I was in this situation with a girlfriend a few years back. I had gone to school part time so I could avoid student debt. She had taken 5 years on a 4 year degree at a fancy private school in a big city. At the time I was debt free other than a small mortgage which I wasn’t upside down on so really I could have sold and walked away any time, plus I had about 20k cash saved up with enough time vested in a pension fund to be guaranteed at least a partial payout some day so my head was at least above water in life at that point. She had 70k worth of student loans, plus I’m not exactly sure how much she had worth of a car loan and credit card debt, but I’m assuming when she said 70k she meant like 79,999 and was about 100k in the hole total and was living paycheck to paycheck in addition to whining to her dad for money pretty much on a monthly basis it seemed, at least for the time we dated.
Now if that were the case but she was making good money, I don’t think I’d have minded so much from an economic standpoint…but I was making 40k a year at the time and she was making less than I with no desire to pick up a part time job on the side to pay off her s~~~ faster. In other words…if we moved in together, or even worse, got married at some point, it was pretty much going to boil down to either me helping her pay her debt off directly or me paying the bulk of the bills so she could pay her debt down faster…which basically amounted to me just paying her debt down.
Problem was I was making 40k and she was probably around 32k. Even if I 100% supported her and she put everything she earned towards her debt it would have taken her 4-5 years to dig out after factoring in interest. 4-5 years of me having a needlessly s~~~ty standard of living to pay penance for cupcakes past poor choices was too much for me to deal with. What was the alternative? Keep paying the minimum for the next 20 years or whatever and have that nonstop debt around when I had worked so hard to avoid it myself?
The worse part of all was how she ran it up. She had told me random stories about bars, parties, big league ball games(expensive!) she had been to, and her multiple Spring Break trips(where she was getting c~~~ of course). She had told me she had one night stands during her college days but wasn’t proud of it and doesn’t do it anymore. She had shuffled through multiple live in boyfriends during that time. It was obvious what she did…she borrowed every penny she could so she could slut it up and live the life while in college and now hated the fact that she had to carry her s~~~ty life choices forward into all future relationships.
Why would I want to pay for that? I would be literally paying for cupcake to have spent 5 years of her life living on credit f~~~ing a bunch of dudes that weren’t me. If you had a girlfriend that said “I want to go on a trip to Cancun for a week with some other guy and have porn star sex with him all week,” would you pay for it? Well why the hell would I…just because her party days happened before we met but still needed paid for, that was exactly the deal I felt like I was getting.
This was the first girlfriend I had post college where finances were really part of the package. Needless to say, I haven’t had a girlfriend since then and that was the one that made me really reconsider ever wanting to get married. A divorce would simply suck too hard going into a situation where I had assets and a higher income and she had debt and a lower income. It basically meant in the event of a divorce I’d basically be losing years worth of work while cupcake would be walking away with a windfall as some judge “made things fair.” F~~~ that. Now I’m at a point where I’m in my early 30s…most the women around my age have hit the wall already or are damn near close to it, and I’m assuming most haven’t made much progress on paying back student loans because they all love their new cars and vacations. Additionally I’ve had more time to build assets and have raised my income considerable. Year after year I’m putting more on the line as I build wealth and further my career while the quality of woman I’ll say +/- 5 years of my age declines more and more. Its too bad for women they were too stupid to settle down earlier when guys like me still viewed them as worth it…hope the carousel ride was worth it!
MarketWatcher 2 years, 8 months ago.
