Fiancé and I set up a joint savings account to pool our money for a house down payment, agreeing that neither of us would withdraw a single dollar without telling the other. I've been depositing $1,500 every month like clockwork. I logged into the banking app this morning to check our balance and see how far of an improvement we've made. Only to discover that $4,126 was missing. I pulled up the transaction history. Yesterday afternoon he transferred the exact amount to a sports betting app. When I called him demanding an explanation, he casually said: It was a guaranteed lock on a playoff game; I was going to double our down payment! Crazy part? He lost the entire bet.

My boyfriend promised to sponsor my move for grad school to Europe with plans to relocate and join me over there a few months later. To pull it off he put his commercial warehouse in Houston up for sale for $1.5 million planning to use part of the cash to fund my tuition and living expenses and seed the rest into a new business venture. That was nearly a year ago. It’s sitting in a prime industrial corridor right off the highway but with interest rates high and the commercial market slowing down he hasn't gotten a single serious buyer. Meanwhile, my university acceptance deadline is just three weeks away and he keeps telling me to just hold on a little longer while refusing to take out a short-term bridge loan or let me apply for private student loans. Right now I dunno what to do. Trying to figure out if I should keep waiting on a property sale that might take another year or pack up and figure out the finances myself.

My neighbor's porch light has blinked twice every night at exactly 9pm for the three years I've lived here. Not on-off like a timer glitch. Two deliberate blinks, then steady. I used to think it was broken. Finally asked her about it at the mailbox last month.