more continued from original post

[pilot]

I have been reading in the archives and on one titled nuggets of wisdom.. one said do not withhold support. Are we talking financial or emotional or both? Here is why I ask. When my W and I met, I was doing pretty well financially. However in recent years I began digging myself into a financial hole. Put it this way, if I needed 10 bucks a month to break even, but only brought in 8 bucks, I would be 2 bucks in the red, which dug into savings. Eventually savings turned into nothing and dug into credit. So I am at a point where I have considered personal bankruptcy (chapt 7) and start over. However, through all of this I always made sure every single bill of my W got paid. She never missed a payment and her credit remained perfect while mine went from perfect to nothing. When she took her jobs which put me out of work, I basically stopped giving her any money. Mostly because if she was justifying working as a way for her to pay her bills, then fine, pay your bills. I knew the money she was making was not going to be enough, and I also knew she was spending it as fast as she was making it on clothes and her new party lifestyle. This of course pissed her off. She began getting more and more money from her parents. This started about 6 weeks or so before I found out about her A. After that, I told her not to expect anything from me.

Now was I being controlling. Perhaps it could look that way. My justification was I was not making enough to cover my own needs, and barely enough to keep our family afloat and in the house we were living in. I had already lost my investment property to a short sale, and credit cards were being charged off every few months it seemed. I basically just got tired of falling on the financial sword to protect her if she was not going to participate in our family's financial health. And truth be told, there has not been any extra money around to give her anyways. My father has been loaning me money to help keep us on our feet while I worked at building a new business in the new town we moved to. But I never got close to making ends meet when by the time our R fell apart. So now that we are S she sold her car (today actually) and drives one of her parents. (they have 4 cars between the 3 of them...W included). I had offered to pay her cc bills and the car payment when we were talking about S, but when she filed for D on her own and included those things in her list of demands, I told her I could not pay them now, because if I did, the judge would most likely say keep paying them after the D.

So she is up at her parents with no job and no money. I am at my dad's just starting a new job, but no money. Should I revisit the idea of financial support? Am I being controlling/hateful/wrong by not giving her something I dont have anyways? BTW when I offered to pay for those things before, I had no idea how I would be able to honor that commitment, but I said I would figure it out. Now I would rather work on rebuilding my own financial mess for the sake of my future and my kids.

Thanks...

[pilot]

i copied this into my original thread. once i figure how to delete this i will