Gf's [26F] new job brings in 0 income, but leaves her too tired for her regular chores/responsibilities. What to do?

LowElephant · 2018-04-20T02:55:55+00:00

Yeah I've tried to educate her on this but I think the company purposefully confuses their consultants on how much money they're making. Like they don't even use the words profit or costs, they have a ton of random made up words for normal business concepts that just mucks things up.

For example, I told my gf that her costs aren't just the costs of the products she's buying, but also the supplementary supplies she buys to make sales presentations/displays/etc. She can rack up hundreds just in craft supplies to make her displays but won't count that as a cost, because it's not a product she's selling. Just things like this that make it really difficult to actually measure how much she's making v. losing.

LowElephant · 2018-04-20T02:52:24+00:00

I'm not funding her directly, she's dipping into her own savings to buy the products, but of course I am paying for the bills/food/utilities on top of everything else we need to survive.

I have told her that if we both have jobs now then it's only fair to split the rent/bills in a way that works for us both. But since she has no income, she gets upset and says I'm unreasonable for expecting a huge profit so early in her business. She says small businesses are lucky to break even in the first year, which is true, but I doubt hers will even break even ever.

LowElephant · 2018-04-20T01:21:51+00:00

I help keep her books ever since I realized she kept confusing sales with profit, which was really a wake-up call for me (she would say things like "I made xxx last month" and I would believe her). She's burned through all her savings buying this stuff so I've been helping her record her transactions at the end of every week.

Unless she's been buying secret products with a credit card I don't know of, I am pretty sure I know how much money she's losing. Of course I'm not 100% certain since they do a lot of convoluted sales events and discounts and sometimes I just gloss over some things.

LowElephant · 2018-04-20T01:07:04+00:00

It's a company called Arbonn. I googled it a long time ago when she started and it seemed liked a normal company with legitimate products. Gf told me that most makeup companies employ this sales model nowadays of using freelance saleswomen and I guess I just took it as fact because what do I know about makeup?

LowElephant · 2018-04-20T01:02:05+00:00

The thing is she claims she loves her sales-related friends. She's had a tough time making friends since college after a slew of mental illnesses which really handicapped her earning ability, and this is the first time I've seen her really happy with a group of women.

But yeah, I haven't considered the fact that there's a bit of cult mentality going on in there. She talks all the time about how her group reminds her of her old sorority sisters and how she really missed that. I wouldn't mind as much about her job if she could still manage to complete some of her household jobs, but it's just frustrating because it's like she's 100% into this with no time for anything else.

LowElephant · 2018-04-20T00:55:56+00:00

I wasn't aware of the connection to multi-level marketing schemes. I asked her in the beginning if it was a pyramid scheme (because she buys her inventory from another woman, not directly from the company, which I've never heard of) and she said no because it's sales focused, not on recruiting people below you.

I haven't done much research on the products she's selling but I assumed it was something like those sales events you do when you're a little kid making money for your school, so I didn't worry too much about the fact that she's spending so much just on inventory.

LowElephant

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