I'm 70 With No Retirement And Living Paycheck-To-Paycheck

Brought to you by the EveryDollar app. Start budgeting for free today. We've for quite a while now, we've had financial problems with bills. We owe a lot of debt and one of the problems is my wife has a habit of spending constantly and she pretty much goes through all of the income that we have in a month. We've had discussions over it and everything and you know it doesn't set in but it is a little bit, I mean she's a little better but she just has this habit of when she walks in the store she's got to buy. Okay, how can we help? Well my question is as to what direction should I be using to I guess get her to stop completely from wasting the money and then being able to catch up on things. I mean Bob when you say that, I mean you're saying that she's spending the whole paycheck so would you, I mean would you think it's a level of addiction would you say? Would And has she gotten help for it? Besides you just telling her not to? Okay, why not? Yeah, yeah we've had numerous discussions on it. Because you're not going to change her. She has to do the work to understand what is happening for her because it's a real thing. I mean we see that more often than, I mean it's becoming more and more common I feel like. So why has she not taken steps to find healing in this? Well the strange thing is she knows that she's, you know the problem to our problem and you know she's always feeling sorry for it but you know when the income comes in she goes out and she spends and she doesn't look at what she's spending. In other words she'll How old are you guys? Pardon me? How old are you two? She's 78 and I'm going to be 73 in the next couple of weeks. Bob why don't you just take her, like she can't have access to the money. Like if it's an addiction like this, this is what we would tell couples is to say the one that is struggling does not get access to money because she has a spending addiction and you would say all right we're going to have x amount for groceries and when you go grocery store this is you know if that's what she does then here's the amount you have because she doesn't get access to the checking account. Yeah and the income, what is your income monthly? Believe it or not it's over seven thousand. Okay I believe it and how much debt have you guys run up? Well the house still has a hundred and sixty seven thousand, I mean two hundred and sixty seven thousand we probably have about forty thousand dollars in debt. On what? Well we have one vehicle, you know we have numerous credit cards. So what do you owe on your car? I believe it's about twenty five thousand. Okay and what do you owe on the credit cards? Credit cards total about ten thousand dollars. Okay and that's thirty five and what's the other five? The other five would probably be well actually we just had a roof put on the house so. That's five grand? Yeah. Really you had a roof put on your house for five thousand dollars? Well I mean I paid some of it so there's some money left over on it. Okay like a lot more. So you guys can live on seven thousand dollars if you have your if you're in agreement and in alignment and you stick to a budget and you could reduce the debt. Agreed? Yes yes. Is there you own two cars? Nothing's paid for? One vehicle. I'm sorry? One vehicle. The only car you have is twenty five thousand dollars in debt? Right. Okay all right but I think you could probably with that kind of an income clear the forty thousand dollars in debt if we were reasonably spending on seven thousand dollars. Agreed? That's what your problem is. Okay. Yeah. And so I you know the way it's going to sound at my house and you can do what you want to do but you called us is hon I think we have a problem and it's you. You're out of control and you can't seem to control it and it's really sad. Consequently we don't have any money and we're in debt and we have plenty of income and so here's what's going to happen. We're going to try this first. We're going to agree on a budget this month. You and I both have a vote. We're going to spend seven thousand dollars on the every dollar app and we're going to have a plan and we're going to stick to that plan and you're not going to go into a store and go out of control again. If you do next month you will have zero access to the money. I will shut everything down and put it in my name to protect me and our family from you. Right. That's how it's going to sound. So we're going to try this together like two grown-ups that can function and so if you're being immature you can merely adjust the immaturity. If you are an addict we're going to discover that in one more month and we're going to treat you like an addict at that point. I don't know. I can't diagnose if someone has an OCD. Well there's a level of medicating that's for sure going on. Well at a minimum there's immaturity and princess syndrome or something. Right but at a minimum at a maximum two percent of the public has been diagnosed literally with a spending addiction a shopping addiction and two percent and it's an OCD behavior and you know it's a psychological label and done by professionals and we deal with them but most of the time when we deal with it we're just dealing with somebody who's being selfish immature and a princess or I deserve it and you don't kind of thing and you do so I don't know which one she is but I would if it was my wife I'm going to have a real clear conversation that says for one more month we're going to try this and if we fail this experiment that you and I cannot act like two adults at 78 freaking years old we can't act like grown-ups and live within our means then I'm going to shut down your access to everything. And it sounds like that's what's going to happen I mean yeah 100% and Bob for her sake too encouraging her we just said this in the last call but for real she needs to go get help for it because as she's not a whole person like there there is a level there that is eroding her quality of life who she is as a person and who she's going to be as a wife I'm like you're getting someone who's not functioning but none of us are fully but but there is a very obvious issue there that she's just not addressing head-on and and I don't think you're getting the quality wife that you could have too if she doesn't go through a level of healing to this because that's probably what I mean like yeah it could be immaturity and all of it but at 78 and him having this conversation her knowing intellectually where they are but her compulsion it's still happening there's stuff happening in there so I I would for her sake like the financial side is one thing Bob but if that's my spouse I'm like I want her to get healing I want her to to understand what's going on and to and to find I don't know peace in this because there's just chaos happening inside of her I would imagine and it's coming out medicating in spending and so you're not getting a great wife either a great partner she's not getting a great self I don't know there's a lot there's a thing mixed up between in the psychology in the spirituality of godliness with contentment is great gain and if I can't find contentment and so I'm chasing it somewhere else that is a spiritual disease yeah and it's also can be an addictive compulsion and it can be just immature immaturity yeah that's right you know self-centeredness that's right and no one ever told me no that's right yeah and including you Bob you've never told her no and um you know and her daddy never told her in a pretty like yeah like consequential way we're not doing that yeah yeah it's not an option and so um so I can't tell exactly and I'm really not going to diagnose something as severe as a spending addiction and this but it it could be so I'm gonna treat it that way and move down that process and it's gonna stop one way or the other create your free every dollar budget today the simplest way to budget for your life