My husband and I have been married for almost a year. Before we got married he had perfect credit, and so was able to get a credit card with a limit of $16,000 shortly after we financed a used vehicle. We used it to pay for some stuff for our wedding, but he kept me in the dark, saying that we could afford everything. As far as I knew, everything that we used that card to pay for would have totalled maybe $8000.
Flash forward six months later, and suddenly he tells me that he can't pay for anything with it anymore because it is maxed out. Baffled, I asked what he had used it for, and he said there was nothing out of the ordinary on it, that I had underestimated how much everything cost. (This was shortly after we got married)
Being newlyweds, and with me having a little debt of my own from before we got married that I have been working toward paying off, we had been making the minimum payments on his card. I thought that the balance was going down, slowly but surely, and that once my debt was paid we could concentrate on his. My husband would never let me look at the balance of his credit card for myself, but would give me a rough estimate of what was on it.
Yesterday, however, I got fed up and decided to take his card in the middle of the night and look up the balance myself. To my shock, it was nearly $17,000. As it turned out, the payments we were making had been only enough to cover the balance and the insurance for the card, but not to pay down the debt itself. For almost a year our money has been getting nowhere. Furthermore, my husband had lied about what was on the card. My estimate about what we had bought together had been correct, and he bought a bunch of stuff with it without me knowing.
My husband does have a small RRSP totalling $13,000. Should we use that to pay part of our debt, or leave it alone and work to pay it off?
Right now I'm shocked and angry, and just wondering how to go from here. Obviously, there are some relationship issues that need to be worked through, but I am asking for advice with our debt. I want to pay it down but it seems like a mountain that we'll never get through. Any advice would be helpful!
Some background info: My husband works full time and has $17,000 in debt. He does have $13,000 in RRSPs. I am in school full time right now, but have only 6 more courses to complete after this term. I have about $7,000 of debt, plus some student loans to be paid once I have graduated. We definitely don't live beyond our means, yet our budget is tight at the moment.
Submitted February 17, 2017 at 11:19AM by hgolinowski http://ift.tt/2kRz2d0
