My daughters moved the money months before my husband even realized he could access the account alone.
That’s what they meant by “we handled it.”
Apparently they started getting suspicious after he began asking weird questions about account passwords and tax penalties right after he started “working late” with the woman from his office. One of my girls even caught him photographing account statements with his phone while pretending to look for printer paper.
Instead of confronting him, they quietly called my brother, who’s a financial advisor in St. Louis.
Because the girls had just turned eighteen, most of the college fund could legally be rolled into separate educational trusts under their names with enough paperwork. They transferred almost everything weeks before my husband disappeared.
They left exactly $3,217 in the original account.
He never checked the balance.
So when he drained the account and ran off with his mistress, he thought he stole $172,000.
In reality he emptied an almost-dead account and blew up his marriage for less than what we owed on property taxes.
The screaming phone call came five days later from a hotel near Clearwater Beach. He kept demanding to know where “his money” went while my daughters sat at the kitchen island eating takeout and listening on speakerphone.
Then he made a mistake.
He admitted he already promised part of the money to his girlfriend because she quit her job expecting them to buy a condo together in Florida. My oldest daughter quietly recorded the whole call without him realizing.
But the real disaster hit him the next morning.
Turns out he’d also borrowed heavily against his retirement account expecting to replace it immediately using the stolen college fund.
Without the money, the loans defaulted almost instantly.
Three weeks later his mistress left him after debt collectors started calling her phone nonstop.
Last month my daughters received handwritten apology letters from him mailed from a weekly-rate motel outside Tampa.
The return address was Room 214 beside a vending machine repair company off Interstate 275.