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draekin13
144 M Embraced 1
PathStep 14 Compassion hearts9 Forum posts3 Forum upvotes1 Current upvotes1 Age GroupAdult Last activeFebruary, 2022 Member sinceOctober 17, 2019
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Life outside work
35 & Over Community / by draekin13
Last post
 February 3rd, 2022
...See more Don't think I'm alone here but I have found now being a professional in my field of IT I have lost touch with most of my friends as we are all kind of in the same spot with work and kids and covid. So what does everyone do to stay in touch with friends, or even make new friends as an adult? What else do you do outside of work with friends or when you have time to yourself? I used to play video games but can never seem to dedicate time to being able to do that anymore.
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What to do
Relationship Stress / by draekin13
Last post
 February 2nd, 2022
...See more My wife and I have been together for a little over 7 years. I have a job in IT and make a very comfortable salary, she works in billing for a company and makes a decent salary as well. Until my most recent promotion she was making about 80% of my pay, she now makes about 60% of what I make. I have been struggling with the distribution of finances and overall chores. She works slightly more hours than I do but also has a Rover dog sitting business and trains horses/riders. She has shown horses essentially all her life and this is her passion and her hobby. We have a nice house with acreage dedicated to the horses, a barn, and shelters for more horses. In all we have 7 horses on the property with 3 of them paying board/training costs. There are obviously chores that have to be done every day, this comes out to probably an hour or two of cleaning and feeding. I have tried to support her as much as possible, to the point of when her and her mother started having issues and her mother started to take away things like use of truck and trailer I sold my new Audi SQ5 (cars are my passion) to buy a truck so she could still haul her horses around as needed. I also frequently take time off work so I can follow her to horse shows to help out with whatever I can. I have been very lucky in my career that we now have two trucks, a travel trailer, and I was able to get another Audi. We have about $4800 monthly bills that come out of our joint bank account, until recently I contributed $2500 and she contributes $2300, with my latest raise I am now putting $2800. Those monthly bills cover the house, one truck, travel trailer, utilities, and groceries. I pay for the other truck, car insurance, anything else we need around the house (think everything from cleaning supplies to furniture), maintenance on all the vehicles, basically anything else outside of what our monthly bills cover. Calculating this just for last year it came out to me paying $3500/month, and this doesn’t include us going out to eat or vacations (my other passion is traveling). We started talking about finances because a credit card I cosigned for her was several months late and ended up taking a hit on my credit score. I paid it off and she has put both her credit cards on auto pay for the minimum payment at least. This is when I found out her other credit card has roughly $10k on it and the one I paid off was around $1k. I personally have no credit card debt, I use them frequently but pay them off each month. She has said I need to pay more because she doesn’t pay as much but when we sat down to look at her finances she is going in debt about $1300 a month. She has attributed this mostly to vet bills for the horses she owns. She says it is unfair for her to pay more when her expenses are so much higher than mine. Which is half of why I’m struggling. I mean this is her hobby is it fair for me to have to compensate household finances because she is spending nearly $3k/month on average on her hobby? The other half of this is because she has so many horses on the property, shows her own horse, and helps her daughter show I am left with most of the chores around the house (cooking/cleaning) along with project work around the farm (running hotwire, building stuff, upkeep of land, etc). When we try to talk about it we are always civil but I don’t ever feel like we get to a better place. She will cook dinner and maybe sweep the floor after a dog has been over but after a week or two we are back to “normal” and I am doing everything again. She said she is doing her part because she is doing most of the chores that revolve around the horses, which I see this as part of her hobby, not part of our household chores, though maybe my perspective on this is what is wrong. The last part of this is because she is dedicating all her time to her work streams and hobby I rarely get quality time with her. She will come back in the house at 7pm or later sit down to eat some dinner that I made an hour or two previous and then just want to watch TV and scroll on her phone. I can’t recall the last time we went on a real date and even our last vacation (my birthday weekend) she ended up on the phone frequently talking to her daughter or the others that board about the horses making sure everything was ok. Apologies for this being so long, I think more than anything I just needed to get this out on paper to understand what I’m even feeling, not so much anger but disappointment that I feel I dedicate so much to her, her daughter, and their passion but I can’t seem to get anything in return when I need it. Thanks for listening.
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