Girlfriend with manageable debt, but still problems persist

[TBH]

It sounds to me like she's depressed. Working part time, living at home, unmotivated, vague about how she got into this position, moody and mercurial with her boyfriend--sounds like depression.

I agree that paying off her debt will not help your relationship, will not help her, and will be something you regret.

It sounds like you are very committed to staying with her. That's great. She sounds like she's a wonderful person underneath all her pain and misfortune.

Maybe she needs professional help to deal with the depression. Then she needs to get her butt into a full time job and sell the car that has a payment on it to buy something cheaper and stop being a b**** to you and turn her life around. If she can't do that within the next couple of years, I'd walk away if I were you.

[jasmin1386]

I dont know how long you have known her

or what her student debt is

thats a big warning sign that her debt was wiped and she went into it again.

death or trauma can effect people for decades.

You are very loving but finances are very real and can effect so much.

people who have issues, any issue hoarders, making debts have to get out of it themselves. people do spend to fill other pains or voids and get an initial high.

i personally had financial stress for years but i was supporting a bunch of children some with extra medical needs for many years. Even 500 of debt stressed me alot and i did everything to get out of debt.

i was loving in a marriage to someone who didnt care about making huge debts. I was responsible and worked harder and harder , he didnt care , he always had plausible stories why he made debts. he actually was a huge con artist and narcicist and psychopath. He didnt care of the toll it took on all of us. He dragged us down for decades while i was stupidly loving and fell for his stories. I was left financially, emotionally and physically so depleted. finances causes such stress for everything. Drs say that i must have been depleted totally within a year or 2 and that once someone is that depleted for so long their energy never is replenished. Its been years now and nothing i do seems to make me physically strong. I am always tired, i dont have as much energy as others. I'd be a rich woman if i didnt let him drag us down for many years.

i dont know how long you have known her for. we think we have to give the benefit of the doubt in the beginning of relationships but dr phil says not to! this is a high risk situation.

we do want 2 equal people capable of contributing or at least not dragging us down

maybe counselling, antidepressants, or some other healing would help her.

my daughter lives off her husband but she never made debts and she is caring for their baby otherwise she would still work.she is very frugal and always has been.

some debts are made legitimately and sometimes suddenly things fall together re work and emotions and they are overcome suddenly in a year or so .

one of my sons has a pattern of taking on girls who will use and abuse him financially. he is now trying to get rid of the third one. She has debts. She became pregnant to him. He tried to do the right thing and support her.But he cant support her, the baby himself and her debt. she is 35 years old and has 35000 debt. She tries to say that 10 000 she got helping her dad when he went overseas and got sick. But she worked since and why isnt she out of debt. She also is still paying payments for a car that she doesnt even own as she didnt pay insurance and it was in a crash and couldnt be repaired. she manipulated him into letting her stay, but he needs her to go . He cant support 3 people and her debt. The warning sign is also the debt doesnt even bother her, while he is very stressed about it which is the same thing that i experienced with my husband that debt didnt bother him and he kept making it over and over again the more i paid off the more he took and more debt he made.

i cant advise re trauma, re how responsible she could be, whether at some point she can turn things around which i've seen happen i've seen people have debt and then suddenly turn it all around when timing, job, emotions all keyed up one yr.

I just know if our family we have seen too much to enter such a situation. I"m single. I meet men who after decades of working have lost their job or had a heart attack or hip replacement. I cant take on a risky situaiton, not after what i know. It can take years to work out someones patterns and how manipulative irresponsible a person is. Even a very bad person has good traits so its confusing to know without decades of history sometimes how good or bad a person really is. i personally cant enter such high risk situaitons.

its not cruel
love doesnt conquer all.

sometimes we feel we wouldnt get someone better and we do

at other times we stick by somene and they over come something
and others times they dont and we should ahve cut our losses

i have a friend who is stingy but its a very good thing as it means that none of us drag each other down. if i pay for something even small or if he does we repay each other unless its stated that its a gift. I didnt drag him down while raising my kids on my own, he didnt drag me down when he lost his job.

yours is a hard situaton but you have a huge warning sign.

i had a friend who made a date and when that date came if the husband didnt have a job and wasnt out of debt she would divorce him and she did. it seemed really harsh to me but she was the smart one. I loved too much, i gave too much and i lost everything even my health and my kids health because of the stress it caused. Money is very important. both able to contribute and not drag both down is very important.


my kids have done it very tough. a couple got into some debt. One then suddenly made huge efforts and got out of it. Its very hard to know the future but the best predictor of future behaviour is past behavior, and this is a high risk situation financially with very red flags, that might happen again and again. pls dont take 15 years to learn like i did. pls dont lose your health like i did from such stress.

[kv968]

Money issues aside, has she ever seen a therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist, etc...?

With all the turmoil in her life she may be in need of some professional help. I'm not saying that would "cure" her but it sounds as if she may have a lot of unresolved issues and possibly be dealing with depression.

[SavingSweetOneL]

Hi Ocean1026,

I see your GF as someone who is dealing with grief, depression, self-worth issues, and lack of money/finacial literacy.

Before agreeing to give her any money, know in your own heart what your limits are.

If I was you, I'd look into paying part of her bills for a therapist, life couch, and a class such as one of Dave Ramsey's.

