Marriage for Holly brought financial problems – a situation she wasn’t used to and happily one that changed quickly once she was divorced.
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Breaking away from someone else’s view of money was a huge breakthrough for me. It really is amazing. He had such scarcity issues and they were stronger than my abundance issues. He was always about ‘there’s never enough money’ and there was a slight resentment to people who had wealth like they were bad people if they had money and he didn’t. I was used to managing my own money. I was never used to having financial problems and all of a sudden we were married and having financial problems.
You would think that if there wasn’t enough money somebody would be more judicious with it but whatever money came in, got spent. It was just different from the way I operate. He would find cars in the newspaper that he thought were a really good deal, that he’d be able to fix up and resell. If he saw a deal, he would feel compelled to buy the car, even if he already had three cars. He’d buy it with a credit card and then not be able to fix it up or not sell it for what he thought it was worth.
I swear the week I moved out I felt something opened up, like there was more money in bank account. There probably really wasn’t but energetically I was breaking away from this scarcity pattern and this not enough pattern. It felt like overnight there was enough – ‘There is enough money. I can make this work.’ Since then I’ve worked my way up to VP/executive level at companies and just five months ago I left a well-paying VP position to start my own company with a partner. That is something I never thought I would do.
When we got divorced, it forced me to look closely at my own money. I didn’t even know until the divorce that he had over $30,000 in credit card debt. We live in a no-fault divorce state so I had to pay half that debt. He got the house that I had put the down payment on and I pay him child support even though we share custody 50/50. It was a wake up call for me. I could be angry that I write him a check every month but I’d rather look at as I would be willing to pay a million dollars not to be married to him.
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Holly said one of the reasons that lead to her divorce was that she and her ex didn’t know each other very well. They’d only dated for about a year before they married. Handling money was just one of their differences. It also became a contentious issue in my marriage. I look back and realize there was so much my ex and I didn’t talk about before we got married – so many aspects of life we just assumed we’d be able to figure out because we got along well and were both reasonable people. I wonder if we’d done a pre-marriage couples counseling class if things would have turned out differently? Will never know the answer to that one but I will be encouraging my children to take such class when the time comes.