Background:
I (23F) have been dating my bf (29M) for 4 years. Although we both came from a poor background, we had very different perspectives on personal finance. I’ve always been intentional with my money. I budget, save, and invest. Meanwhile, he was living paycheck to paycheck despite making a 70k salary with low expenses. He’s a big believer on traveling and enjoying your youth, and not waiting until you’re too old to live life.
He picked up various hobbies during the time I’ve known him, from surfing, to paragliding, to fixing cars. Every time he has a new hobby, he spends every waking minute reading, watching, or doing said hobby. He would dedicate all his time, energy and money to this new hobby until he finds a new one.
Now the problem:
A year ago, I encouraged him to learn about the stock market and start investing in some low risk index funds, like the s&p500. I advised him to set aside some of his income every month to consistently grow his account. I thought it would be a good way to get him interested in his personal finances and incentivize him to save as it was more exciting than just a savings account.
The next day, i saw that he was on YouTube watching a day trading course. I advised against it and said it was not a great idea, which he agreed and said he was just watching. He continues to go through the course and by next month, I find out that he’s taken out 70k in loans and maxed out all his credit cards to day trade. He already had credit card debt from his previous hobbies. He said he needed a lot of capital in order to be able to make good returns and could outperform the interest rates. I was absolutely horrified but he was so tunnel visioned at this point, nothing I said was getting to him. Whenever I tried to convince him to just pay back the loans, He would get upset and tell me I was being unsupportive and negative. He would also get angry if I referred to day trading as his hobby and not his job.
Over the next year, he’s made a lot of money and also, lost a lot of money. He would have good weeks where he made thousands of dollars, just for it all to be wiped out by one bad trade. At this point he’s lost 50%, about 50k. He recently had lots of bills come up, like taxes and insurance. I told him to withdraw some money from his trading account to pay off some debt but he refuses because the market is down right now and he doesn’t want to sell at a loss. He gets low account balance notifications every other day. This man literally has $100 in his checking account. And his credit cards are all maxed out. Every dollar he makes from his day job goes straight to his loan payments, and he can barely afford to pay his bills.
I literally don’t know what to do. I’ve tried to help him but he won’t listen. I send him money Everytime he’s short on bills or his account going into overdraft but I don’t want to enable his behavior. I also started a good job recently and now make twice his salary and want to go to dinners and vacations but he’s so broke from his trading addiction. I don’t mind paying but I also think it’s unfair to support him when he’s in this mess bc of his poor deductions despite me trying to stop him
Tl;dr boyfriend’s day trading addiction caused him to take out 100k loan (including maxing out credit cards) and is now drowning in debt. He’s since then, lost half of it, but is still unwilling to withdraw money.
Submitted April 19, 2022 at 11:31PM by Think-Let8812 https://ift.tt/C7GLUJ0
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