the money issue
dh and me have been married for almost twenty years. we married while the skids were in preschool.
i was not the home wrecker but have been forced to feel like one since we married. bm found a lover and dumped dh to marry him. the skids are mini wifes and even more so since they are adults.
dh is always crabbing that we have no money and how our friends have comfortable lifes. "joan and tim have this." "ann and ralph have that." "andy and sue take vacations all the time." etc etc.
i point out the one thing they all have in common - no children. they have the money and the life style so they can buy what they want, travel when they please and are not shelling out money for children who wont grow up and get a job. ditto for in laws who are begging.
dh clearly did not see the connection.
You need to find some friends
You need to find some friends that are poor.
Just joking. But in a way I'm serious. It's hard when you are surrounded by people who are always doing things you can't afford to do.
When I was 22, I had a job at a law firm as a legal assistant. All the other legal assistants were in their early 20s as well, but I was the only one that was already married with a young baby. The other girls all still lived at home.
They would buy their lunch every day, while I was brown bagging it. The other girls would come back from their lunch break with bags of clothes they had bought, or get their hair done. While I was worrying how we were going to pay rent that month, the biggest worry they had was what color nail polish they were going to get their nails done in.
While it wasn't the only reason I left that job, it was great to leave that place and get a job where my co-workers had "real" lives and "real" people problems. (Not saying they didn't have real problems, just it was easier to deal with my life when I was around other people that dealt with the same things I did.)
Yes, with husbands you have
Yes, with husbands you have to be strait forward. The little hints will never set in. Plus he needs to realize that by still paying for everything for them he isn't doing them any favors.
dh still doles out money
dh still doles out money because he is still on the guilt trip and hungry for the skids' aaproval. when they were teens they never called him and then called him a whiner when he complained about it. they call and text him every day now, and also go out to dinner with him (without me) once a week. on the tit is right. dh sees nothing wrong with this.
and i have pointed out that he spends a lot of money on the in laws and skids. we cant take vacations because of this or buy nice things for the home.
Why don't you save some of
Why don't you save some of your money and take a trip by yourself or with a friend?? If you show your DH that YOU can save enough to go on even a weekend getaway, maybe that will help get the point across.
We lived through the miss
We lived through the miss alignment in life stage with our friends and some family too. We still do.
My bride is the product of abject rural poverty in the US. My ILs are for the most part minimum wage farm laborers. My FIL is a low wage farm laborer who is struggling with his health due to poor life choices. My MIL is a low wage customer svs clerk for the local newspaper. My x2 BILs are farm laborers though one has been in the National Guard for 12ish years and has at least the hope a decent retirement through the USANG and my SIL is a low wage assembler at the local bbq manufacturer’s sheet metal shop.
My bride on the other hand is a multiple degree holder and an CPA. She graduated with a dual major BS with honors and an MBA with honors. She struggles with how impoverished her family is and it breaks her heart when they rant about how privileged and “lucky” my wife is and how selfish we are for not sharing/helping. We are not idiots and learned long ago that giving them any negotiable gift is tantamount to flushing money down the toilet. So we don’t give them money or anything they can return for money. About all they can do to get money from us is to sell a gift we give them for pennies on the dollar.
Even when we have helped by paying a utility bill directly for them instead of using that freed up money to catch up on other bills they will go get a tattoo of pay their pool league or beer club dues.
Our misalignment with our friends has been going on for a very long time. While our friends were all new college graduates buying sports cars, boats, and nice houses on high engineering incomes for new graduates at that time, my bride and I were raising a young child, working on grad school, and eliminating school debt. Now 20 years after graduating with my engineering degree our kid is raised, we are debt free (except for the mortgage which we should have paid off in about 7 years), prospering and most of our friends who used to give us crap for not having fun back in the old days are buried in debt, starting to put multiple kids through college and get sensitive when we invite them to join us on a nice vacation or even to meet us for dinner. We are driving the new sports cars and they are driving the beater mini-vans. We have very close relationships with many of our college friends and we travel to visit them frequently but it is our more recent friends who are aligned with us as far as stage of life that we do things with for the most part. Many are a decade older than we are but they are nice people can do the things we enjoy at this stage of our lives.
If your DH wants to change your financial situation and enjoy some of the fruits of your joint labor he needs to change his behavior. As others have said he needs clarity which can only come with a very direct barring of his ass in regards to CS and giving money to family members to lacking in character to earn it for themselves.
It can be difficult to let people we love suffer the consequences of their poor decisions (family). It can be difficult to let the idiot decisions of an X impact our kids. But these are major learning moments and they need to learn. Learn or feel. Sadly far to many never learn and always feel the consequences of their behiors.