Looking for advice - explaining the situation to an innocent spouse. Let me explain.

[lillymarlene]

Ditto. I agree with all the posts. First thing I did when I came back from my attorney's office after signing all the papers, was hand the copies to my boyfriend and told him to read. He is an important part of my household, and I wanted him to understand and realize that he'd have to be on board for this, too.

[Drazil65]

You are obviously well aware that it will not work if both are not on the same page with the extent and seriousness of this action. Make a plan to have no distractions in the house (or wherever you decide to have this conversation) and spend as much time as needed to go line by line with the papers and the budget. She has no choice but to sit there until she has a handle on the entire process and what lies ahead for the next 5 years. With us it was the opposite, I was the finance person for the most part BUT he was well aware and cognizant of the amounts and the balance transfer games we were playing. We had many discussions about his impulsiveness back when we were using CC for our enjoyment which started our debt accumulation in our early days of marriage. Recently (last couple of yrs) this has not been the case and we were just trying to survive while keeping up with payments. If he told me to do what I have to do type of thing when I would bring up money then I pushed him to sit and listen even if it caused an argument because WE needed to understand where this was heading. I did not want to nor did I have to carry this burden by myself, I was part of a team, a unit and this was ugly but it was OUR ugly and WE both needed to deal with the consequences. He finally got it and realized that it does not go away by itself if you tend to ignore the issue or let someone else handle the payments so you do not have that visual.

It is never easy to have that kind of conversation but needed and the sooner the better. She should be involved with going to the attorney with you and planning the budget etc. You will feel better as well because we all need to share this with someone close to the subject (and directly involved with the household) and our partners (for better or worse, richer or poorer etc). Good Luck!

[PELRDL]

The first thing you need to do is show her the budget. From there, she'll understand how following it will address the bigger money issues you both face. For years my husband handled the money, and I always had this awful sense of foreboding, which I found out later, was quite justified. Now I handle the money.

I would suggest doing as I have, and create a budget on an excel spreadsheet. The expenses are broken down by pay period (and income amount), with the first line item being "savings." All items are color-coded, with a legend at the top: yellow means "paid", pink means "unpaid", blue means "non-recurring paid", that sort of thing. That way if I drop dead, my husband will know what to pay and when to pay it.

Additionally, I've created a folder with important documents and life insurance policies. Lastly, we don't use a bank anymore. Instead, we keep all of our money in an investment house, and I've seen to it that we both have equal on-line access to the accounts. If you organize everything for your wife in a straight-forward way, I'm sure she'll come around. For the uninitiated, it all seems very daunting, but taking charge of your money is really quite easy once you get on a written plan. I would also have her read The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. Both my husband and I are bankers by trade, but until we read this book, we really had no clue how to handle money. Dave Ramsey's simple plan gave us the blueprint we needed.