Eating my budget

I think worrying about my financial situation has lead to my recent weight regain.

When I first instigated the divorce I felt like it was such a positive change that I deliberately didn't worry about money and spoiled myself with visits to my parents, getting my hair done, buying some new dresses for work, etc.

But it's been 4.5 months now that I've been paying rent and paying for half of my "marital expenses" and I'm out of money, I'm binging like I did when I got out of the eating disorder clinic.

I had to tell the lawyer that I can't keep paying for half of everything. My mom is offering to pay for me to fly home for Christmas. My dad is coming to visit this weekend and will be paying for everything. I'm almost 30 and my finances are worse than when I was in college. It's embarrassing.

I was contemplating ways to increase my income such as--getting a second job, getting a similar job that pays me more, something magical like developing the content of this blog into something advertisers will pay for--when the soon to be ex husband texted me to see if we could discuss the house.

After talking, this is what I gleaned: he wants to refinance the house, but can only get financed for 95% of the appraised value. This means that assuming the condo was appraised at $150,000 (keep in mind that we bought the condo for $159,900 a little over two years ago and due to "improvements" it requires repairs to the flooring) he could get $137,500 so I would have to cover the $22,000 difference. I told him I would talk to the bank, but now that I've had some time to think about it, I'm not sure that it's a good idea for me.

Without the debt from the house, I'll be walking away with almost $40,000 in debt. I don't think I can take on another $20K.

All this has been eating me up inside and I've been afraid to be honest about it. I think I've been overeating to avoid the discomfort.

"The ex" also mentioned a second option: that I file a quit claim deed on the condo and we keep the mortgage in place for now. I'm not comfortable with losing all of my rights to the house, but still retaining my responsibility on the mortgage. However, it sounds like he might be open to taking over the mortgage payments as they are without the quit claim deed until he can refinance, but would that be smart?

I think I'll sleep on it for now and hopefully get some good advice from the lawyer and financial advisor this week. In the mean time, maybe now that I've publicized the situation I can stop hiding it with food.