We have a yearly payment for both pieces. We have a lot of surplus money around thanks to hard work on the day jobs and a good year on the farm and just plain getting ahead that we will be able to scrape together X (with a lot more left over) and just pay off one piece.
This concerns me gravely. There is so much fun we want to have in retirement and so much fun we want to have until then. Ain’t no ten year anniversary trip to Sandals on one income! Plus I’d like us to be able to buy more land. We regularly contribute to the kids’ 529. That’s going to be difficult.
There are good arguments in both directions - but something that also has to be acknowledged is that there are two people involved, and not just in the sense of it being a joint decision. I am not referring to @Mighty_Mouse , because I don’t know anything about his situation - but I have known many people who chose to live the life they wanted to live when they were younger without considering that it meant their spouse might never get to live the life they wanted to live.
I suspect that it looks to her that you want her to keep working a dead-end job that she hates so that you can continue to buy/pay off land, because it gives you intense satisfaction to see your farmland and net worth grow.
I wouldn’t want to work a shitty job for the rest of my life to allow my husband to live out his dream of being a gentleman farmer.
There’s a woman on another website’s board who has said that she now regrets being a SAHM because she might not be able to retire at all, especially if her husband died. I, and a lot of other people, said that she should not regret it, because she did the right thing for her family, and chances are, with 3 kids, any income advantage would have been eaten up by child care and other work-related expenses.
p.s. And not to be Debbie Downer, but there’s no guarantee that anyone will live to retirement age.
I’ll never be a full time “gentleman farmer”. Hell, considering what some just sold for I probably won’t get anymore bought. But I would like to provide a nice retirement for us and an inheritance for my kids and the ability for them to be raised in a way that fewer and fewer kids get raised these days.
Yeah, retirement means different things to different people. My FIL retired and he spends 70% of his time traveling. When I retire I will spend it reading and writing and puttering around my house. Which is not so different from my life now, I’ll just feel less guilty about it.
We both decided a long time ago we value time more than money. That applies to both of us. So we live, and plan, accordingly.
Sure, that’s your goal. But at the beginning of the thread you made it sound like your wife was so simple that she got made that you made the mortgage payment, because she didn’t understand foreclosure and homelessness. Now it’s clear that what’s really happening is that you have a very strong urge to own land free and clear, and you make large excess payments on farmland on your own,without her support.
Technically speaking,I bet those payments don’t even make financial sense. The interest rate is low enough that you’d do better to invest the money elsewhere, and pay off the land as slowly as possible. But (and I get this), owning the land, really owning it and having it as a thing to hand down, that means something to you.
But it doesn’t mean anything to your wife. You keep “trying to explain”, but it’s not that she doesn’t understand, it’s just that the process of building ownership that doesn’t satisfy anything in her. So she’s financing this thing that gives you lots of good feelings of satisfaction and accomplishment, but gives her nothing.
I wonder how common this is. Happened to me, too. Didn’t end well, though technically it hasn’t completely ended. I feel like I’m living out the end of a sentence with work release.
One thing I keep forgetting it: I did this once - what she wants to do, although under different circumstances.
After college I hated M-F 8-5 jobs because I felt I couldn’t get anything done. That coupled with the fact that I had gotten into some trouble with drinking I decided to say screw it and become self employed with farming, day-trading, and selling seed on the side. It didn’t work, I sold no seed, had a bad year farming and had to take a miserable rotating shift job making jackshit an hour.
Tried my damndest to line up a job with my degree but always got questioned what I was doing those seven months off and I was tired of being embarrassed so I just quit applying for those kinds of jobs and basically put my head down, worked my ass off, and DEVELOPED AN ENTIRELY NEW SKILLSET, to which I’ve gotten better and better shift jobs and then finally have a kickass job focusing on my new skillset ALMOST 11 YEARS LATER…
Wife’s situation is a bit different, but boy do I look back and wonder how we’d be living today if I had just done X different.
This doesn’t jibe with “my wife is frustrated that the money she wanted to spend disappears into a mortgage payment.” Or rather, if you are really making one big payment a year, yeah, it must be a shock to her to see all that money disappear into the ground. You may think of it as valuable equity, but I bet she sees it as a plot of land that’s probably not even visible from the house, something that provides her little value.
Pressuring your wife to continue working in a job that is growing increasingly stressful to her so you can look at fields doesn’t, honestly, strike me as a great idea. I’m all in favor of saving for retirement, but
land can be a shaky investment.
how much to save vs. how much to spend now (and spending time with her kids is a form of spending now) should be a joint decision.
she needs to know how much money is actually available for her to spend. I said this above, but if you two agree to drop a lot of your income into land or other savings, it’s probably easier for her if it comes off the top, into a separate account, so she can look at the balance of the account holding disposable income and understand what’s available.
