Highly Unstable Situation
Jan 29, 2013, 1:54 PM | Updated: 2:22 pm
QUESTION: Rob in Nashville found out he has a child he didn’t know about. That baby’s mother was incarcerated, and he now has emergency custody. His fiancée is also pregnant. They make $38,000 a year and have $41,500 in debt. Dave says he needs to have some stability and recommends how to go about getting it in place.
ANSWER: Man, you went from 0 to 60, didn’t you? It’s not necessary to hold off on the marriage until you get your finances in order because you’ve got a baby on the way. It’s not going to matter–you’ve got the financials either way. Marriage isn’t going to stop that.
Don’t hold off on getting married. You need anything in life that isn’t crazy right now. Put your student loans on hardship deferral. I would let your fiancée watch babies as much as she can and you work like a crazy man. You may pick up an extra job and begin to cut through some of these things to clean them up as fast as you can.
You need to stabilize something here. There are too many things going nuts around you. You are going to have to lay that solid foundation in your relationships to be able to face all these things and turn these situations into blessings. They can be, and that can be the end of your story.