Spendthrift Boyfriend Goes 'Ballistic' When His Girlfriend Refuses To Put Him On The Mortgage She's Been Saving For Since Her Teens
He makes twice her salary but has nothing to show for it. Who can blame her?
fizkes | Shutterstock Ask any couple's therapist or divorce lawyer — perhaps nothing has more power to come between romantic partners than good old-fashioned money.
For one young woman on Reddit, her and her boyfriend's wildly different approaches to finances aren't just a difference of opinion; they're diametrically opposed lifestyles — him a spendthrift, her a conscientious saver.
Now that she's ready to buy a house, it's threatening to sink their relationship entirely.
The woman refused to get a mortgage with her spendthrift boyfriend.
Especially given how young she is — just 26 — you'd be hard-pressed to find a more responsible, financially prudent person. (I'm nearly double her age and would kill for just half of her money smarts.)
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With all her scrimping and savings, she was able to do the impossible — she got through college completely debt-free. (The UK's drastically lower tuitions compared to the U.S. surely helped, of course.)
She's been saving up since her teens to buy a house, and after landing a well-paying job in the U.K.'s tech industry, she's now ready to take her first steps into the property market.
"I have been saving up for a house deposit since the age of 18," she wrote in her since-deleted Reddit post. "I worked loads of jobs throughout university and saved every penny I had just to get by."
"I've accumulated almost £25,000 for a house deposit," she continued. "This has taken eight years of hard work and dedication. I have never spent a penny of these savings before."
Her boyfriend makes twice her income and spends every dime — and is furious she won't include him in her home purchase.
Her boyfriend, on the other hand, is… well, a hot mess. At 31, he makes double her hefty salary but "chooses not to save it but to spend it on drugs, booze and video games," she wrote. "I don't know how he spends his money so fast. Honestly, it scares me."
He's also seven grand in debt, "and his credit file is atrocious… because he fails to make payments on his debt a lot." She adds that he's also in tax arrears as well. Given these dire straits, she assumed he'd have no expectations of being on the mortgage when she bought her house.
"I was wrong," she wrote. "He went ballistic at me for suggesting that he'd be paying rent" to his girlfriend instead of helping with the mortgage. She thinks this is absurd for obvious reasons.
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"It's my 25,000 that I've saved. It's my great credit score. It's my hard work and determination," she wrote. "He's been able to lounge about and spend his money without care just to end up with 50% ownership of the house? I'm not doing that."
Instead, she gave him the only reasonable option: become her tenant or go find his own place. "He was furious," she wrote.
People found her boyfriend's response ridiculous — and possibly even nefarious.
Under even the most charitable reading of the circumstances, this dude is a walking red flag. Hitching your wagon to someone who's a financial disaster but willing to do the work to clean things up is one thing. Linking up with a profligate with this level of entitlement is quite another.
While VeryWellMind urges financially incompatible couples to do some serious talking before throwing in the towel. Their experts also note that if you and your partner can't come to some sort of compromise and he is showing signs of more problematic behavior in terms of money, it's best to cut your losses — especially before buying a house together.
It bodes poorly for their relationship of course, aside from their finances, and many on Reddit urged this woman to be very careful moving forward with this guy.
Others saw potential disasters on the horizon. "DON'T MOVE HIM INTO YOUR HOUSE!" one person pointedly wrote. "He is just looking for a free ride." And given the U.K.'s property laws, that free ride could turn into a catastrophe down the road.
"The only reason he would have to be on the mortgage is to grab half if your relationship failed," one person cautioned, while others pointed out that if he were to pay for substantial renovations or pay off a chunk of the mortgage, UK law says he would have a legal claim to the property.
Taken all together, people were pretty much unanimous in their advice: They're incompatible, he's not trustworthy, she needs to get rid of him, let alone keep him off the deed to her house.
As one person put it, "Sweetheart, you can do better than this! Why would you want to strap yourself to someone who is so emotionally immature and financially unstable?" Hard to argue with that.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.