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]

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.