by Sondra Gomez

Created on: March 22, 2009   Last Updated: March 27, 2009

Oh my goodness, Where shall I begin. You know, maybe that's just how things always were, and the beginning for me was when I realized that the finances in our marriage simply didn't add up. I felt that men in general, my husband, well, that they need a little part of their life to be just their own, Not so much that it is a secret, though their own personal space, so to speak. In our marriage we both worked full time jobs, while sharing the responsibilities of raising eight children.

At tax time, when we would set down with our accountant and she would go over all of our tax information, I would often be in awe of how much money we earned over the year, and often wonder why finances always seemed to be so tight. My husband and I would talk about it and the conversation would usually end with the reason being that we must overspend here and there, and that we should learn to budget our spending a little better, and maybe create a savings, we could certainly afford to do so.

And another year would pass by, and another, and with me always wondering how could it be that we had earned so much, though we had so little. So I decided to keep a journal, I knew what portion of my income was contributed to the family budget, "all of it," though his paycheck was always cashed, and the cash was brought home to be placed in our family checking account, and along with my income we used it for our monthly budget.

I started my journal one January, I didn't tell my husband that I was going to keep a journal of the money he was bringing home, and I of course began to pay closer attention to our spending habits. While I found that I could better manage some of the spending, I also found that our income average was no where close to what the previous tax year records had shown. I had a talk with him about how it seemed that we had less of an income in comparison to the previous year, and he would simply say that there just isn't that much work out there. And with respect for my husband I let it go, though I continued with the entries in my journal of how much money he brought home each week.

Later in the year I decided to ask him one week if I could see one of his paycheck stubs, I found a huge difference in the yearly net and the amount of money I had recorded in my private journal.As you might imagine, All kinds of things would go through my mind, another woman, gambling, What was he spending all this money on? We could have really used the money for our family. Our children needed

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