I think the mistake was selecting a cofounder who was more committed to his consulting work than to your startup. As a freelancer your cofounder had the option to scale back his consulting or treat the startup as another consulting client. If he had to work to support his family then you didn't select someone with enough runway.
For all its benefits, the conventional wisdom of HN that one should pay off their mortgage prior to a startup may often be a mistake. A mortgage is leverage, and the cash used to pay ahead twenty years would be better used for a longer runway - $100,000 will cover many months of mortgage payments. What would most startups do for $100,000 worth of seed money?
Likewise, if a family keeps someone from going all-in to the startup that's only an issue when the other founders believe that going all in is a point of pride. In this case however, it's not that your cofounder wasn't going all in, it was that he wasn't even anteing up.