A
female
age
41-50,
anonymous
writes:I have a wonderful boyfriend of 5 years. We are very much in love and have decided to move in together and get married. We both have good well paid jobs however he has dropped a bomb shell! He is £50,000 in debt and has hidden it from me till now. Should I finance the house until he has cleared his debt - we could both afford to share the mortgage but I would have to pay the deposit
View related questions:
debt Reply to this Question
Share |
Fancy yourself as an agony aunt? Add your answer to this question! A
female
reader, aunty t  +, writes (8 March 2007):
 God love him I would say he wanted to tell you but just didnt know how. This is a whopper of a debt and you need to know how it came about. Does he have a spending addiction and has it stopped? I think buying a house would be a bad move at the moment. It would be better to get the debt sorted first. If you love him you will stick by him and help him sort this out but I think you need to take some financial advice from a professional. You can always look at buying a house when you are in a better position.
Good luck
Aunty t
A
female
reader, chachacha +, writes (8 March 2007):
Debts of £50k are not exatly small. Surely it worries him ( or should ). But he has not talked to you in 5 years about something that big? That's not a very open man, is it?
Some people are hopeless with finances, and it's a form of not growing up, and wanting to be looked after. Do you want to be the mature one in the relationship, that does all the looking after, while your partner acts like an immature child?
A debt that big will be growing constantly. It sounds like he doesn't own property at the moment, so it'll all be in small loans and on credit cards. This guy could go bankrupt in the near future. Do you want to jointly own an asset with someone who could be declared bankrupt?
At least has has had the decency to tell you at the final moment, before you move in together and get married. To be honest, I would tell him that you cannot move in with him or marry him at the moment, as a result of his financial situation being out of control. I would then wait for him to have worked out a programe of budget control and paying off of debts, and wait for him to show that he has stuck to it for at least 6 months, and then to reassess whether he is acting like a mature adult or not, before deciding whether to move in and get married.
...............................
A
female
reader, AskEve +, writes (8 March 2007):
 He has probably been wanting to get this off his chest for months and now that he has this is a weight lifted off his shoulders in itself. If you truly love him and still want to be with him then you can work this out. Go and get some professional advice on the best way to consolidate all his loans. Go to a few though as interest rates differ.
Eve
...............................
A
reader, anonymous, writes (8 March 2007): Never mix money into your relationship, not unless you have some solid idea and guarantee that it wont be a mistake. Either that or a contract (like a marriage sorta thing). This guy didn't even tell you about the debt problem till you moved in together. He hasn't exactly asked you to help bail him out has he? Cos if he hasn't then its pretty easy to stay outta this. You both have well paid jobs, so let him deal with this debt himself. The three main things that can easily destroy a relationship is religion, sex and money. Stay clear of other people's debts. Once you're married, its a different story. But also if you have some serious commitment, then it might be ok too. You didn't even know about the debt all this time, so he could probably take care of it himself
...............................
A
female
reader, cd206 +, writes (8 March 2007):
 Hi, I'm not the biggest expert in the world on mortgages and I'd advise you to take professional advice but no bank or building society in their right mind will give your boyfriend even a part share in a mortgage because of his bad credit rating. This means the mortgage would be in your name making you responsible for all repayments although I assume you would have an arrangement with your boyfriend tht he paid you a certain amount. What I'm saying is you might run into problems because only your salary will be taken into account when calculating how much money towards a mortgage you can borrow which will mean a less good house. In a way all of this is great because if your boyfriend does have debt issues the last thing you want is to give him another asset that he can use as a guarantee for more loans. I recommend you get mortgage and legal advice about this. On the surface of it that's what your question seems to be about but ask yourself if you're sure you can be in this situation where he might possibly keep up this spending and cause you problems further down the line.
CD
...............................
|
