Posted by:
Misfit
(
)
Date: November 09, 2011 09:27AM
A paycheck is not a baby. Unlike a baby, money CAN be split in half. People do it every day in divorce court. It sounds like you have a serious marriage problem here, and the key to keeping a marriage intact is compromise. The fairest compromise is to split the tithing money in half. She can do what she wants with her half, you can do what you want with your half.
I'm the main breadwinner with a TBM wife who earns a little bit of side income. The angle I took with my wife is that it is MY name on the paycheck, I earned it so therefore it is MY income, and it is OUR money since we have the legal rights and obligations of being married to each other. I said the church teaches that we pay tithing on income, and income is only what we earn, it isn't every dollar we receive, like inheritances or gifts. I was playing semantics, yes, but it seems to have worked, and I pay zilch on tithing from my paycheck, and she pays on whatever she earns, which I hate, but its a compromise. Plus, we go out every weekend and she gets nice things for birthdays and holidays. I tried very consciously to spend more money on her once I stopped giving money to LD$ Inc. She hasn't said one word about it in the almost 2 years since I stopped paying.
I make close to 100k also, and live in Southern California. Behind Hawaii, Alaska, and the San Francisco Bay Area, its got to be one of the most expensive places to live in the U.S. When I paid tithing, we literally had nothing left for vacations or retirement. We had no surplus at all. Everything we saved during the year went to either the insurance companies or the county tax assessor.
Now I put most of what I paid in tithing into our 401K. I regret all those years I gave money to the Corporation of the President, with no promises of any return on investment.
As a previous poster in another thread stated, the LD$ Church WILL NOT provide for you and your wife in your retirement years. If you make more than enough to get by, whatever is left should be going to your future, not to a greedy real estate investment corporation. Does your wife even know about the Mormon Mall?