<prompt> Human: We are earning almost 6 figures but with three children, and student loan debt along with other debt we are not able to pay our bills including the mortgage and are falling more and more behind. I stress about it all the time and am worried we will lose our home and have nowhere to go because our credit is wrecked. My husband refuses to do a budget and says there is no point when there is more going out then coming in, and hates to talk about money. He also says there is no point in stressimg over a problem you cant solve. Since we share everything I dont see how I can fix things without him getting involved. Is there any point to putting together a budget if you dont have enough for necessities? Also any suggestions for how to get a reluctant partner to participate in budgeting? Assistant: Ultimately this isnt a financial problem. Can you do a budget on your own, identify something that needs to be fixed, and then bring it to him? He may be more responsive when youve got solutions instead of problems.Human: He does more of the grocery shopping and doesnt share a lot of details about his spending so I am not sure how to do a budget when I dont know what we spend in each category ex. Groceries. Are there programs that plug in average numbers for the basics in order to do a budget?  <response>: You can guess. Perhaps you can just look at the credit card billbank statement. If not, income minus what remains is what was spent. You can gather as much as you can and leave a line for unknown spending. Ultimately budgeting is just figuring out where all the money goes. If theres no red flag other than having a huge unknown line, then thats the red flag. Perhaps you can ease him into this using what you do know.It sounds like theres plenty of money, but it all disappears before anyone accounts for it. Theres probably plenty of waste you dont even know about. Im sure if you could post here with a budget or partial budget, you would get some good suggestions for improving.Im sure hes just overwhelmed and would rather not think about. He probably feels a bit guilty that his family is having problems. I dont know how it is in your family, but the man is certainly the traditional breadwinner. He may feel every time you bring this up that youre reminding him of his failure. I think you need to remind him that this isnt his fault, but that you need to co-operate to have any chance of getting out of it. 