom. My wife is an only child. This started when my wife’s father passed away and escalated more when her mom had to go on medical disability. At the time, we just wanted to try to help her through a tough time. She had been living on her acreage for decades and desperately wanted to keep living there as long as possible. My wife and I had enough spare cash every month that we didn’t have much trouble doing this.
Soon after this, my wife became pregnant with our son and he was born in June of 2017. Parenthood has been great so far, but it certainly added a lot to our monthly living expenses. Even though money was tight, we still were able to maintain a decent amount of savings and keep our credit card debt low.
In the summer of 2018, my MIL’s car crapped out on her. My MIL had no money to buy a new car so my wife and I had to buy one for her. This was a real turning point for us because we had to use a large chunk of what was left of our savings for a down payment and the new car loan and insurance bill put us close to living paycheck to paycheck. We have been spending about $900 a month on her since then. Lately, we’ve had no choice but to charge any large unexpected expenses to our credit card.
I can’t really stop my wife from spending this money on her mom. Our paychecks still go into our respective personal bank accounts that we had from before we started dating. My wife basically spends whatever is needed on her mom and then spends whatever is left on our bills and her personal expenses. I have no access to her account. I know that she regularly burns through her entire paycheck by the end of each month.
I’ve confronted my wife about our dangerous financial situation multiple times and she is still strongly committed to continuing as usual despite having no plan for how we could get back on a more solid footing financially. She even told me I should divorce her if I don’t want to deal with this anymore. It seems that she desperately wants to be a hero for her mom and prevent her from feeling any sort of hardship ever again.
What’s particularly frustrating is that the math doesn’t really add up when it comes to my MIL’s finances. Despite us paying all of her bills, my MIL is always short on cash. Somehow, she’s blowing through about $1100 a month and doesn’t have much to show for it. This is in rural Iowa so that amount of money should be way more than enough for food and basic necessities for one person. She has a few pets, but I don’t see how she could be spending more that $250 a month on them. I’m not allowed to question this though. It just leads to a fight with my wife.
At this point, I’m just done emotionally with this situation. I’d estimate that we’ve spent about $25,000 on my MIL. I’m tired of not having any money. I’m tired of being expected to do grunt work around my MIL’s acreage. I’m tired of not having any time and money to work on my own house. I’m extremely frustrated with my MIL’s reluctance to make any necessary lifestyle changes. I’m angry at my wife’s insistence on enabling this behavior.
I could really use your help Reddit! How can I get my wife to see that we can’t continue to throw all our spare cash at her mom? How can I convince my MIL that she needs to start living within her means even if it means giving up her dream of living on her acreage?
TL:DR - My wife if spending almost all of our spare cash on her mom and I don’t have a good way to stop her.
Submitted July 26, 2019 at 09:16PM by average_ITguy https://ift.tt/2ZeaH5n
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