I’m posting this here anonymously because I promised my mom I wouldn’t tell anyone we know about what’s going on, but I needed to get it off my chest. I figured you guys would be interested in this story as an example of why you should always pay attention to financial red flags (and probably run a background check) before getting married. Any advice you have after reading it would be appreciated.
Okay, here goes:
Six years ago, my mom (currently 43) married my stepdad (50-something) after dating for almost a year. At that point she was a single mom who had just bought a small house with a public school teacher’s salary, and he was in a managerial position in a car dealership making around $200k a year. He assured my mom he had prepaid for their trip to a beach wedding destination, but once they arrived there he told her that he didn’t bring a card with him and asked her to pay for things. Things only escalated from there.
He encouraged her to have the checks from her job deposited in a joint account that only he has the password to. At one point she asked him for the password to it so she could see what was going on in the account, but he changed it days after giving it to her so she was locked out again.
He makes irresponsible purchases constantly under my mom’s name or putting my mom as a cosigner. My stepdad bought three $1.5k purebred dogs, a couple of sports cars bought new that have depreciated and accumulated interest so that the debt is worth more than they are, thousands of dollars worth of expensive and unnecessary sunglasses, hunting equipment, guns, boots, golfing supplies, a motorcycle, a four-wheeler, plane tickets and tickets to major league sports games, etc...and many of these purchases were under my mom’s name and credit. In the past four years we also went from living in the small house my mom bought to a McMansion worth half a million dollars.
There have been red flags for a long time that my mom didn’t tell me about and tried to ignore. Bills would show up in the mail unpaid and my stepdad would insist that he paid them, but our water and electricity would go out every few months. My stepdad would ask my mom (again, a public school teacher!) to pay for his golf trips and his kids’ plane tickets to come visit, and apparently frequently pulled that “oh, I forgot to bring my credit card” trick and never paid her back. He also always only paid for things he wanted—cool expensive stuff he could show off to people—and has never been generous to other people.
He moved out of state about a year ago for a new job at another car dealership that supposedly makes him $400k a year, and he’s been renting out a fancy apartment in the expensive downtown area of a city. My mom and I still live at the house they bought together.
In the past month my mom caught my stepdad cheating, and new information has come to light. Apparently he has been using the money that his boss gave him to fly home every other weekend to instead pay for flights for his mistress, fancy gifts for his mistress, etc. He has also—and this is actual criminal fraud—just bought a stupid, flashy $90k truck for himself and forged my mom’s signature as a co-signer without telling her and while she was physically in another state. His mistress is the loan officer.
I graduated from high school a month ago. The night of my graduation, when our extended family was at the house, he paid to have his mistress fly over first class from a city that’s only a three hour drive away to stay at an expensive resort hotel a short distance away from our house and snuck off to be with her while everyone else was asleep. It makes me sick to think about, not just because we trusted him and it was supposed to be a time for family, but also because he’s so willing to buy indulgent things for himself while my mom and I economize. We recently drove across Texas and back in one day to go to the orientation at my college because my mom didn’t want to pay for a hotel, and meanwhile my stepdad has been spending money on things like this.
And, once my mom did more digging with an online background check service, she found several more things: he apparently had a bankruptcy only months before they met that he never told her about, he doesn’t actually pay taxes to the IRS and so now owes in the ballpark of $80,000, he has (without her consent) put a lean on the house that she owned before their marriage in order to pay for his own tax debt from before they were married, and he opened thousands and thousands of dollars worth of credit cards in my mom’s name without her knowledge and maxed them all out. It’s shady as hell.
Yesterday my mom blocked his number from her phone and discovered that there were five other blocked numbers. She thought this was weird, because his is the first number she’s ever blocked. When she looked up who the numbers belonged to, they were all debt collectors.
Now my mom is two years away from what she had expected would be her retirement date from teaching, and she just discovered that she has—sickeningly—$800,000 of debt that she didn’t know about.
I don’t understand how my mom let my stepdad’s irresponsible spending go on for so long without asking more questions or divorcing him, but ultimately he is the asshole who racked up an obscene amount of debt and took advantage of a genuinely good person who wanted to believe the best in him. I guess we all wanted to trust that he made enough money to eventually pay for the things he was buying (even if he would have nothing left over for retirement), and he’s spent his life trying to convince people that he’s worth more than he is, so he was pretty successful.
My mom is currently doing what she can to separate from him. Today she opened a separate checking account that all of her checks going forward will be deposited into and she made an appointment to speak with a divorce attorney about what she can do going forward.
Thank God she at least has a teacher retirement plan that he’s not able to touch.
Also, on a personal level (and I get that this is selfish), it pisses me off that he was lying to everyone about his financial situation when I was filling out my FAFSA, so I wasn’t eligible for any need-based financial aid and I also can’t in good conscience ask for any parental financial support. I’m basically on my own. My mom definitely will have to deal with most of the fallout from this and I feel guilty that I’m thinking about how this affects me, but I can’t help feeling betrayed that none of the adults in my life cared enough about me to be concerned about how I would pay for college while at the same time spending ridiculous amounts of money on things that were totally unnecessary.
Sorry this got so long! Thank you for reading if you made it this far. I would love to hear any suggestions about things I can do to help my mom salvage her financial situation.
Submitted June 24, 2019 at 07:48PM by throwaway72419 http://bit.ly/2Lgm0Wv
