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

[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.