What It's Like to Date Someone Who's Terrible with Money

Let's face it. If you're a young millennial type, you're probably quite bad with money. But we all are, right?!! We get paid very little, don't have a concept of saving, probably won't ever own property, and all readily admit to being financially fucked.

But some people are seriously bad with money. Huge credit card bills, bailiffs, eviction bad. Research shows that 18-to-24-year-olds make up 21 percent of the UK's over-indebted population – that's more than more than 1.8 million young people falling into serious financial difficulty as they start out as "adults". And these guys aren't all dying alone, so someone must be dating them. So what do you do when you find out that your new person is first-rate financially fucked? That their constantly misplaced wallet is actually an attempt to hide thousands of pounds of debt? That ordering a salad and a tap water reflects a perennially empty fridge at home?

We spoke to some people who have dated, gone out with and even married people who have had serious money problems, to find out what it's like to be continually picking up the bill.

We were together for 18 months, from the ages of 17 to 18. Around this time, he was supposedly working at a butchers on Saturday mornings, but he rarely went in. Even when he did, he was usually on some kind of substance like LSD. I was earning about £180 a month on the weekends from sixth form, and was spending nearly all of it on both of us going out to raves.

As well as the butchers, he used to try to deal drugs to make money, but since he took most of his own stash, he never really made any profit and was basically just feeding his own addictions. The worst this got was five days before Christmas. I was at my grandparents' and he called me up crying because he owed some scary drug dealer about £400. He actually had done for a whole month, but chose to ignore it. In the end he had to come and stay at mine over Christmas that year because his mum said he had ruined it for the family. I'm pretty sure the drug dealers knew where he lived, so he basically put his three young siblings at risk.

The other clear memory of his money troubles was when he stole his alcoholic father's bank card for a couple of weeks. I do not know how much he spent all together, but with it he got me expensive pearl earrings (which I still have), booked a weekend trip and bought a quarter ounce of weed to take with us. I accepted it all, mainly because I felt like he owed me the world after all the shit I put up with from him.

When we were first dating, he hid how badly in debt he was and lived a very extravagant lifestyle, by paying for dinners and driving a flash car and staying in a nice flat. But it was all a sham.

Part of the reason we got married was because he asked me to quit my job to go into business with him. I was like, I'm not going to do that for somebody that didn't have a stake in it or any commitment to me. When I told him that, he said, "In that case, will you marry me?" It was the most unromantic proposal ever.

On our honeymoon, we discussed our finances, and he admitted that he had about £30,000 of credit card debt. And at the time I'd been saving for ten years for enough money for a deposit on a house, a figure which was coincidentally also about £30,000 pounds. So essentially in marrying him, my savings cancelled out his debt. Because what's mine is yours and all that.

Once we were married I panicked and realised we couldn't afford to do anything and couldn't go out, but he kept spending this money that I knew we didn't have. One time I remember very clearly having to raid the penny jar to go and buy food. He'd gone out and I needed to buy food for our two kids, so I had to literally raid this jar to go buy milk and bread.

When confronted about it all he got aggressive, or was just in complete denial about it. He just had a warped idea of who he was and what he was entitled to, so was living beyond his means to emulate the lifestyle he thought he deserved. By the time we got a divorce, I got the equity from the house, but all of it went on our tax bills and bank debt.

We were introduced through a mutual friend on holiday when I was 19 or 20, and the relationship lasted three and a half years after that. It was fairly evident from the start that she was bad with money, even from her appearance. Not saying that as a bad thing, she looked good, just… too good for not actually having a job.

She spent literally every penny of her (eventual) salary, after living expenses, on clothes within the first few days of receiving it. And then she would live off me for the rest of the month. The worst thing she ever did was take out payday loans in my name. Several of them, without my knowledge, to the point where Wonga was pre-authorising £1200. Worse than that, she took a loan out right around the time we broke up, and it was never paid back. I found out a month later when the default letters started coming through. None of this was ever paid back to me.

Was she aware of being bad with money? Yes. Did she care about it? No. The thousands of pounds of debt she accumulated was pretty much nothing to her. When the second part of it had been paid off in the form of a monthly payment, it was re-spent immediately.

I met him at a party during my freshman year of college and things took off almost immediately. We ended up dating for nearly four years. Towards the second half of the relationship, when I was a little older and had a job for the first time and was learning how to manage money on my own. I realised then how terrible he was with his.

On dates, we would go out to eat and go to concerts, but never to anything that was "nice" or "expensive". He also very rarely paid for me (which isn't a problem) but when he did, the way he went about it made me uncomfortable. He was overly concerned with keeping track of how much money I owed him, if he covered expenses for me he would keep a note on his phone with itemisation of what I owed him for and exactly how much.

One thing that particularly got under my skin was that he would come over for meals and eat out of my pantry and groceries more often than he would provide me with dinner. We spent nearly every day together, so this became a recurring habit, and one that really annoyed me – just because I was still in school and my parents were paying for my groceries didn't mean that it was okay for them to pay for all of his meals as well.

Despite all this, he actually spent all of his money on shopping. I think he had a serious compulsive shopping problem. We would go shopping and I would have to wait for him for hours to finish looking through the racks and he would walk out with a massive pile of items. At the time he worked at both Urban Outfitters and Whole Foods, and would come home from nearly every shift with something for himself, or me, that he "had to get".

I don't think he was ever aware of his money problems, and if he was, he didn't see them as problems. He was very entitled and believed he deserved the most possible while putting in the least amount of effort, in every aspect of his life.

He asked me out on Twitter, and then we stayed together for about nine months. He was freelance when I first met him so that was fair enough as I'm in the same position and struggle a lot with money. But then he got a decent salaried job and nothing seemed to change.

I once had to go to his office with money because he couldn't get home, having just spent everything on a stag do. I took him a travel card and some money for food, then a few hours later found out he'd actually gone and spent it on cheap vodka and was drunk alone in an alleyway. That incident has been brought up several times but I haven't had an apology or anything. I had frequently questioned why he was always so skint when his rent wasn't much and he was on a regular salary, but whatever he's hiding, he certainly doesn't want to tell me.

I was actually told several months in that he had just recently been made to sign a contract promising not to bother his ex for money, which I had no idea was going on. I mean, he always admits when he's broke, but doesn't explain why. I'm not really sure how much of the ex stuff has to do with it, or if the alcohol thing was more serious than he let on. But it does seem odd though as he seems to still book holidays yet not have any money for a beer.

@bijubelinky

Read more from The VICE Guide to Finance 2016 here