# Marriage and Taxes



## FlyBoyJ (Mar 13, 2018)

I created my first post here the other day with regard to my wife's unhealthy obsession with her two adult daughters. I wanted to share something else that's happening and it felt like a different enough topic that I should start a fresh post.

My wife and I have been married now almost a year. Second marriage for both of us. She has two daughters (22 and 19) and I have one daughter (12). We've dated for 8 years.

When we met, I was self employed in the trades, as I am now. An educated blue collar guy who LOVES what he does but has definitely struggled over the previous 8 years and just last year, started to feel like I was getting my head out of the deep financial hole I was in.

When we moved in together, my now wife received a very minuscule alimony and child support from her ex. What he paid her monthly in total wouldn't even cover the rent. Mind you we have a household with three girls, two teenagers at the time in a VERY expensive area. Of course, "her girls" as she always calls them always have to have the best. Fancy vacations, fancy birthdays, the latest iPhones, cars, designer clothes, etc. Obviously my wife was not able to pay for even close to what all that costs these days with what her miser ex (he makes alot of money) gave her. The child support ended when each child turned 18 and the alimony ended when the youngest turned 18 last year.

So I've paid everything. Rent, insurance, cell phones, internet, cable, utilities, food, vacations, etc etc. My wife's small alimony generally went to frivolous things that she felt were "necessary" My wife never worked in her previous marriage and seems to have a sense of entitlement that because she's "a mom" she shouldn't have to work. So needless to say, all the financial burden has fallen on my back.

As a result, I have ended up with significant tax liabilities over the last 8 years. I needed EVERY dime I made to maintain the household and didn't have anything left over for taxes. I'm not proud of it, as I know I have to pay them, but I feel as if shelter and food, etc. comes first.

As we were married last year, we now must file taxes together. The other day, my wife went off on a crazy manic episode about how it's not her responsibility to pay MY taxes from MY business. I explained to her, that when you are married, it's 50/50. She doesn't get the benefit of "my business" as she says without any responsibility. I explained it's that business that has supported she and her girls for years. I explained further that because we live beyond our means (she refuses to move from this community where everyone is some corporate big-wig bringing in $500K plus a year) and I make a decent but not huge living in the trades that I need every single dollar I make to support this family.

I am at my breaking point. I told her she really doesn't get what marriage is. I reminded her, "for richer for poorer, good times and bad". She seems to be stuck in this world where she is entitled to a opulent lifestyle and bears no responsibility for us being behind on taxes and certainly has zero interest in cutting back (moving, no vacation, no fancy birthdays, etc). She says, "no it's your fault because you need to get a REAL JOB". It makes me sick! I love what I do, and yes, while the industry was in deep trouble for years, it's booming now, so yes it is a GOOD JOB'.

Am I wrong here?


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## Lostinthought61 (Nov 5, 2013)

Yes. You are definitely wrong.....in marrying her in the first place....did you not talk about all of this before you married?


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## FalCod (Dec 6, 2017)

I'm confused by your post. You make a vague reference to not having paid taxes for 8 years. That's a huge deal. If you entered a marriage with significant outstanding tax liabilities, it is something that you should have disclosed before the marriage and those debts are not communal debts.

That aside, all of your other financial issues with your wife are shared. If she's spending too much of "your" money, it is because you are letting her. You need to either have a come to Jesus meeting with her and get financially aligned or you need to get out. From the tone of your post, I have no idea why you want to stay.


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## FlyBoyJ (Mar 13, 2018)

Let me clarify, I am on payment plan for back taxes, something she was FULLY aware of!

I don't expect her to pay anything towards prior years, but I do have a problem that she fails to recognize the fact that the reason that I fell behind on paying taxes was because I needed 100% of my income to support OUR home and SHE and HER girls. Whether married or not, the financial decisions that were made were to the benefit of both of us. It's not fair that she can "have her cake and eat it to". She benefited by having more take home pay and now can't claim no involvement when it's time to pay the piper! I've been begging for years to stop the over the top spending, move to a more affordable area once school became a non-issue, as it is now, but no go. She feels entitled to this lifestyle eventhough I can't support it and pay the taxes at the same time. What I bristle at it that it's my fault for not making enough and she has no culpability on the spending side.

My point being, the way I see marriage is TOGETHER you enjoy the good times and TOGETHER you make sacrifices during the bad. Don't play spoiled brat and just point fingers.


