My Boyfriend Wants Me to Completely Float His Kids. But They Can’t Know We’re Together.
Pay Dirt is Slate’s money advice column. Have a question? Send it to Athena and Elizabeth here. (It’s anonymous!)
Dear Pay Dirt,
My boyfriend and I are at an impasse. I own my own place and he was trying to get back on his feet after the divorce. He has two small kids. My place is small and not child-friendly. He pays no rent and half of the other bills but thinks it is completely OK for me to give up my home office for a bedroom for his kids. And pay for all the new furniture. And help with other expenses like private tutoring and sports activities.
The thing is I can only introduce myself as dad’s “friend” and we need to sleep separately when/if the kids come over. We aren’t even talking about marriage. Honestly, I think that he should give up overnight visits and stick to seeing his kids in public places. Even just picking them up and dropping them off every day seems more doable than this. However, he is a great and devoted dad. When his eyes are on me, I feel like the most special woman in the world. He has had a hard time of it. Am I wearing rose-colored glasses here?
—Rose Red
Dear Rose Red,
You don’t owe your boyfriend and his kids anything. You did not agree to support them. It is your boyfriend’s responsibility to figure out how to make physical room for his children and to pay for their expenses, not yours.
It’s understandable that you’d want to help him get back on his feet, since you care about him, but part of being a great and devoted dad is taking care of your own kids, financially and otherwise. Right now he is trying to outsource an important part of that to you while offering you no real relationship with the children or guarantees of commitment. I think you just have to say no.
It’s also understandable that he wants overnight visits with his kids, but that doesn’t obligate you to host. Your place is not his place, and he should not be asking you to modify it when he’s not even paying rent. He needs to figure out how and where to see his kids, and how to pay for private tutoring and sports and other things himself. It is bizarre and inappropriate that he is asking you to help support his children when you are not their mother and have no real relationship with them. He needs to figure out how he is going to make it work, and his plan cannot be you financially supporting his kids. He should be doing that.
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Dear Pay Dirt,
My only sister, my spouse, and I are talking about purchasing a vacation property together that we would all use as well to rent out to offset costs. We live in a part of the country where many families have a cabin that has been passed down through the generations, and we are looking to create that for our own family. We know that business dealings with relatives can be risky, so I’m writing to ask if you have any advice on what topics to discuss that might get missed in all the excitement and how to keep our candid, loving relationship intact. I love this idea in theory but want to look at it objectively.
—Vacation Ready But Objective
Dear Vacation Ready,
It’s good that you are anticipating possible friction in your relationship with your sister if you choose to own a vacation property together because without a lot of structure and guardrails, that can easily happen. The most important thing you should do if you choose to proceed is have an agreement in place that articulates what will happen if one of you wants to sell or can’t pay the mortgage, who is responsible for maintenance and upgrades, how and when you can each use the home, and who’s responsible for finding renters and managing the rental process. This is assuming, of course, you find a property you all like, can afford, and you can agree on the mortgage terms and equity structure.
A real estate lawyer can help you hammer a co-ownership agreement formally, but you should prepare yourselves emotionally for the possibility that you’ll disagree about how to use and maintain the property over the course of owning it and think through as many potential problems as you can anticipate. Some of them are going to arise, and sooner than you think. If you’ve prepared ahead of time and already discussed the potential conflicts, these things can be resolved and (ideally) won’t escalate.
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Dear Pay Dirt,
I’m fortunate to be very comfortable financially—I own my home and am able to travel, eat out, and save more than is recommended per the 50/30/20 rule. I have almost a full year of expenses saved, separate from retirement, so I know I have a good cushion above the recommended three to six months. I also know if I really got into a bind I have family that could assist. However, I get terrible anxiety when I think about spending savings on anything, fun or necessary! My AC was on the fritz recently and just the thought of having to pay for a new one caused terrible anxiety, even though I know that’s what savings is for! I bought an expensive plane ticket for a long saved-for/planned trip, and it ate at me for days, even though I’ll still end the year with more in savings than I started with. How do I get comfortable dipping into savings, especially when it’s for completely normal expenses?
—Nervous Nelly
Dear Nervous Nelly,
It sounds like your financial anxiety goes beyond the ordinary concern that you might not be saving enough. I don’t know if you have anxiety generally about things besides your finances, but if so, therapy can help with that by giving you a space to better understand your underlying fears and how they distort your perception of risk when you make perfectly reasonable decisions to spend money. (I speak here from experience; I have an anxiety disorder myself and therapy has helped immensely on that front.)
Some compartmentalization might help you. You already have emergency money separated out from your retirement funds, so it may help with your anxiety to create a third pool of money that’s explicitly for things that inevitably come up and you can’t really budget for, including fun things like a vacation. Make an estimate of what your budget for unexpected and fun occasions will be for a year and aim to put that much into a separate account with the idea that it’s money that will be spent and does not count against savings. Spending out of a separate account will make it feel like less of a loss because you’ve already budgeted for it and consider the money already spent. If at the end of the year, you have money left in that account, you can put it back into savings if you wish, but since you’re also having trouble spending money and enjoying it, I’d encourage you to get used to enjoying a little bit of a discretionary fund and spend it on yourself instead.
—Elizabeth
My husband and I recently had our second child, and already have a toddler. We struggled with thinking of a name for our second child and went to the hospital each with a first-choice name and no agreement between us. He very much wanted to name our child after a family member, but it was a name I strongly dislike, so I said no repeatedly through the pregnancy. He asked me again shortly after the baby was born, and in a haze of hormones and drugs, I agreed.
