Financial security is very important to me and my boyfriend’s finances have always been something that has stressed me out. We have been together for eight years, but we never had any finance conversations till a couple years ago. I would try and bring it up, but it was never something he wanted to talk about. Now I have a better understanding of where he is at, and although that in itself stresses me out, I’m more concerned about his mindset towards making the proper changes.
He currently lives paycheck to paycheck, has debt, very small amount of savings and zero retirement plus he still has no health insurance. When I try to talk to him about budgeting and coming up with a plan, he always has an excuse, which is mainly that he doesn’t make enough so it’s just impossible. He does not want to switch careers and he does not want to pick up a second job to offset this excuse. When I ask him how he expects to buy a house or have a family and even get married, he just tells me that we will figure it out.
He talks about the future like there’s all this time in the world but here we are eight years later and we haven’t taken any forward steps in our relationship. We will talk about setting goals and timelines, the lifestyle we want to live etc, but there’s just never any action on his end. I don’t want to start resenting him because I feel like he’s not making me or this relationship a priority but if you have plans to get married and start a family and buy a house and what not, wouldn’t the first step be saving money? I don’t want to sound shallow, but I don’t want to live paycheck to paycheck my entire life. I am very financial secure and great with money management, which is why I am totally open to helping him get to that place, but it’s the issue of saying verse doing and that makes me concerned about what our future looks like. He tends to be dismissive or gets defensive when we talk about finances so I’m just looking for suggestions on how to talk to him about this and relay how serious of an issue this is to me.
TL;DR boyfriend is not taking any actions to make sure he’s financially set up. Worried about how this is going to impact our future together.