Names have been changed*
TL;DR
I have made too many choices in my life that have helped others while leaving me destitute. I am working hard to change that now, but have accumulated debt this year and have nothing to start with.
I have one biological son that is currently 11 years old. He does live with me and is a wonderful kid. I do not receive financial support for him, but am pursuing it.
We are currently trying to move out of my former partner’s home after our husband passed away in a car accident. She is keeping everything – house, money, furniture, etc. I am only bringing our personal belongings and my car in the separation.
This is the third time in my life that I’ve lost just about everything of value while others profit off of my hard work. I will not allow others to take advantage of me like that again if I can help it.
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6 years ago, I separated from my son’s father because he wouldn’t help with basic house chores or caring for the property that was only in his name. I had done all of the work of setting the house up to be purchased but had no credit. He had credit because his parents had set him up with their cards when he was in high school.
We agreed that I would stay home with our son and he would work a 9 to 5. I didn’t realize that meant I would be doing literally everything and have no access to any finances except through him. I also didn’t realize that while my family and I remodeled the house that was almost condemned when we bought it, he was going to be the only deed holder.
When I left him, I had to leave everything behind aside from my basic belongings, my car, and our son. He sold the house for more than twice what we bought it for and used part of the land that he kept to build a new, expensive, high-end house next door to it. He has not and does not pay child support, and for the last 6 years, he has only come to visit his son 2 times. I have been responsible for getting my son up to Iowa for all other visits. He had another child with his current girlfriend not long after we moved.
I moved my son and me to Texas because of the weather and some of my family being located in the area we moved to. I ended up meeting a couple (we’ll call them John and Sarah) and we joined their family of 2 adults and 4 children, making a total of 8 of us. Things were rocky the first year but evened out and I thought everything was going ok.
I didn’t think much about John asking me to stay home for the first couple of years and started a small graphic design business to fill my time. This worked well because I was able to do all of the promotional work for John’s career as a musician, and began to travel with him to sell his merchandise while he played. I’ve always been very involved in music and love traveling, so it felt like a win.
Eventually, I wanted to be able to do more and pushed to get a job again, so John offered me one at a company that he worked for. It’s a good job but requires me to cold-knock people’s doors to try to pick up their cable and internet equipment (this is based on work orders sent from the company I contract with, and could be due to nonpayment or changes they’ve made to their accounts). That’s not easy if you don’t have your head about you, and there is a fair bit of danger involved. I have been attacked by dogs, had people attempt to trap me or drag me into their houses, almost been hit by cars in residential neighborhoods, and totaled my car in Austin traffic while on my way home from work. It isn’t what I’d like to be doing for the rest of my life, but it pays most of my bills most of the time.
I was committed to making it work and put all of my money into a joint account with Sarah. She and John had their own joint account, and she did all of the home finances with John checking in from time to time. I found out after a while that she would sometimes try to hide money or sneak things away. One year she spent over $3000 on weed in 6 months, without having anything in the budget for it. We found out that we were about $20,000 in debt that year and I ended up being the one that worked most of that off, working double the amount that we had agreed to. I was irritated about it and haven’t trusted her with money since, but she wouldn’t hand over the finances and John wasn’t really interested in helping me take them over. He just wanted her to do what she had agreed to do. I chose not to rock the boat and didn’t change anything.
In the spring of 2021, John was in a head-on collision on his way home from promoting a show. He died on impact. I have a lot of trauma from that. I didn’t know he was driving at the time, and I know it wasn’t my fault, but it still eats away at me that we were texting when it happened. It bothers me that I was out working my other job earlier that night instead of promoting the show with him. There isn’t anything I can do about any of that though.
Over the next few weeks, I found out that none of the precautions we had agreed to and discussed had actually been acted on. We weren’t legally married, so I had no legal standing in their family, and therefore no right to any of the life insurance funds or say in how anything went from there.
Sarah got everything, and I just had to hope that she would want to continue with me. She said over and over that she did, but her actions increasingly said otherwise. When I asked her to marry me it was an immediate no. She had ended the option of there being any sort of romantic relationship between us long ago and stood by that. I was ok with friendly roommates though, as long as we were equals. We have not been.
It started with how she was spending money. She bought a new minivan to replace the one John was driving in the accident but spent double what we had discussed. At the time I just wanted her to be happy and it didn’t seem too unreasonable, just a little irritating that it wasn’t discussed.