FWIW, it’s not necessarily better with money. My circumstances are too complex to go into here. But similar to the OP, my wife very much acts as if everyone needs to follow her life agenda. And if you don’t, it’s met with passive aggressive bullshit, irrational rationalizations, sulking, tantrums and other nonsense. The only difference is that with her own income, she doesn’t really need my permission or approval to do it.
I’d say her circumstances are VERY different: she’s put her head down and worked at a job she hated for years (AND has done most of the work on the home front). Has she gotten into trouble with drinking? Has she taken 7 months to try self-employment? Not faulting you for the drinking trouble or saying you didn’t work hard. Just pointing out your wife hasn’t exactly been sitting around eating bonbons and getting mani-pedis. Nor is she proposing she do that now.
While we all agree MLM is a bad idea, it certainly would involve her working her ass off and learning a new skill set.
Having been following this thread, my feeling is that you are being optimistic on the time frame, based on my experience.
Kwc, what I’m seeing is a wife who has already all but packed her bags and moved out. She’s pretty much disengaged, mostly, but still going through the motions because you guys made a life commitment to each other, but the things you’ve described her doing tells me she’s got a foot out the door already.
You have a lot of work if you want a long HAPPY AND HEALTHY marriage with her and the only thing you can change is YOU. Do not worry about changing your wife, that’s a guarantee for failure. I see a relationship so on the rocks, that you almost have to start from scratch in rebuilding it. A lot of what you might have to do, to rebuild your marriage in a way that is equitable, healthy, and happy you will not like. Counselling will reveal things that will HURT, and you may not be able to work past them.
I’d ask your wife to hold off on the selling oils for now(long term its a no starter, I “sold” amway, the original mlm) until you get the marriage off the rocks and either going again or over with.
FWIW, she’s probably interested in the mlm because the group that’s recruiting her is giving her something she doesn’t get from you( mlm are scummy emotional predators)
Make time to talk, really talk and really listen. Get a babysitter and go out somewhere, away from the house and its distractions.
My husband and I periodically go out for dinner to someplace where they don’t care if you sit for a long time, and we just … review our life, I guess. Personally I find I can say things I need to say that way without getting overly emotional; the public setting keeps me focused on getting my message across in a quiet way. That’s not to say I turn into a screaming banshee at home, but out in a restaurant I can keep a better rein on my emotions, and that makes for a much cleaner, calmer tough conversation.
How would you know she’s hated it? She has always said she was happy with it. I’ve suggested making a jump to supervisory roles or even a real cushy government job that fit her skillset to mix things up and she’s always shut me down with content smugness. (“Nope. Not interested…”)
Thank you. We are going out tonight for axe-throwing (that will be interesting) and supper without the kids. Really looking forward to our mini vacation we are taking right after Christmas for our anniversary to Minneapolis for two nights at a hotel with a pool and hot tub on the roof open year round.
Truer words have not been spoken. And, worse comes to worst, you’ve become a better, healthier version of yourself even if things don’t work out. For me and my wife, things were rocky, and while it came from both sides, I realized with self-reflection that for all the stuff I felt she did that was unfair to me, I did, after reflecting with brutal honesty, at least as much dumb shit to her. Once I was able to see things from her perspective and work on myself (this included drinking, diagnosing a psychiatric condition and being treated for it, and learning better ways of dealing with the world and people – and I had never thought I was bad at that, but I realized I could be much better. Improving communication skills was among the biggest lessons I learned), things somehow fell into place. At any rate, it also got me to the point that if this doesn’t work out, I’m in a mental place where I think I can accept it much more graciously and rationally than a year ago. But this last year has been calm and our relationship has been the steadiest and most rewarding it’s been since we probably started dating. But, even more importantly for myself, I’ve been the steadiest and emotionally levelheaded I’ve ever been in my life (and she has told me this, completely unprompted). I primarily did this for myself.
If your wife were to take your collective relationship issues to a similar forum to this one … what story would she tell ?
That’s rhetorical. I’m not asking you to answer that here. But I do think it’s valuable, worthwhile, and often extremely difficult to answer that question well.
And I think it’s directly related to active listening (“What I hear you saying is …”) that others have mentioned above.
Um…“this included stopping drinking,” of course. Something I didn’t think was that much an issue until it became obvious to me (exacerbated by COVID), but one that became clear after I eased off the sauce and saw how it steadied my reactions to the world.