Money Problems

Have you ever had problems with money? It seems like in the twenty years I have been married, all we have had is money problems. I am only now finding out just how much trouble we are/were having. We have gotten ourselves in such debt that I don't think we will ever be free. It is sickening and no matter how mad about it I get, I still only have myself to blame. Being a stay-at-home mom, my attention was almost exclusively focused on the children. My husband "paid" the bills and I didn't think too much about it. On several occasions I offered to take the burden of paying the bills off of my husband's shoulders, but he refused. A couple of times, after I insisted, he showed me his bookkeeping and had it so confusing, and so complicated that all he did was yell at me when he was trying to show me what he was doing. I have always been a little "old school" with my bookkeeping--paper and pencil and a tickler file. Anyway, in the last year, I have taken over a good bit of the bill paying and was shocked at the amount of credit card debt we are in. I had no idea my husband had used cash advances and balance transfers to max out most of the credit cards we had. While I would love to put all the blame on him, I certainly have to take responsibility for some of the situation as well. If I had not wanted to get a table for the kitchen, or landscaping, or bedroom accessories, then he might not have felt so much pressure to put things on a credit card. At any rate, we are in a terrible fix. I don't see any other way out except to file for bankruptcy. This makes me heartsick. We have children who will be going to college and very likely will be affected by this move. We are considering Chapter 13, which makes me want to vomit every time I think about it, but unless one of us has a rich uncle we don't know about, or we win a sweepstakes, we are out of options. I recently got a part-time job after being unemployed for 17 years, but now I am wondering if I will even be able to afford gas for my car to get me to that job. It is a black hole we are falling into, and I am scared!