We had talked about moving out of the house we were renting and purchasing a property away from the neighborhood we lived in. There had been an increase in crime, and I didn’t want to drive past the spot where John died every day on my way to work. There were several properties that came up that fit all of our wants and needs and were very affordable. She said no to all of them. Instead, she decided while I was working out of town for a few weeks that she was buying a house down the road, in the same neighborhood. She did this during the peak of the housing market and paid twice what it was worth, then commenced to dump thousands of dollars into remodeling the already completely functional kitchen. The kitchen remodel cost a third of the property’s total value and now she won’t spend money on any repairs in the house because she spent too much there. It is a mobile home that has a lot of floor damage that needs to be fixed, among other things. It is also considerably smaller than the rental we lived in, which was already too small for 8 people.
In addition to these things, there has been a constant stream of Amazon packages – hundreds of dollars a month – since John passed. She has almost covered her body in tattoos during this time as well, going to very well-known and extremely expensive artists.
The real kicker is that she quit her job when John died. I have zero issues with this, but she isn’t doing anything to make money, while I work both my day job and my design job to try to keep up with the house bills. The property taxes on her house (she didn’t put me on the deed either) went up by $4000 this year. She spends most of her time laying on the couch watching TV, smoking weed, and driving her kids around. My son has to ride the bus every morning because there “isn’t room” in her mini-van for him (that’s just not true).
She did get 4 geriatric dogs with all kinds of problems that she was in no way prepared to handle and made them the rest of the house’s problem. Two of them are gone now due to extreme behavioral issues, but the house will reak of urine and feces until the carpets and rugs are all replaced. She treats the dogs better than she treats my son, and they sit in one of the seats in the minivan that doesn’t have room for him in the mornings.
At the beginning of this year, I began separating our finances. I knew things weren’t going well and I had a feeling something was coming based on the previously mentioned behaviors. Sure enough, I discovered a note she had written and left on the floor in our shared room that talked about how she hates that John left us with her. I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to see it but was supposed to see it if you catch my meaning. When I really look back, she has been passive-aggressively pushing me out the whole time I’ve known them, I just tried to overlook it because she was saying the opposite. Actions speak much louder than words though.
So here I am, paying to live at her house so that my son has a roof over his head and can finish the school year where he started it. Although at this point, if I could relocate tomorrow I’d pull him out and start the move now. Her kids want nothing to do with me and often speak very poorly of me and my son when they don’t think I can hear. I often hear her and her kids picking on my son, but they stop immediately when I enter the room, acting like I am being ridiculous or too sensitive if I call them out on it.
At this time, my son and I are living at Sarah’s during the school week and going to stay with friends or at my boyfriend’s place during the weekends. The cost of driving back and forth, combined with not having any of our own space has been a lot, both financially and mentally.
I feel irresponsible, and am embarrassed that I’ve allowed myself and my son to get into this position. I also feel taken advantage of and am mad that I was lied to about so much by so many people, for so many years. I don’t know what I was thinking, leaving a situation where I had no safety net, just to get into another with even less.
All I want to do is have a house close enough to my job that I don’t waste all of my time and money on commuting. I just want to have a home that is mine, that no one else gets to keep without me or take away from me without my permission. I want my son and me to have our own rooms. I have been trying to save money, but have just been sinking into more and more debt as Sarah’s bills have increased and inflation has skyrocketed.
I’ve had confirmed COVID 3 times just this year, in addition to dealing with grief and depression. I have been jumping through the hoops to get state assistance for months, but their communication and website are poor at best, and I have a hard time getting my mail from Sarah on a consistent basis. I found out today that I have more forms to fill out, one being confirmation of a rental agreement, which I do not have.
I need housing that allows pets, as I will not rehome or put my cats in a shelter. I’d love to be able to bring my chickens and ducks as well, but am willing to work with what I need to with that. I do regularly use my birds as a source of food.
My goal is to raise money to pull myself out of debt and find an affordable rental or be able to make a downpayment on a home as soon as possible.
None of my family is in a financial position to help me with this move, I won’t ever have any sort of inheritance coming to me. I DO have a couple of friends with land in the area that have said I can set up a mobile home on one of their properties until I’m able to purchase a plot of my own, but I do not currently own a mobile home. I do think that is a good short-term option.
So that’s what I’m trying to fund – a home for me and my son.
Thanks for reading… I appreciate anything you may have to give.
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