Finances

Before my spoused drained our checking account, paying off credit cards and loans in their name, and changing passwords to relivant financial accounts; I was told that our financial situation was fine and that all credit cards were paid off. I knew my spouse had been drawing down our savings, and we had had several conversations about getting a budget plan in place to stop doing that. Unfortunately I had assumed that my spouse had been drawing down savings to continue paying credit cards, the truth was much more painful.

Current finances:

Category	Balance
Secured Loans	-$7,422.30
Unsecured Loans*	-$31,396.88
Credit Card Debts	-$13,656.56
Community Checking	-$1,339.56
Community Savings	$0.00
Total	-$53,815.30

At this point I have allocated a minimal amount of funds for food and fuel with the remainder of all funds going towards paying down the credit debts.

Calculated Funds after Rent/Bills/Debt: $0.00**

*Loans taken out to cover previous credit card debts.

**Before legal fees.

Cash

I have been unable to get my spouse to hand over the code to our safe. I have made various attempts via different parties, including my mother, to retrieve the code as there should be $3000 cash in the safe, as well as all of our credit cards that we do not carry on our personages. It is not clear why my spouse will not hand over the safe codes, other than to hide the possibility that they took the cash. At this time it is an issue being taken up by my lawyer.

Hidden Checking Account

A few years ago my spouse opened up a private checking account in their name only. This was supposedly for the purpose of managing our egg business, though our existing credit union would have allowed them to open up a new business account over the phone, so it was never really clear what was going on with this account.

What I learned recently is that my spouse had deposited our COVID relief funds into this private account, as well as had the opportunity to deposit cash from the sales of our community property into this account. This co-mingling of funds automatically made this checking account a communal account even though my name was not attached to it.

I am morbidly curious as to how much of our community funds eventually landed in this account and what was done with it. That is something that will come out during the whole divorce proceedings.

Secreted Credit Cards

In examining transactions out of our communal checking account I found out that my spouse had at least 3 other credit cards that I was not part of. Two of these cards I knew of, with one of them having an annual fee and a horrible interest rate. This card had been a regular topic of debate and eventually my spouse claimed they closed it. It turns out that that was not the case.

One of the other lines of credit was new to me and I know nothing about when it was created or for what purpose.

In both cases, payments made on the cards came out of our communal checking, and so far as I am aware that makes them communal accounts in the eyes of the state.

Gift Cards

We had been collecting a pile of unredeemed gift cards. Not because we liked having a pile of gift cards, but because my spouse just regularly procrastinated redeeming them. Some of it was insanely silly to not have redeemed as many of them were Amazon cards, and you simply redeem those via the web interface. Regardless, they are all gone. Every one of them, even the one from my mother gave to me for my birthday. I have no idea of the total worth that was taken.

Lost Savings/Bonuses/etc

I have gone through all of our accounts, credit cards, all of it .. or at least the ones I have access to, going back to 08/2022 and am trying to figure out how much more we were spending vs making. The most exciting part of this calculation is that there will be ongoing payments that can hide how much over the top one was. So far my simplest approach for my cash accounts is to take the starting balance, deposits to savings, and payments to our secured loans, and subtract all of those from our ending balance over the same period. E.g. $balance.end - ($savings.total_deposits + $secured_loan.total_payments + $balance.begin) For our acconts the final Cash Profit value comes out to be -$10,015.52) over the period in question.

It is a little different for credit card accounts. In this case we are looking for the inverse value, i.e. how much more or less we went into he hole by the end balance. For this we take the total credit balance at the end of the period and subtract that from the starting credit balance. That is to say $cc_debt.begin - $cc_debt.end. If our debt as decreased then this will come out as a positive value, if it increases then we get a negative value. In our case we get -$4,669.76.

So in summary, between 2022-08 to 2023-01 (6 months) we made -$14,685.28 in profits, at least based on the accounting data I have access to. Put another way, we had an average outgoing that exceeded our incoming by roughy $24475.54 every month in just a 6 month period.

Right now I do not have a full view of all of our expenses because my spouse has locked me out of access to the financial records for the other credit cards and checking accounts. I expect the upside down picture of our expenditures to get worse once my spouse hands over the required account transactions.