Man creates financial ultimatum for 'manic' fiance she says, 'you're being selfish.'

When this man is fed up with his fiance, he asks Reddit:

'AITA for wanting my fiance to just pay the debt instead of living through her weird debt payback plan?'

I (31) have about 67k in debt, between college, my car, and a little bit on my credit card. I've been making my monthly payments on all of them, but it will still be many decades before I'm debt free.

My fiance (29) is relatively debt free. This wasn't always the case. She got a few scholarships to help with college, but did still have to take out a few loans to finish things up.

She had to get a new car because the old one was cursed and was in more accidents while parked than we can count. And she did go through a manic period and almost run up her credit card in her early 20s shopping so much.

However, she spent a lot of time getting her finances in order, worked multiple side gigs on top of her normal job, which I commend her for, and now is debt free except for her mortgage, which she makes a ton of extra payments towards, and has almost 300k in investments, savings, etc. I'm very proud of her for everything she's done.

Now that we're engaged, we're planning on moving in together (she had a roommate we had to wait for the lease to end on before I could move in), and she said before the wedding she wanted me to be debt free.

We chose a date 3 years from now, since some of our family is out of the country and needs to save, and so it will be on our 7th anniversary, both of our favorite number.

She pulled out a spread sheet of my debts, and pointed out how if I put all of my paychecks, minus maybe 200 a month for 'fun money' into paying off my debt, I'll be debt free by the wedding.

She would cover everything else - the mortgage, food, bills, insurance, our pets, vacations, date nights, etc. We could then both aggressively save for that last bit of time for a nice honeymoon, and after that focus a good amount of our funds on taking out the mortgage and getting my own savings up to snuff.

I thought about it for a day or so and came back with this counter offer: she pays off my debts and I pay her back in a year and a half, since I wouldn't also have to be paying interest, we would put a bigger dent in the mortgage, and still stick to the timeline.

She seemed unhappy with this, and said she would have to think about it first.

I casually mentioned it to my friends over beer to get another perspective, and they said I'm the asshole, and they would do anything have her two year offer to get debt free, and that even if I paid her back, I'd still be taking a 1/5 of her savings for a year and a half. So I'm here for judgement, am I the asshole?

Let's find out.

automatic78 writes:

YTA. You're an entitled AH for not accepting her very generous offer and expecting her to do even more. Your counter offer is laughable and she would be an idiot if she agreed to it.

warmrefrigerator2426 writes:

No. Just no. Your compromise measures do nothing to solve all the issues with his initial proposal.

OP has debt and at this time isn't putting any effort into paying it down. Says he's making the monthly payments only. GF is obviously very debt averse. So right off the bat he's waving red flags all over the place as to whether he's financially compatible enough to marry for someone like her.

She's worked her ass off to get where she is. She's worked extra jobs and sacrificed a lot to get her debt paid off.

She's not even asking him to do all of that. Her offer includes fun money and she's not expecting him to look for extra income and he's still balking at it. Another red flag and also shows that he expects to some degree to be able to ride on her efforts as part of their relationship.

They aren't married yet, so at this point her money/savings is very much still her money and he's got the idea he has a right to access to her money for his benefit. Big ol red flag considering the 2 points above.

With her plan, she's really not risking much. She's paying a little extra for things she probably was already paying for, but that's going to be out of income that's coming in, not from her savings. So OP is asking her to take a big hit on her savings AND the earning power it has to create more interest income. Your plan still requires her to take a hit in savings of HER hard earned money.

At this point OP has given no indication that he is truly on board with being debt free. He wants her to pay things down, but why would he need that if she's paying all of his expenses so he can pay his debt?

The only reason to pay things off faster is to avoid interest. Frankly if he didn't care about interest when he was paying only the monthly minimum why does he care now all of a sudden? Or does he actually want to free up space on his accounts so he has more debt available to spend?

The reason people are saying it sounds like he wants her to pay off his debt and run is because if he's in debt to a company it's a lot easier for them to hold him accountable when he doesn't pay them back.

They aren't going to listen to any lame excuses he might have about why he needs to be late this month or how much he NEEDS to buy a motorcycle or go on a trip or whatever guilt trip he can lay on her to try to manipulate her into letting him slide if he just doesn't feel like paying in any given month.

Even if they were to draw up a legal contract, if he defaults she has to pay for lawyers to try and recoup, where a debt holding company has a whole staff just to chase down bad debt.

So if he does cut and run the odds that she ever sees that money again are slim to huge pain in the ass only to get maybe half of it back. Add red flags 1-5 up and see if that sounds like a good risk for her.