He Wants His Fiancée to Pay Off Her Debt Instead of Going on a Payback Plan. Is He Wrong?

It takes forever to pay off and there are usually a lot of bumps in the road that complicate things.

So you can understand why someone would want their partner to pay off their debt the smart way.

But did this guy step over the line when he told his fiancée what he thinks?

Read his story below and see what you think.

AITA for wanting my fiance to just pay the debt instead of living through her weird debt payback plan?

“I (31) have about 67k in debt, between college, my car, and a little bit on my credit card. I’ve been making my monthly payments on all of them, but it will still be many decades before I’m debt free.

My fiance (29) is relatively debt free. This wasn’t always the case. She got a few scholarships to help with college, but did still have to take out a few loans to finish things up. She had to get a new car because the old one was cursed and was in more accidents while parked than we can count.

And she did go through a manic period and almost run up her credit card in her early 20s shopping so much. However, she spent a lot of time getting her finances in order, worked multiple side gigs on top of her normal job, which I commend her for, and now is debt free except for her mortgage, which she makes a ton of extra payments towards, and has almost 300k in investments, savings, etc. I’m very proud of her for everything she’s done.

Now that we’re engaged, we’re planning on moving in together (she had a roommate we had to wait for the lease to end on before I could move in), and she said before the wedding she wanted me to be debt free.

We chose a date 3 years from now, since some of our family is out of the country and needs to save, and so it will be on our 7th anniversary, both of our favorite number. She pulled out a spread sheet of my debts, and pointed out how if I put all of my paychecks, minus maybe 200 a month for “fun money” into paying off my debt, I’ll be debt free by the wedding.

She would cover everything else – the mortgage, food, bills, insurance, our pets, vacations, date nights, etc. We could then both aggressively save for that last bit of time for a nice honeymoon, and after that focus a good amount of our funds on taking out the mortgage and getting my own savings up to snuff.

I thought about it for a day or so and came back with this counter offer: she pays off my debts and I pay her back in a year and a half, since I wouldn’t also have to be paying interest, we would put a bigger dent in the mortgage, and still stick to the timeline. She seemed unhappy with this, and said she would have to think about it first.

I casually mentioned it to my friends over beer to get another perspective, and they said I’m the a**hole, and they would do anything have her two year offer to get debt free, and that even if I paid her back, I’d still be taking a 1/5 of her savings for a year and a half. So I’m here for judgement, am I the a**hole?”