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## MAJDEATH (Jun 16, 2015)

FlyBoyJ said:


> I created my first post here the other day with regard to my wife's unhealthy obsession with her two adult daughters. I wanted to share something else that's happening and it felt like a different enough topic that I should start a fresh post.
> 
> My wife and I have been married now almost a year. Second marriage for both of us. She has two daughters (22 and 19) and I have one daughter (12). We've dated for 8 years.
> 
> ...


I have to say it man. You should have worked thru all of these issues prior to marriage. And if the word compromise is not in her vocabulary, you need to seriously consider making a change. No more "yours" and "mine", it's "ours". And the 2 adult daughters need to learn to survive on their own.


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## Windwalker (Mar 19, 2014)

Time to break out the 2x4's.

You let yourself get into tax trouble because she's some damned entitled snow-princess who must have the best of the best so that she can coddle her kids.

YOU SIGNED UP FOR THIS ****-SANDWHICH! You continued to put up with it and then turned around and married her. WTF? 

When you find your backbone, you will put a stop to this. So what exactly does she bring to the table? I mean other than entitled princess attitude and BSC OCD obsession with her kids? No vagina is that good, nor is it worth my self respect. Demand more for yourself, damn it man.

There is a common theme with your 2 threads. That's your tolerance of the intolerable.

Put your foot down or untether yourself from the ship anchor tied around your neck!

At a minimum, her ass needs to get a job. If it was me, the first words and the last words out of my mouth every day would be, GET A JOB!


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## FlyBoyJ (Mar 13, 2018)

Windwalker said:


> Time to break out the 2x4's.
> 
> You let yourself get into tax trouble because she's some damned entitled snow-princess who must have the best of the best so that she can coddle her kids.
> 
> ...


You are dead on. I made the bed and now I'm lying in it. Unfortunately they may be throwing dirt on top of me in that bed if this keeps up. I honestly feel at the end of my rope.

By the way, what does "BSC" stand for?


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## FlyBoyJ (Mar 13, 2018)

Windwalker said:


> At a minimum, her ass needs to get a job. If it was me, the first words and the last words out of my mouth every day would be, GET A JOB!


AMEN Brother!!


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## Windwalker (Mar 19, 2014)

FlyBoyJ said:


> You are dead on. I made the bed and now I'm lying in it. Unfortunately they may be throwing dirt on top of me in that bed if this keeps up. I honestly feel at the end of my rope.
> 
> By the way, what does "BSC" stand for?


Bat **** crazy


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## Hopeful Cynic (Apr 27, 2014)

FlyBoyJ said:


> By the way, what does "BSC" stand for?


Bat poop crazy.

Which I'm not sure she is, but she sure sounds like a selfish entitled princess, which you usually only see in young women her daughters' ages.

You have to cut her off. Spend your money on housing, food, utilities, essentials for your own daughter, and put the rest into your taxes. Nothing else. If your wife wants to spend money on her own adult daughters or herself, she has to go out and earn it herself.

If she moans, tell her there's literally nothing left after the bills and your tax installments are made. If she complains about your job, tell her it's the same job you had when you started dating and the same job you had when she married you, and she wasn't unhappy with it then.

She can either finish growing up and get a job in her spare time, which she should have lots of now, or she can leave you. If she'd leave you over this instead of being understanding and supportive, it's probably for the best.

And honestly, how on earth did you not realize she was like this much earlier into dating her, and realize what marrying her would mean for you?


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## Prodigal (Feb 5, 2011)

FlyBoyJ said:


> When we moved in together, my now wife received a very minuscule alimony and child support from her ex. What he paid her monthly in total wouldn't even cover the rent.
> 
> So I've paid everything. Rent, insurance, cell phones, internet, cable, utilities, food, vacations, etc etc. My wife's small alimony generally went to frivolous things that she felt were "necessary" My wife never worked in her previous marriage and seems to have a sense of entitlement that because she's "a mom" she shouldn't have to work. So needless to say, all the financial burden has fallen on my back.


Well this clarifies things. You are the $$$ she uses to have the lifestyle she deserves. You are the doormat that provides it.


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## Livvie (Jan 20, 2014)

Reading that she hasn't worked and that you paid her way thru life and-- that of "her girls" --and that she treats you like **such ****** actually made me feel a little sick. I feel for your OWN daughter who will miss out on these resources that you spent over the years on this woman and her daughters (that aren't yours).


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## lucy999 (Sep 28, 2014)

I am curious. What made you decide to get married after 8 years together?


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## Wolfman1968 (Jun 9, 2011)

People are going to be telling you what to do. 

I'll tell you what I WOULD do. And maybe it's easy to say because I'm not in your shoes, but I'm on my second marriage and I've had to make some hard decisions and make a hard stand in my first marriage. 

