"You Need To Tell Your Husband About This Today"

If your private student loans are in default, you're not out of options. Go to whyrefi.com slash Ramsey. I'm a married woman in my 50s with $25,000 in debt that my husband doesn't know about. I started a part-time job and I'm slowly paying it off. I grew up in a middle-class family and my mother was always trying to save a dollar, which drove me crazy. My husband is a good man who makes about $175,000 a year. We don't have a mortgage and have about 1.5 million in retirement. We have a healthy retirement investments and our parents have set up 529s for our children. So college is set. I like to buy nice things for myself, but I feel terrible about the way I've handled my finances. Should I continue to pay this off myself or come clean and tell him about the debt? To answer your question bluntly, yeah, I would come clean and tell him about the debt. Not only can you guys get this cleaned up together, but also carrying around a secret like that and functioning at that level in your marriage is going to erode not only your marriage, but also you. You can't carry that stuff. Secrets is what erodes trust in a marriage. You carrying that is not being a person of integrity, being fully honest. That's going to be a very hard conversation. People that deal with financial infidelity, and thankfully you guys have the... Sounds like the margin that you're going to be able to take care of it. But people that get stuck with this stuff, it does feel like a level of betrayal, sometimes at the same level as actual infidelity going on in a marriage. I'm not saying it's going to be easy, Lauren, but carrying it around is fine. I can't expect your husband to be pissed because you lied to him. I like nice things, so I lied to you. I don't think that's okay. No, it's not. It's not okay. I think you expect him to be pissed, and he should be. Not because of the money, but because of the deception and the lying. That's some serious stuff in your relationship. So yeah, you need to come clean yesterday, deal with whatever the consequences are. It may put you on the marriage counselor's office, which would be okay with me. Then the second thing is that you can afford nice things, but you can't afford to do it under the table. Hide the target bags under the bed. That's not funny. This is a grown woman, and you're 50 freaking years old. It's time to act like it. You and your husband need to sit down and have an adequate budget for you to buy some nice things. Part of it was you grew up in a tight household where they didn't have any money, and so your husband makes $175,000 a year. You want to have a nice dress. That's okay. I want 14 nice dresses. No, then that's something wrong with you. Well, that's what I was going to say. At that point, yes, where she is, I'm like, there's stuff inside of you, Lauren, that's coming out sideways in the form of money. For some people, it's other things that they sit there and medicate with. For some people, it is. It's the spending. It's the money. Figuring out what that is for you, for yourself to get healthy, is going to be a gift later on to your marriage. We can afford to do a lot of things that we choose not to do, because in our minds, they're ridiculous. But she and I, Sharon and I, choose to do that together. Then there's some things that we choose to do that other people think are ridiculous. I don't care what they think. It's not their money. We just buy that because we want to, and we have the money. Shut up. You can do that, but you're in agreement on that amount. My wife wants to do such and such in the redecorating, which is a constant budget line item. At least we know what it is, and we're doing it together. It's a reasonable percentage of our world. It doesn't mess up everything else. She gets to enjoy that thing that I don't even understand. That's okay. I can do that as a husband. She can do that as a wife. But we can be on the same page. It's a line item in our overall plan, and there's room for it. I think that's the case here. There's room for you to have some nice things, but not by hiding them. You need to come clean today. You need to expect him to be not about the money, but about the lying, for him to be really pissed. I don't know of anybody that wouldn't be. You've broken trust, and it may take a little while to rebuild that trust. It may take some time in a marriage counselor's office, and that's okay. I wouldn't mind that for y'all at all because there's a lot of stuff going on here that needs to be fixed. But the way you all have been handling money as a couple has not allowed you the freedom to speak up and say, I want to buy something. Yeah, and it's either that you have an issue, Lauren, that you have to live below your means and you don't like that, and so you go off and do whatever you want and go charge it on credit cards. That's your issue. But then on the flip side, he could be kind of a jerk and like shaming you over every purchase. You're like, I don't want to deal with that. I'll just come over here and do my own thing too, right? Which is an issue too. But the way you're money as a couple has partly led to this. Either you're not speaking up or him putting his thumb on it or some of both. Somewhere in there. YREFI refinances defaulted private student loans for struggling borrowers. Learn more at Y-R-E-F-Y dot com slash Ramsey.