I didn’t take his comment seriously when he said he “planned to retire at forty”. I should have done. Throughout our time together, he was forever coming up with money making schemes. Some did have potential; others were pure fantasy. Every so often he would come up with a money making scheme, the ones that he had direct control over he was prepared to spend vast sums of money to get them going. The schemes that he expected me to get going and make a success, he refused, unless absolutely forced to, spend any money on.
The Bookkeeper
I will start with one that was pure fantasy. During those last few years, he came up with the idea that I should become a bookkeeper. Apparently there was a shortage of them, even though a successful bookkeeper could earn a good income, or so I was lead to believe. Now, when I say numbers of any description are not my forte, I am not kidding. Yes I can do my own budgeting and know from month to month how much money I have, I can even work out how much my gas and electric bill is going to be. When it comes to anything more complicated than that, like my tax return, I have someone else prepare and submit them for me. That was also how it was in the USA when we bought our house in Oregon. We paid for someone to do our taxes. How on earth he thought I could be a bookkeeper is beyond me, but he did!
To keep the peace, I found a free online course that would allow me to see if I had the aptitude for bookkeeping. It was plainly obvious that I didn’t. Double entry bookkeeping, what is that? By the second lesson I was way out of my depth. However, knowing what my husband was like when it came to money making schemes, I didn’t tell him how much I was struggling. Instead, I looked at what it would take for me to become a qualified bookkeeper. If memory serves me correctly, it was between three and four years and would have cost us some money. Those factors alone made him go off the idea. That was to be his last money making scheme that directly involved me.
The Premium Bonds
What I came belatedly to realise was that my husband was easily influenced by those he perceived to have money. During a conversation, the person he was talking to had had a win on the premium bonds. My husband was excited by this and started talking about how much money he could invest in the bonds. Within a short period of time, he had set up an account and was buying the bonds. I never said a word, but hoped that he would get some money back and also kept my fingers crossed that he didn’t increase the monthly amount he paid each month to buy more bonds.
After he died, I contacted those who run the Premium Bonds and requested the money back that he had paid in. There was no problem, the money was refunded or bonds cashed in, whatever the correct term is. The money, around £300 of it was back in the account. That represented food and bills excluding rent for one month. That is how tight things were when I was having to bank on getting money back to cover the bills.
The Get Rich Quick Jobs
One of his constant gripes was that engineering didn’t pay enough in this country. At the time, he did have a point and when we moved to the USA, his salary increased considerably. Before he was offered the position in the USA, he went through a period of time when he looked at jobs outside engineering. All had one thing in common; they offered opportunities to earn vast amounts of money. The problem was that all of them were commission based and required selling skills. My husband wasn’t a salesman; however he was determined to apply for them, even though he didn’t have the required skill set. Time after time he was rejected, applications not responded to, and if he did have an interview, it went no further. Still that didn’t stop him.
I will admit I was his enabler. I pandered to him when yet another application was ignored, or an interview failed to achieve his goal of leaving engineering. Even up until his last few months, he was still talking about changing jobs, not necessarily within the engineering field. I dutifully kept his CV updated, a task he allowed me to do. After all, a professional CV costs money!
The Nanny Placement Agency – AKA A Better Class of Nanny
Out of all the get rich quick/I want to retire schemes he had, this is the most personal and sums up both his mentality and how much financial control he exerted over me.
My background is in childcare. I have worked as a nanny both here and in Canada, although at the time of meeting my husband, I was working in administration. A nanny agency may have made more sense if he had thought about it while we living in the UK or when we were in California, but he didn’t. Instead he came up with it while we were living in Oregon. A beautiful area, but rural and there wasn’t a market for nannies. There were also plenty of agencies to the north of us in Portland and Seattle and to the south in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Once an idea entered his head it was incredibly difficult to remove. Nanny agencies were profitable, I was a former nanny so knew what was required to run one. Yes they can be profitable with time, and no I didn’t know how to run one. First of all, there were all the different regulations that were required to set up a business. What childcare qualifications did prospective nannies need? His suggestion about me running a nanny placement agency was more of an order and he saw hundreds if not thousands of dollars of profits that would keep him in the style that he believed the world owed him.
There were many questions that should have been asked before even considering venturing down the path of setting up a nanny placement agency.
Start-up costs – Not even talked about
Office premises – No consultation, I was to use the computer in the bedroom. Luckily we didn’t have Zoom type meetings back then.
This was my office; the computer that I used was in the cabinet. The chair I used is out of the picture as it had to be moved each time either my husband or myself needed to use the bathroom. The phone was in the living room as there was no place to put it.
By comparison this was “his” office. Separate from the house with no distractions. He had plenty of space, by contrast if I needed to use a pen and paper rather than the computer I had to use a book as the surface to put the paper on.
Geographical Location of the business – Rural Southern Oregon wasn’t the ideal location for a nanny agency, but he thought otherwise.
Website – All businesses need a website and this was one area I was allowed to spend some money on. The emphasis on some money.
Separate phone line – I had to use our phone line; he had his own business line.
Separate bank account – He didn’t see the need for my business to have to have a separate account. Business accounts have a monthly fee and he wasn’t prepared to pay that until the business could afford it.
Marketing – Initially I wasn’t allowed to spend any money on marketing. When I was it was only a small amount.
Liability Insurance – Another cost that was ignored and so I never had any. Not having it could have had serious consequences for us if things had gone wrong.
Family – Continue home schooling the boys, help with his business, cook meals and clean the house. This was all in addition to setting up and making the agency profitable. The boys stepped up and helped as much as they could; my husband spent his days in his office.
All of the above should have been discussed in a calm and logical manner. Not once did he ask if I thought it was a good idea and how feasible it was. He came up with the idea and I blindly went along with it, putting hours into it, trying to come up with marketing ideas that didn’t cost anything. In the end it was all for nothing. I had a lovely website but nothing to show for all the effort I had put into the business.
There was briefly a time, when due to receiving a substantial contract from a customer, he was in an exceptionally good frame of mind. The initial website wasn’t a success, but I was able to persuade him to allow me to find another web designer, who redesigned the site. I was also able to pay for some marketing. I never had a separate phone line nor did I ever get to share his office and for the entire time I ran the agency it was from the bedroom. His good mood lasted as long the contract and when it wasn’t renewed, he started to blame me for why the agency wasn’t a success. The location was a hindrance, as was the lack of a marketing budget. None of which he chose to understand.
As time had gone on, he had received less and less work and was turning to the bank of mum and dad to keep a roof over our heads. A series of circumstances came to a head and he made the decision to move back to the UK. I had a choice, should I attempt to stay in the USA or should I go along with his plans to move back? I chose to move back in the hope that it would improve my marriage. With decision made to return to the UK I closed down the agency, there was little point in keeping it going. As much as my husband would have liked for it to be run without any expenses, there were some small ones. By that stage of our life in the USA, every penny counted and those pennies went towards the bills.
Looking back, the easiest part was designing the forms. The hardest part, was surprisingly not struggling to get my husband to agree to spend some money on setting it up, but closing it down. All the effort I had put into it, had been for nothing and that deeply hurt. There are a lot of what-ifs connected with the agency, but at the end of the day I have come to understand that if he really wanted it to be a success then he would have allowed me to seek ways of financing it, whether through our own/his money or even a loan, but that was never his intention. For him, seeing the agency fail was a success and provided him with another weapon to use against me. Yes, there was a time when it was up and running, he did talk about it, but at the end of the day seeing it fail was what gave him the greatest pleasure.