Asking Eric: Unwanted makeover an unpleasant surprise

Dear Eric: I’m a 52-year-old divorced guy. For the last four months I have been dating an early-40s woman, “Marie.” There has been no thought of living together, or even really seeing ourselves as a couple, but we each have a house key to the other’s place.

On a number of occasions, Marie has commented on the fact that I don’t have a television and found it pretty weird when I said that I have no use for one. She also has — politely enough, I must say — indicated that she finds my home decor rather bland because she tends toward bright colors in her home.

One day after I’d been at work, I came home to find that Marie was unexpectedly in my house, had repositioned all the furniture in my lounge room, installed a large wall-mounted flat-screen TV and painted two of the walls in the lounge a deep maroon!

She expected me to be very happy about this, but not only was I not happy, I was actually quite the opposite.

I took my house key back while returning hers and told her I’d be leaving the TV on her doorstep the following morning. She was wildly angry at my response to her “generosity” as she saw it.

Did I miss something here?

Eric says: You didn’t miss anything, but it sure seems like you dodged a bullet. It’s one thing to have an opinion about a someone’s home decor. It’s quite another to let yourself in and lay down a drop cloth.

We often talk about the need to respect other people’s boundaries in order to have healthy relationships. She’s lucky you didn’t send her a bill for the re-painting.

Dear Eric: I have an amazing boyfriend. We have been together for 6½ years, and we currently live together.

My family loves him, and my friends get along with him, but he is terrible with money and in debt. I cannot trust him financially, and it makes me scared for the future with him.

I’ve been saving up to buy a house and hopefully will start looking soon. It concerns me that I may have to take the step alone. How can I get him to stop spending and start saving?

Eric says: Don’t come within 10 feet of a mortgage with this man until he’s willing to take an equal role in your shared financial well-being. Don’t even walk by a bank together, just in case.

“Their best bet is going to build a system that bypasses the old habits and forces new ones,” said Sam Erdman, founder of Anchor Wealth Advisors. Managing money is “not generally a game of knowledge, it’s a game of behavior.”

The first thing Erdman would encourage you to do is have a conversation about your values. Once you understand each other’s values, you can construct a plan for living those values.

Here’s a path that Erdman laid out:

1. Determine where he is overspending.

2. Reconfigure these numbers for what he wants them to be moving forward.

3. Set up multiple bank accounts that will be funded based on the budget — an account that pays all the recurring monthly expenses, one to hold the money for upcoming non-monthly expenses and a spending account for him.

Lastly, remember that you don’t have to combine finances if your values aren’t aligning. A financial coach or adviser can build on the advice Erdman gave, as can lower-cost or free resources like Vicki Robins’ book “Your Money or Your Life”.

Send questions to R. Eric Thomas at eric@askingeric.com or P.O. Box 22474, Philadelphia, PA 19110.