{"id":695906,"date":"2026-07-17T02:34:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T02:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/695906\/"},"modified":"2026-07-17T02:34:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T02:34:14","slug":"i-wouldnt-marry-him-until-he-paid-off-his-debt-now-im-in-charge-of-our-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/695906\/","title":{"rendered":"I wouldn’t marry him until he paid off his debt, now I’m in charge of our money"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Sarah Reeve got engaged she gave fiance Lee an ultimatum: he had to pay off his debt before she would marry him.<\/p>\n

“I was paying my mortgage and bills whereas he was giving his mum some rent,” Sarah says of their situations when they met in their early 20s. <\/p>\n

“I told him I wouldn’t marry him if he had any debts,” says the 45-year-old.<\/p>\n

So they set a wedding date for two years ahead which gave Lee the time to pay off the \u00a32,000 bank loan – \u00a34,000 in today’s money, external<\/a> – he had taken out to buy a car. <\/p>\n

Once Lee’s debt was cleared, the couple paid everything into a joint account and Sarah took charge of bills, saving and budgeting.<\/p>\n

“He said ‘you can sort it all out and take charge with money because I’m rubbish with it,'” she says. <\/p>\n

Sarah’s experience reflects a wider trend of more than four fifths of women being actively involved in managing daily finances like day-to-day spending and household budgeting, according to St James’s Place’s Women and Wealth Report.<\/p>\n

Sarah earns \u00a324,000 working part-time in insurance and Lee worked in maintenance at the same factory for 27 years, earning about \u00a326,000, before being made redundant four years ago. <\/p>\n

He now works for himself in property maintenance and earns about \u00a330,000. <\/p>\n

The couple, who have been together for 25 years and have two daughters, aged 19 and 21, have always thought of money as shared.<\/p>\n

“It’s very much our money rather than mine or yours which is really nice especially as I took four years off work when we had children,” says Sarah.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Sarah Reeve got engaged she gave fiance Lee an ultimatum: he had to pay off his debt…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":695907,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-695906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=695906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695906\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/695907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=695906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=695906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=695906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}