I Feel Guilty Financially Cutting Off My Ex

Brought to you by the EveryDollar app. Start budgeting for free today. I am recently divorced and while I know what I need to pay legally according to the decree for alimony and child support, I don't know if it feels right morally especially at its end in 2029. Okay, you feel like you should pay more? Yes. The reason I say this right now, alimony and child support together is $2,900 a month, but I am fearful that when it ends in October of 2029, then in this economy she'll be left destitute or high and dry and that I wouldn't be, like, does that make sense? I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, that's unusually compassionate toward the ex. What do you make? $106,000 a year, but just yesterday I accepted an offer for $120,000, which I'm acceptable. Very nice, good for you. Good new chapter, clean chapter in your life. And $2,900 a month for three years, right? Yes, it started partway through last year, but it's going to go until October 2029. And how old is she and what is her career? I know that she was a manager for a mold company a while back, but I don't know if she's working at all right now. She's just focused on raising the kids and homeschooling them and things like that. She is 37, I'm 36. How old are the kids? The youngest is two years old and the oldest is six years old. Okay, so the $2,900 is gonna be largely child support, isn't it? Not in Utah. I was told that the alimony portion is only $2,059 of it, and then that the remainder is child support. Okay, I don't know what I'm talking about except from years of experience dealing with this, because I don't know anything about Utah law and I'm not a divorce specialist, but typically three children, when you make $100,000 a year, it's not gonna be $900 a month. You might have those two numbers flipped. I might be wrong, but I'm guessing. But in most, and I'll say in most states, you would at least have those two numbers flipped. Did you say you have two kids? Three children. Three. Two, six, and what was the other age? Right in the middle, three years old. Okay, so three years from now, you've got a five, six, and nine-year-old, and they'll be in school, and she'll go back to work full-time? Is that the plan? I think that she would want, and I wouldn't hate for them to continue to be homeschooled, but my goal is if I can be debt-free by 2029, when all of this, you know, ends, takes place, then they will stay with me half the time, and I'm just trying to get to a point that I can eventually move into a place that they have room to live in as well. So that's my motivation to become debt-free. I'm curious what happened to your marriage. We were married for six years. The best way I can describe it without going into a lot of detail is I didn't feel need or needed or wanted. She bought a house in 2020, and I didn't know it until she told me afterwards. I didn't feel like we made decisions together, and I couldn't, I gave the best I could, but I just couldn't keep going. And yet you're talking to me about keeping going. I, I guess so. I think that. So here's, here's an opinion of a guy, not an attorney. I don't know what I'm talking about as an attorney and not even a financial opinion. I think this lady's going to have to have a career. She's now a single mom with three kids and she gets child support and she's probably not going to be at home on your dole. You're not going to want to take care of her for the next 20 years so she can sit at home and homeschool. That's not a realistic scenario. If you want to do that, it would be highly unusual to the point. I would call it weird and I'm not sure it's good and I'm not sure it's good. The very reason you left there, you need to leave there. And then she needs to go on and make her, she likes making decisions by herself. So now she gets to, and so, um, you know, I would not pay somebody $3,000 a month so they can sit at home and homeschool for 20 years, you know, or, or whatever it is, 18 years for a two year old. I mean, I'm not, no, I would not. Uh, I don't think that's, that would be unusual. Um, I would make other arrangements for the children. I do other stuff, but I'm not going to just support her and her have no, it's not good for her to have no life. Um, and person, a divorced woman to have zero career and be homeschooling the kids and living off of the X. That is, that's not dignity. It's not good for her. She needs to become a person of, um, a standalone entity and have some independence at that point. She's codependent on an exactly. I don't want my ex-husband. I mean, would you want your little sister's ex-husband supporting her? Who could pull the rug anytime? Yeah, no, I don't, I don't want that. I don't want that. I don't want that for the X. I don't want it for the kids. I don't want to model that for the children as some kind of a, you know, well, the marriage didn't work out, but we went ahead and paid you now. Uh, no, no, no. Um, you can do it if you want. It's your money, but that's my opinion. And you'll always get that when you call here. Cause I'm an expert on my opinion. Um, and I also would check your numbers cause I think your numbers are inverted. I think it's $2,000 a month in child support and $900 a month in alimony. I don't think you got away. Maybe, maybe there's something different in Utah. I don't know. Create your free, every dollar budget today. The simplest way to budget for your life.