Hi GV,
Thanks for your response. As you can see, I have been in this for 27 years now, so almost numb to what to do now. I am currently 58 years old, and ready to retire, but scared of my wife. You are only in it for three years, and sound like you are having some fun, so as long as you don’t get financially hooked, and you are having fun, just keep it at that level. If I were you, I would just pull the plug and move on.
In my case, my wife is not very pretty or sexy and a little fat, but she is a decent companion and does at least attempt to keep the house clean and cooks for me, so there is some benefit to staying together for me. I do miss the sex, but it is not a deal breaker. I am a bit old fashioned about extramarital activities, and try to follow christian principals. I am a bit of a loner by nature, so that aspect is not difficult to deal with. At this point in my life, I feel agnostic about existence of god, but still feel strong moral obligation to traditional marital values.
My biggest fear is when or if she retires, she gets bored and wants to gamble more. Her only other interest in life is traveling and watching Viet videos on the internet. She and her whole family are Catholic, but they don’t seem to follow the principals of the faith, so extemely hypocritical from my point of view. The interesting thing is, most of her brothers and sisters are very successful financially, most of them engineers, and they’re children becoming doctors. She sees her brothers going to the casino regularly, but doesn’t seem to realize they have much larger incomes, so can afford to lose more and still not crash and burn. I see they will need to continue to work for the rest of their lives if they want to continue this destructive habit. On the surface they appear to live great lives, nice houses, nice cars, nice vacations, It all really makes me literally sick. On the surface they are really friendly to me, but like to stay in their own culture/world. I’m welcome to family gatherings, but basically sit in the corner, because although they all understand english, will talk in Vietnamese, while I sit there, basically ignoring me, Maybe once in awhile somone will ask me a question in english, but largely it is a lonely boring time for me, but the food is good.
Yeah, so your suggestion to move the moeny somewhere would be noticed. My wife knows full well how much we have, about half our networth is in real estate, our home and one rental. The other half is in 401K and a couple stock acounts and some bank CD’s.
And since I make more then her, about $120K vs her $40K per year, I would undoubtedly get hit with alimony payments. I know that there is some provision in California law to get some compensation for a gambling spouse, but you need to provide actual proof of losses, which is very difficult to pinpoint total amounts.
I fully agree that if she got a big wad of cash, it would all dissapear in probably a couple years or less.
Interestingly enough her daughter is scared of her mother as well, and on my side with regards to money matters. She knows she will probably lose half her inheritance, and maybe more if we got divorced. So far she is very level headed, and since I warned her of avoiding getting the gambling bug (since it seems to run in her blood), she is just as disgusted as me about her moms habit. She does have some dreams of being rich and successful when she grows up, and says when she has made it, she will buy a house for me and her mom to live in (kid’s dreams!). I’m not holding my breath on that one, but I do see potential in her (straight A student in advanced classes). She is highly self-motivated.
So anyway, thanks for your ideas. I need to think about it for awhile. Right now, I see things at a slow burn, not a raging fire, so I have some time act. If anyone else has some ideas, i welcome other opinions.
Thanks