It is important psychologically, that she is responisble for some part of paying back her debts.

sweetOneL

[syracusa]

I would not pay off a girlfriend's or boyfriend's loans. I would pay off a wife's or husband's loans. Call me old fashioned but I don't believe in merging finances until that point in the relationship.

Keep in mind throughout this process that money fights are the leading cause of divorce.

If the two of you are fighting over money now when you are both single and you are just paying for dinner, how do you think she will feel if you pay off her debt? That isn't going to make her any less insecure - just the opposite I would think.

What would I do? I'd probably run the other way if I found out a girl I was dating was 13K in credit card debt, but that's just me. If I wanted to try and make things work, I'd offer to help her review her budget and devise a plan to repay the debt in a reasonable period of time. I'd explore why she is only working part-time. If she isn't able to find a full-time position right now, how about a 2nd PT position to bring her income up to FT level?

When you say "undisclosed amount of student loans" what exactly do you mean? Undisclosed to you? If she isn't willing to share that info with you, that would concern me a great deal.

Your last paragraph also concerns me. If she isn't treating you with respect now, don't pretend that will change. Maybe if the current money problems get resolved, the situation will improve temporarily, but if that is how she deals with stress and conflict, that attitude will be back again later.

Sorry to sound pessimistic but a 28-year-old with 13K in CC debt and some significant amount in student loan debt who is only working PT and living with her mother raises a bunch of red flags in my mind. JMHO.

What Steve said...though I would have much more to add, some of it extremely unpopular and prone to ruffle many, many feathers.

I am a 40 yo woman with a non-American background, so my opinion is based on a perspective that many native-borns do not have because they take certain cultural aspects for granted. If you were my son, here is the advise I would give you: be careful about the expectations and true partnership potential of your average American female, particularly those without serious career prospects, a proclivity towards spending and raised with a certain dose of entitlement (and I would include others like British, Australian, Canadian).

In general, western women have been raised with the feminist mantra that whatever they choose to do in life, it just has to make THEM happy, regardless of other considerations (husband's ability, children's future, economic constraints, etc). Whether it's a career they are burning to do, or just plain "staying at home" - whatever that vaguely-defined occupation is supposed to mean nowadays - they MUST be happy.
It took no more than a few decades of intense "women's lib" propaganda, meant to turn women into men in the workplace, for women to figure out that this "career thing" is not exactly the passport to happiness it was advertised to be. Career means intense work, bosses, deadlines, competition for promotion with fellow workers designed NOT TO give birth, back-stabbing, keeping up with the Jonses' CV-s or else, and the jazz. When you add the extra loads of stress that appear once the career woman has children, it's all clear this was a really, really bad idea. But many households are now based on two incomes so the genie's kind of out of the bottle, economically speaking.
More recently, this has caused many women to look back at the other option for "personal happiness": the "good ol' fashion" one. Only that now it's supposed to come in an updated, post-modern version: it needs to be called "SAHM" instead of "Housewife", and job responsibilities are best left vague, particularly after the children turn 5.
The SAHM helicopters over the 0-5 yo child to the point her job responsibilities boil down mainly to baby-sitting during the first 5 years. She no longer cooks daily fresh and economic meals from scratch ("convenience foods are just as good and besides, cooking takes "talent" and not everyone has this kind of talent"); no longer irons ("we all use synthetics now anyway and if not, what is the Dry-Cleaner for?"), no longer keeps the house clean and orderly ("we all know it's impossible to have a clean house with small children - note that "small" is usually defined very liberally); no longer cans foods (who does that kind of crazy thing anyway?)... in one word, her ECONOMIC/PRODUCTIVE role has been severely diminished.
She is, however, the consumer representative of the family. She will buy stuff and services for the house, for the children, for everybody - and usually not little. Signing kids up for a slew of activities and chauffeuring them there back and forth ...all this means consumption, not production, and all that - yes, with your paycheck.
I would never underestimate the shopping appetite of your average American woman.

When the children turn 5, the SAHM will send them off to school in the morning to stay there until 3:00 pm, and then she'll be left with the vaguely defined job, no kids in sight, just quite a bit of time in her hands to do what she pleases with. Sometimes she will volunteer at the children's school because "we all know it is very important for the child to see the mother at school".

Over the past couple of decades the domestic role of the female in the West has been defined in very loose, non-economically productive and often "hobby-like" terms: volunteering at school, walking the pet, gardening, whatever strikes the lady's fancy. Such used to be the preoccupations of a rich man's wife, but the western middle-class female now wants that lifestyle too. After all, she was told by Feminist mothers that she has the RIGHT to choose whatever path in life makes her happy. Nevermind that men do not seem to have any other choice in life besides being providers - ideally BIG providers.

No wonder young men are catching on, especially as the purchase power of their paycheck is getting weaker, and increasingly they specify "she needs to be independent" as requirements for a potential partner.

In conclusion: if you want a wife who will just be "happy" and you have the wallet to sponsor such "happiness", by all means pay off her debts, marry her, expect her to want to exchange her current job for the much more appealing "SAH" position, and live happily ever after.
But if you want a wife who will significantly contribute to the financial well-being of the household, you would be well advised to take the red-flags very seriously.

[Like2Plan]

Wow-this is a blast from the past.
Has anyone noticed the OP started this thread 10-14-2010 04:43 PM, his post count is 3 and he has not been back to this board since Last Activity: 03-17-2011 07:42 AM ?

I wonder if they are married now?

[UnknownXV]

It would be interesting to know what happened with them.