Rachel Kiley
A husband wondering if his wife should use part of her inheritance to help pay back his student loans is kicking up some drama on Reddit this week.
u/sloanaita said that his wife, who is a stay-at-home mother to their two children, recently received an inheritance of about five times what he currently owes in student loans (which he later said is around $41,000 of debt).
The original post begins:
My wife is a SAHM (stay-at-home mom) for our 2 kids and I work full-time as the sole income provider for the family. I am slowly working on paying back my student loans. My wife recently received a relatively large inheritance that amounts to about 5x the number of my student loans.
OP Continues
A month after everything regarding the inheritance was settled I talked with my wife about using the inheritance to pay off my loans. She refused to give me any of the money and said the inheritance belongs only to her.
I told her that, yes, legally that’s true but we are a family and we should share our resources to make our burdens easier. She disagreed and said my student loans pre-date our marriage and are my sole responsibility.
I felt like she was being unfair to our marriage and to us as a family. So the next day I told her that if she was not going to help me pay off my student loans, now that she has money, I will not be paying for any of the expenses that are solely hers (like clothes, eating out, flights, makeup, spas, new phone, etc.).
After things were settled and the money received, he asked his wife if they could use some of her inheritance to pay off his loans to put them in a better financial position moving forward.
“She refused to give me any of the money and said the inheritance belongs only to her,” he wrote. “I told her that, yes, legally that’s true but we are a family and we should share our resources to make our burdens easier. She disagreed and said my student loans pre-date our marriage and are my sole responsibility.”
The Redditor was taken aback by that and decided that he would continue to pay all their family expenses as the sole income earner, but anything extra or fun his wife wanted would now be her own responsibility to pay out of her inheritance so he could use his extra income to pay down the debt faster.
“She accused me of being controlling with money and abusing my position as the income-earner but I don’t see why I should be responsible for all that when she has her own money now,” he wrote.
It was a surprisingly controversial post, with some readers accusing the original poster of “financial abuse” for withholding money for extravagances from his wife while others felt she was the one failing to be a team player.
What do we think, Interwebs?
An alternative perspective:
But one thing most people reading seemed to agree on was that if the two can’t get on the same page about finances, there’s something a lot deeper going on here, and it’s not going to end well.
