My daughters transferred the money out three weeks before my husband emptied the account.
That’s what they meant by “we handled it.”
Apparently they noticed something was wrong months earlier because their father suddenly started acting weird anytime college mail came to the house. One of my girls walked past his office one night and saw him printing withdrawal forms from the education account.
Instead of confronting him, they called my sister’s husband who works in banking.
Legally the account couldn’t be fully locked without both parents, but because the girls were already eighteen, the money could be moved directly into separate tuition trusts under their own names once paperwork cleared. They quietly transferred almost everything except about four thousand dollars and left the original account open.
My husband never checked the balance before stealing it.
So when he disappeared with his coworker from the dental office, he thought he’d taken $172,000.
In reality he wired himself less than five grand and destroyed his entire life for it.
The screaming phone call came four days later from a hotel outside Clearwater, Florida. He kept accusing the girls of “setting him up” and demanded to know where the money went. One of my daughters actually put him on speaker while they were doing homework at the kitchen table.
Then he made things even worse.
He admitted during the call that he already promised part of the money to his girlfriend because she quit her job believing they were about to “start over” together. My daughters recorded the whole conversation without him realizing.
The funniest part honestly came later.
Turns out he also drained his retirement account early expecting the college money to cover penalties and taxes afterward. It didn’t.
Three weeks later his girlfriend left him and moved back to Ohio after finding out he was sleeping in an extended-stay motel near Tampa with maxed-out credit cards and a repossession notice taped to the windshield of his leased BMW.