Family Feuds·
THE SECRET SAVINGS SAGA
After discovering his ex-wife hid a 50k emergency fund during a grueling divorce, a father refuses to bail out her as their college-age kids pressure him to intervene.
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The fight started with a secret savings account, and ended years later with two college kids asking their father to bail out the woman who hid it.
He says, "I divorced my ex-wife about 5 years ago when I learned she had a private emergency fund." At the time, he says he was "working 60-80 hours a week to keep up with the bills while she was laid off." He believed the family was barely getting by.
Then he found out she had been quietly building a stash of cash. Not a few hundred dollars. He says she managed to "squirrel away around 50k" and was still adding to it while he strained to keep the household afloat.
The discovery hit hard, and the breakup that followed was ugly. "The divorce was messy," he says. Along with the hidden savings, he says he learned about spending and credit card debt he had not known about during the marriage. The house was sold and they both moved into their separate places.
At the time, the kids were still in high school. Now they're in college, splitting time between both parents. And that old financial rupture has come back in a new form.
According to the poster, his ex-wife is now the one in trouble. He says he is doing well and recently bought a house, while she is struggling to keep a job and is about to be kicked out of her apartment. The kids want him to help her.
He won't.
"My kids want me to help her out," he says. "I have told them no many time." He says he has refused repeatedly, but the pressure from his children has only grown. They think he is being cruel, and they say the whole mess is his fault because he divorced her.
He pushed back and told them exactly how he sees it: "their mom's issues are not my problem."
That set off another round of silence. The children are now ignoring him, and the family is split over the refusal to step in.
What makes the situation sting is how many years it spans: a marriage built on one partner's secret savings, a divorce over money and trust, then children old enough to remember it all now asking for help on behalf of the parent who kept that secret.
He ends by asking the internet, "I am wondering if I am in the wrong."