We have been married for 2 and a half years. In this time he has depleated our savings for his daughters disasterious wedding that ended after 4 months and never even told me. Lied about being in major debt. Bought tickets to football games to take his son without telling me. Went to Texas to see his grandkids in Oct that are gonna be home in Dec, that I refused to charge because in my opinion we should of saved for this. Promised me we would go to wine festival but bought football tickets instead without telling me I learned from his daughter. I just got a new job and needed to buy clothes to wear as I wore scrubs in my previous job. No offer of help, no offer to help with tickets to join him in texas but sends money to daughter who is capable of working but likes to party more as I should feel sorry for her as her marriage crumbled. Well it crumbled as she wanted to be the party girl more than a wife. I feel as if this should be our time, instead he is constantly doing for his kids and there is no time or money for us. Lots more I could add but this is the issue at the moment

Hi ladyrwb, welcome to Marriage Builders. The basic issue I see here is that your husband has very independent behavior and he makes unilateral decisions without telling you. As you have discovered, that is a disaster for marriage. It will cause you to fall out of love with him. I would get the book Lovebusters and His Needs, Her Needs and follow the program in there. If you use the lessons in there, you and your husband can learn the necessary skills to negotiate all of your decisions together and eliminate lovebusters.

Here is a good article that explains it: How to Create Your Own Plan to Resolve Conflicts and Restore Love to Your Marriage

Thanks for the imput but I'm really not sure if I even want to stay married. I'm finding that I enjoy my time alone and the peace associated with the quiet inviting. It's so very close to hatred for my husband and his kids. I just don't ever see anything changing.

Is there anything we can help you with, ladyrwb?

What can you do when I have tried to talk to him about this, nothing, so I write him letters and he tells me he is not responding to nonsence. All we do is argue all the time. When he cleaned out the savings without telling me I felt like he had stolen from me and I can't get over it. And he thinks he done the right thing. His daughter knows more about him than I do. Recently she has been very disrespectful to me. He says she is just stressed. Well I lost my mother, started a new job and he was so busy pampering her that I was told to get over it all and deal with it that i am a grown woman and should be able to handle my own problems. His daughter is 24 which i think is also grown and should not be telling her father all her personal business. It is like they are married. She comes first in every situation and he tells me I get all bent out of shape every time he wants to do something with or for his family. I tried in the beginning to treat his kids as my own and it was all thrown back in my face with snide remarks and disapproval from them so I stopped. Now i'm the bad guy. So if there is no support, no understanding, no one to lean on when there is a crisis and nothing that is ours. I feel like we are just roommates and I hate it. It has gotten to the point that I can't even stand to look at him. So if he refuses to talk about anything and continues to just do what he wants without any reguard to me then why bother.

What can we help you with?

ladyrwb, I can sympathize with your situation. I am in a second marriage and my H has adult children that are also very entitled. My advice would be to change your financial arrangement.

This is what I would recommend. You each have an individual bank account that your paycheck goes into. You have one joint account that you each contribute to that is used for joint expenses. Each month you each move a defined amount of money into the joint account based on a percent of your income. For example, if your joint monthly expenses are $2000 and you make the same amount you would both put $1000 each in the joint account. If you make $3000 a month and your H makes $2000 a month, you would put in $1200 a month (3000/5000 x $2000) and your H would put in $800 (2000/5000 x $2000). The joint account is used for household expenses such as mortgage payments, utilities, food, etc. and expenses for the two of you such as eating out or going to activities together. Anything for his children comes out of his individual account: football tickets, gifts, etc. Your clothes come out of your individual account.

This will stop you from being resentful when he throws away money on his children as it is his money and not yours. Please consider separating expenses this way as it is the standard way of combining finances in this kind of a situation. In any case, it gives you the ability to save up money for a safety net for yourself.

I can sympathize with the anger at entitled adult stepchildren. My H has a 22 yr old daughter and a 29 yr old daughter who always expect their father to rescue them. (I've seen them literally hold their hand out to ask for meney. Ugh.) Luckily for me, he realizes that he would only be hurting them if he continued to "save" them. I am responsible for paying for my two minor children and paying for their college costs. I get some child support from my ex and that goes into my individual account. I do not include the child support in calculating the percent income amount as it is considered my children's money, and is not my wages.

This method is not perfect but it helps a lot. There are several good books out there that talk about financial issues with second marriages that can help also.

This method does not seem to fit with the spirit of MB, which is to build an interdependent, integrated marriage. That should involve integration of everything, including money.

Separating accounts so that each spouse can spend individually without consulting the other on contentious matters is not in the spirit of POJA or MB. In fact, such a method invites more independent behaviour, not an end to it. It also does not stop the H paying the children out of the joint account whenever he wants to. If he is independently-minded enough to do what he is doing now, he may well just continue with that, unless independent behaviour is brought to an end, by agreement.

What would stop this level of discord is to POJA an agreement on what is legitimate spending of the entire household budget, and then each spouse committing to that agreement. What seems to be missing at the heart of this marriage is POJA over the place of the grown-up (step)kids in this new marriage. There may well be lack of POJA over other things, too.

