She reported to me that night that she believes she broke even on the trip through product sales alone, meaning that any business from having "signed people up" will now be gravy. In this conversation, it became evident that prior to the convention, she'd bought $8,000 worth of deeply-discounted inventory for $4,000 at a big quarter-end sale, to take to the convention. This conversation was the first I'd heard about this expenditure. Because, however, she reported that she'd sold enough that the net effect was now that she had a few thousand dollars worth of "free" inventory, and because she was so pleased about it, and because I'm trying to be Mr. Positive, I just let it go.
As I was fertilizing the lawn this afternoon, my neighbor (husband of her upline) and I chatted briefly over the fence. He said, "When [his wife] told me that [my wife] had spent $5,000 on product to take to the trip, I told her, 'Wow, make sure [my name] doesn't kill you for getting [my wife] into this thing!'" "Wait, $5,000?" I asked. "[My wife] told me it was four." "No, pretty sure it was $5,000, but maybe that included some of the convention expenses or whatever."
Then it began to sink in that my wife had spent several thousand dollars without telling me. (Keep in mind that she's not yet cashflowing to any significant degree in this thing, so this is all straight household "budget" money, i.e., money I've earned.) I became progressively less and less enthused with that fact, and as a result let myself spiral for the rest of the day. This was accelerated by her having discovered today--or maybe just having told me today--that her credit card processor doesn't appear to have been working right at the convention, so she "sold" (i.e., gave away) a still-to-be-determined amount of product in transactions that didn't process. She kept written receipts, many of which appear to have names and addresses on them but no telephone numbers that I noticed, so if she can't track down these people, that whole "broke even" thing is shot. She's still in the investigative mode, so I don't know yet what the scale of this will be.
When she took the kids on some errands in the
late afternoon, I m'd angrily, for the first time in a long time thinking not once about her --in fact trying to hard to keep her entirely out of my mind-- but about Helena/Flo/Isabella/Debbie in her traditional "navy lace" set. Then I went on a bike ride up one of the canyons, and weighed at length the possibility of engaging a cute jogger who had smiled at me. (Trust me when I claim that some girl smiled at me or our eyes locked and held or what not -- I may warrant a lot of unflattering descriptions, but "entirely delusional" isn't one of them.) When I showered after my ride, I m'd again, this time to a Hotel Monaco --I don't know what it is about that place-- fantasy scenario with the Ginger Grant gal. I went straight to bed afterwards while she was in the office working on "the business," just woken up now with a dehydration headache from my bike ride, and found that she'd gone to sleep in a separate bed. Probably a good thing.Despite my percolating anger, I haven't yet circled back to her about it. I'm letting these three approaches vie for position:
[ ] A. Hey baby, I want this deal to go really well for you. But until you can fund it out of your own profits, please don't ever spend that kind of cash again on this without talking with me about it first, OK?
[ ] B. If you're going to continue pursuing this business, I'm going to separate our finances entirely. My paycheck will direct deposit to my own account, I'll pay all the major bills and give you fixed monthly allotments for the other main items, and then you can spend to your heart's content out of your earnings, without so much as even mentioning it to me. How does that sound?
[ ] C. Next time you do that will be your final and definitive signal to me that this marriage is over, and I'll take my leave.
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