Is AUTHOR wrong in the post ? POST : My wife’s always wanted braces, her teeth aren’t fucked up beyond belief, there’s just some crowding on the top row that isn’t horrible but impacts her confidence in her smile.

She has a child, a 10 year old, she claims on her taxes. We file separately for a multitude of reasons but she gets the tax break for the kiddo. He isn’t mine by blood but my income goes to support him too. The one time I brought up that I was entitled to a piece of her refund she lost her shit and said SHE got the tax break for having a kid, at which point I corrected her and said no, you get it for SUPPORTING him, not just for having him, and I support him just as much as you do. She apologized and said I was right and she was wrong, I told her not to worry about it for now.

In January we discussed braces for her. She’s always wanted them, always been fucked financially and could never use her tax refund as a down payment because of shitty financial decisions of her ex. I was expecting her to get about $1000 more back in federal than she did. I wanted to put $2500 down and finance the rest and double up on payments to get them paid off quicker. Well, I’m not dipping into savings for fucking braces, so we’re only putting $1500 down.

Well, last night we got into a minor fight when I told her it was kinda selfish to get braces when we could be buying a house instead. She compared me to her ex and said I was just another guy telling her no and that she’d take her refund out of our shared account and put it in her own. I told her it was a $163/month investment and I was putting the onus on her to offset the cost. We sat down and figured out that by prepping our lunches for work we’d save close to $200/month. We took it a step further and figured out a few other small changes we could make and suddenly we’re saving closer to $300/month.

At the end of the day I’m okay with her investing in something she’s always wanted to do, but I still can’t help but feel like it’s a selfish decision. Her reasoning of “well we paid all of our revolving debt off! We can afford this!” Is bullshit imo. When a debt is paid off, you shouldn’t just acquire more fucking debt.

TLDR: am I an asshole for being kinda pissed my wife is spending $5800 on braces rather than saving the money and buying a house in the next 10 months?