The marriage needs to be redefined, with POJA at its heart. Neither spouse should take decisions without getting the enthusiastic agreement of the other. Neither spouse should proceed with behaviour that they know upsets the other. If they proceed with a lack of regard for the other, they are not creating a relationship of extraordinary care and protection.

SugarCane, a second marriage cannot be treated financially like a first marriage. There are so many issues like inheritances and college educations that are issues with stepchildren and are not issues when all children are joint.

If your H starts paying the children out of the joint account without your approval, then that is a problem. But the idea is to POJA a way to separate these accounts and then have a system that you can each be enthusiastic about.

In any case, ladyrwb has a way to protect herself financially in case she has to go to Plan B at some point.

That is incredibly disrespectful of him.

What can you do? Have you showed him this program?

My understanding of Dr Harley's writings is that all marriages should be guided by POJA, and that is really my point here. Apart from inheritance, what separate money needs to be created for a 24 year-old daughter? Whatever that is, is should be POJAd.

Is your advice to create separate bank accounts in line with MB advice?

The way I see it, the issue is not really separate money for (step) kids. The issue is this H's independent, hurtful and destructive behaviour. I think that needs to be solved, if ladyrwb has the patience to work this through.

Violet, do you have a citation for this? Because Dr Harley told my husband and I to MERGE our bank accounts. This is our second marriage and we both have children from previous marriages. Having joint bank accounts is a key factor in creating integrated lifestyles. He did not advise having separate bank accounts.

So if you can please provide a link showing he has changed this advise, I would appreciate it.

A reminder to posters to help this poster with Marriage Builders concepts. If you can do that, feel free to help. If not, we ask that you refrain from posting. Posters come here to learn about Marriage Builders, not our own personal philosophies.

Any questions, shoot me an email.

Thank you, Fireproof

I never claimed that Dr Harley advised this. Many other experts have recommended this approach, however.

In ladyrwb's case, they clearly have very different views about how to spend money, and she is being left very vulnerable. My point was that this approach works for many couples and is an option. If they both agree to have separate accounts that they can use for these types of expenses, I do not see that this goes against POJA. You POJA what expenses come out of which pot. You POJA what purchases need prior discussion and what do not. In my case, we agreed that we can each spend up to $50 from the joint account without checking with the other first and we agreed what expenses would come from what account. There is no IB because we agreed on the rules.

I am sorry that my advice is being reacted to so negatively. I did not consider it to be against MB at all. I will not post again.

That advise DOES go against everything taught at Marriage Builders, because it leads to segregated and incompatible lifestyles. When my H and I had separate bank accounts it caused enormous conflict in our marriage. That evaporated when we merged our accounts and began using the POJA.

Couples need to merge their lives and one of the main ways is to have joint finances. The POJA does not apply to decisions that are not good for marriages.

One of the biggest problems in 2nd marriages is independent behavior. As such, these marriages are MORE vulnerable than 1st marriages (85% divorce rate) so having a merged lifestyle is even more important. The solution to conflicts about money is to merge accounts and become skilled at using the POJA in making spending decisions.

My H and I learned this at our MB weekend, and merging our bank accounts and learning to use the POJA alleviated a lot of the tension in our marriage.

The problem is that I have struggled to keep a roof over my head. I own our home that me and my 1st husband occupied. I also have established a savings account and other profiting accounts that I scarfs iced to obtain. My husband is not aware of these accounts as he is so in debt and uses credit for everything. We talked about this before marriage and he lied as to his financial status. He told mr he had no debt and that his daughter was fuffly responsibility for all her debt. After marriage he is over 1700,00 in debt with credit cards and has a loan for his daughters expenses for over 1500.00. My kids are totally independent, as that is how they were raised. They ask for nothing. His kids are always expecting him to pay for all dinners we have together and truly just about everything . His grandkids are cheerleaders and he sent full sponsorship which he could not afford, had to charge. He wanted to visit grandkids and I refused as we had to charge and my thoughts were we should of talked about this , planned and saved. I feel like I am the responsible one and he is hanging by my shirt tales knowing I am responsible. We had agreed that we would buy another ho,e that would be ours. After marriage I was informed we needed to stay in my home as it was economically the right thing. So many misconceptions that I am at a lost as to how to deal. I have sacrificed so much to keep this home and he has lived with his mother giving his kids everything they want and more and now he is living comfortably at my expense and I just cant seem to let it go and move on.

Can you see now that this is not the way that your marriage should have started out? There has been no honesty about finances from either of you. You say that your H lied about his financial status, but if I understand correctly, so did you.

I am not saying that you should give your H access to all your assets now, because form the sound of it, they would vanish into the hole that is his debts. I am saying that you cannot go on with this vastly different approach to assets and the support of adult children. If you want to continue in this marriage, your finances will have to be treated as one, and the debts and spending on adult children will need to be POJAd.

There can be no such thing a "my money" and "his money" in an MB marriage. That goes against the interdependence that is at the heart of MB.

I told him about this program and we each answered the questionaire on emotional needs. He agreed to try to work on things as did I. But that was the end of the conversation and things are continuing as normal. He seems to think, as always, that since we agreed to work on things that all is good again. NOT...it is all still the same. I feel so very vulnerable financially. My self esteem has dropped to zero after finding out from the questionare that looks are extremely important to him.

Did you tell him this? What did he say?