Pay Dirt: My Wife's Racist Mom Moved In...

[minoanmiss]

This might end our marriage.

Dear Pay Dirt,

My wife and I (we’re both women) are dissolving our living situation, and in the long term, we may dissolve our marriage. Her racist, abusive mom is too ill to live independently, but refuses a nursing home, and wants us to move in and care for her. This woman has called me and our teenage son racial slurs and has been homophobic and wretched. We fought and compromised by planning to live separately: My wife will live with her mom in her mom’s house and manage her aides and care, while our son and I will downsize to a smaller apartment.

This is brokered peace at best, and I recognize that even though I love my wife very very much, this might end our marriage. We both work full time, earning about the same. We have a teenage son, a car loan, student loans, and some minor credit card debt. What can I do to keep our current situation financially fair, while still protecting/preparing myself for a potential divorce?

—This Might Be the End

Dear This Might Be the End,

I’m sorry you’re going through this; there’s no easy way to deal with situations like this. I assume you have some way of working out who is responsible for what right now, and if you were to divorce tomorrow, the courts would likely require you to maintain the status quo as much as possible over the course of the process because you have a teenage son. That means no big changes to who pays for what, if you’ve already begun proceedings.

I assume your wife is aware that the marriage might not last as well, and you both want to protect your son, so I think it’s worth having a conversation now about what you think is fair and isn’t about the way you’re currently handling expenses. It also wouldn’t hurt to see a financial planner so that you both have a sense of what your long-term expenses might be and what your options are with regard to your existing debt.

Anything you jointly own gets split up is a matter of state law. If you live in an “equitable distribution” state, assets would be divided according to your individual claims on the property. If you’re in a “community property” state, your marital assets would be split between you. Student loan debt is trickier because who owns what is a matter of when the loans were taken out (before or during the marriage), whether they were jointly consolidated, and so on. But, generally speaking, student loan debt would be the responsibility of the person who took out the loans.

Knowing all of this, you should be able to estimate what your financial situation would look like post-divorce, and that should help you prepare for the possibility.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

1) There was a letter here some months ago from the POV of the spouse with the bigoted parent. This letter breaks my heart all over again. I hope both marriages can survive.

2) this is a legal question, not a financial one: is LW's wife legally required to care for her racist mother? In her situation I'd choose the future over the past, but I wonder what she can do, legally.

3) Ughghhghggh.

[movingfinger]

This is what happens when you kick a can down the road: it explodes when you amble up to it again.

I have so many questions! Are there siblings? Is the couple in a different state? Although enforcement is "rare" according to Nolo's website, it may exist. The couple should talk to a lawyer, and the one with the mother should get some counseling, because there's no way this is a surprise move by dear old Mom. Note that the obligation can be to pay for care, not to move in with Mom and provide care that the offspring may not be qualified to give. (Seems like this is a situation all but guaranteed to set up an abusive situation, although it already is if the mother is pulling this crap.)

I think that divorcing could be a good idea if the couple are in an obligation state and Mom is threatening to litigate. They may be able to shelter assets that way. The ex with the parent should certainly be paying child support, too. But what if they're in a different state? What if they can't afford care and Mom could with Medicaid? They need a lawyer, not an advice columnist.

[melannen]

I'm curious as to what the financial question is. The answer is as if it's a general question about how to prepare finances for a possible (friendly-as-possible) divorce, but you wouldn't need the backstory on the racist mom for that.

Is the main issue how you're going to handle paying for the two separate households? LW, your wife will not be living with her mother, she will be *working* there as a full-time carer, on top of her job. In fact, in a reasonable state, she would be getting a caregiver's allowance (either way, her doing this is saving her mother a lot of money compared to a nursing home or 24 paid carers.) None of her expenses should be coming out of your or your wife's money while she's there. If her mother can afford it, her mother should be covering all of her daily needs plus a substantial amount on top and an extra inheritance share. (If her mother can't afford that, then you should be looking less at how to keep her in her home, and more how to arrange her finances and living situation to make sure her needs can be covered by state benefits.)

Your wife should be able to help cover her son's expenses and sock a lot of her salary into her savings/debt in the meantime. It may seen unfair if she can do that and you can't, but remember she'll be working two fulltime jobs. If you're worried about paying your own rent on the new apartment, talk to her about what would be fair as a child support payment to cover half your son's share of the rent. (Assuming she also considers herself your son's parent, which isn't super clear from the letter?)

Meanwhile, if you do still care about your wife at all, do your best to schedule *frequent* times you can get her out of there to spend time with her actual family doing stuff she likes, because working full time and being a caregiver fulltime is refried hell even if the person you're caring for isn't an abusive racist ass and you aren't worried about losing all your loved ones at once.

[lemonsharks]

I am not-my-probleming my dad onto his own family when he gets to this point for many of the reasons the LW has drawn her line in the sand.

So, no advice from me but I very much wish that LW's wife was capable of telling her racist, homophobic mom that mom doesn't get a choice and will be moving into a nursing home whether she likes it or not. (Tbqh Wifeo should have been preparing for this, including therapeutic work, for years, and so I have no problem calling her spineless (if there's no large inheritance at stake) and/or golddigging (if an unmentioned inheritance is adjacent to/the reason she's insisting on being her mom's caretaker.)

[purlewe]

I think I am confused. unless it was left out of the letter... LW wants to leave her wife bc her wife will not stand up to her racist mother. Is that what I am reading? I mean it is fine if that is what it is (you do you and your own boundaries). But I feel like that wasn't addressed in the letter. And so I am left with a simple feeling of confusion over why it goes from "My wife is going to do something super hard with a racist who is bulldozing her boundaries" to "so I am going to divorce her".

[melannen]

I am fairly sure the unspoken bit is "LW and son are part of the race that MIL is racist against, and LW's wife is not, and LW is not sure she can stay with someone who picked MIL who is racist against her over her."

Alternatively they just aren't sure it's possible to stay together while living separately, in which case that's something they need to work on.

[minoanmiss]

Yeah, this is what I concluded when LW described that Wife's Awful Mom had personally called her and her son slurs. If I were LW I would feel abandoned by my spouse too, and one of the most loving things anyone has ever done for me was when my sweetie confirmed that that would not be their choice if it came to it.

[lethe1]

Yep, this is what I thought too.