My partner & I have been together for a while, we are living together and we have joint expenses etc. We share a joint ‘savings’ account and a joint ‘bills’ account from which all of our joint and individual bills are debited, as well as our own individual linked account that only the account holder access and view when using the banking app.

For instance, when I log in to our internet banking app, I can see my personal account, the bills account and the savings account.

Now, my partner has been lying to me about money for the past 4 months (that I know of) and I have confronted him many times and got the same response of ‘I’m sorry, this is the last time and this is the last lie’.

The first time was about his pay rate at work. He told me he thought he was on $35/hr but when we started applying for houses (I was left with the entire responsibility of finding suitable houses, organising viewings and sorting out paperwork & applications) I asked him for his pay slip and saw that he was in fact on $20/hr. Now that’s not a bad hourly rate for him as a tradesman but it was this that got me - every time I asked him what he had been paid (I was in charge of bills & budgeting as well so I needed to know), he would tell me the figure that would have been correct if he were on $35/hr. So whenever we were short on money it was always that something had come up unexpectedly that needed to be paid. I asked him why he was lying about it and he told me he ‘didn’t know’ and he wouldn’t lie to me about it again.

The second time he lied was when he said he was getting money from someone that owed it to him but then it turned out he was never owed the money so he lied to me about it and let me count on that money coming in for about 2 months before I finally got it out of him that it wasn’t happening.

The third time was when a friend of his came up to me at a gathering and asked me when my partner was going to cough up the money he owed him. When I asked him why he owed him money, he told me that my partner had borrowed it weeks ago and hadn’t repaid it. I confronted my partner and asked him if he was hiding anything financial from me and his reply was no. Another lie.

The fourth time was about a credit card. We needed a replacement and he said he’d called over a month ago for a replacement and they had sent it. After it not turning up, I asked him to call again. He said he did and he said they’d sent another. I checked his call log and he hadn’t called them at all in the last two months. Another lie.

The fifth time I found out he was lying was tonight. Our tax returns were done at the same time - 01 July. Mine was deposited into my account exactly 2 weeks later. He has kept telling me that his has been lodged with the tax department and he is waiting for it. He has kept telling me that he has called to check up on it and they can’t tell him anything new. I suggested (because at this stage I believed his story) that they may be auditing it and he should just wait and he agreed with this. Normally tax returns don’t take longer than 30 days. So I logged into his tax return account and found that he had lodged it on 01 July and it had been deposited into his account on the 27 July. ANOTHER FUCKING LIE.

I am with him at his weekly sport meet so I can’t even say anything yet but I am LIVID and ready to lose it. I don’t understand why he needs to lie to me about this shit! If he kept the money and spent it, I don’t care - it’s the lie that makes it a problem!

I don’t know what to do but I’m ready to explode! We have been arguing a lot lately and I don’t even know if it’s worth bringing up because I’m sick to death of the lies and the arguments caused by his lies and the shitty reasons he gives for the lies he tells!

I know there shouldn’t be any connection between the two but if he’s lying to me about money this often, who’s to say he’s not cheating and lying about that too? I can’t help but feel as though my trust has been broken in regards to everything now.