I would divorce your wife if I were you. In my first marriage, I also had a wife who just used me to support her lifestyle and didn't care about me as an husband, an individual, a life partner. It took me a while---too long---to come to this realization, but when I did, I filed for divorce. It was the right move. 

So, I am also telling you what I DID in an analogous situation.

Learn from my experience.


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## Prodigal (Feb 5, 2011)

@FlyBoyJ - If you come back after the pounding we gave you, I'd HIGHLY suggest you look at yourself to figure out why you allowed this mess to happen.

You need to look inside to find out why you felt compelled to save this woman from financial destitution. I assume she is not disabled and is capable of working. 

From my perspective, your woman-picker is broken. I mean, c'mon ... EIGHT YEARS before you married her and you didn't see any red flags waving in your face???

You aren't responsible for rescuing her. You are only responsible for rescuing yourself. Go ahead and lay down the law. Tell her she will have to get a job. Tell her she will have to rearrange her priorities and quit making her kids numero uno all the time. What the hell can she do to you - ask for a divorce??? 

Quit financing this leech.


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## DustyDog (Jul 12, 2016)

FlyBoyJ said:


> I created my first post here the other day with regard to my wife's unhealthy obsession with her two adult daughters. I wanted to share something else that's happening and it felt like a different enough topic that I should start a fresh post.
> 
> My wife and I have been married now almost a year. Second marriage for both of us. She has two daughters (22 and 19) and I have one daughter (12). We've dated for 8 years.
> 
> ...


You dated for eight years, so unless you totally didn't think about what you were doing, you had many discussions about money. How to spend it. What to do when it's clear that spending (always "ours", never mine or yours) is more than the income can provide. I'm sure you discussed whether you would be a one or two income household, and how you were going to handle you/me/us things. For instance, one way that many couples handle you/me is that each person gets an account, and a fixed amount per month goes into that. That's the individual's 'mad money'. A third account, "us", contains most of the money, for mortgage payments and such. The only spending that is allowed from the "us" account on things the two of you have previously agreed about. That's only one way to handle the you/me/us accounts, but what I was trying to say is that you had eight year to determine the method.


So, what agreements and understandings did you come to during your eight year courtship and are her actions in conflict with them? If not in conflict, then you have to have a chat about changing the agreements you made, since they're not working. If her actions are in conflict, then I think the approach is to remind her what the agreements are, determine if/that she remembers them, and then ask gently if she thinks "we" are doing OK on them.

The approach that backfires 99% of the time is to start by saying "you have to...". Make it US and WE. "Darling, this is how much gross we make. This is how much tax we have to pay every year. To pay this, we should put 1/12 of that amount in an account every month. That means our total spending can only be (whatever is left). Can we sit down and figure out what our spending categories are, and how much we can spend in each?"

One thing I've done to help couples understand the concept of controlled spending in categories is called the envelope method. It seems clunky and old-fashioned, but what it does is makes the concept very tangible. "Oh, if I spend $75 out of this envelope labeled electric bill, then we have $25 left to pay the bill, and the last bill was $180. Maybe I should not spend this."

My thoughts....


DD


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## [email protected] (Mar 1, 2018)

FlyBoyJ said:


> As a result, I have ended up with significant tax liabilities over the last 8 years. I needed EVERY dime I made to maintain the household and didn't have anything left over for taxes. I'm not proud of it, as I know I have to pay them, but I feel as if shelter and food, etc. comes first.
> 
> 
> Am I wrong here?


Yes, you're wrong. Shelter and food didn't come first: it was your wife's lame-ass snatch you put first. 

We only buy second-hand clothes. Buy food in bulk and eat at home. We have 30 year old vehicles. Our home would be considered appalling to your wife, for sure. 

I was in the same kind of predicament long ago, with a wife who purposefully kept me terrorized financially. Her main gig was finding out how much we had in checking and making sure to bounce checks every month. I would beg her, like you do, not to spend more than $X amount through the last week of the month and she would specifically calculate how to spend $X + 100 on things we didn't need.

There is a perverse sadism involved here. It isn't that your wife needs the "best" for her girls. She needs the terror, the anguish, and the suffering you go through. 

I made more than twice what I make now back then and we had no children. But I have zero terror over finances like I did back then with two kids and less than half the income. Because the wife is devoted to the husband and would be horrified to cause the kind of misery you are living in. She views her job as removal of problems, not creating them. 

Ask yourself this question: if she loves me, then why is she putting me through this? Well, she doesn't love you. That's why.


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