There aren't enough details in the book about Mr Bennet to know for sure how he acts most of the time. He's front and center for just a few minutes, but he does nothing during any of that time to show himself as a good husband or father. He makes fun of his wife and three younger daughters every time we see him saying anything about them, including doing so to Mary in front of his neighbors at the ball. It doesn't take a leap of imagination to think this is what the guy is like (and Austen more or less says he is this way in describing him).
And it is explicit that he lets a daughter who is much too young and heedless go away with a chaperone who is only a little older and he does so because his wife and the daughter would whine if he did not. (This is a perfect example of Bad Parenting 101 - I know people who were so lazy about dealing with the children when young, giving them anything they wanted when they threw tantrums in the grocery store as infants, etc, that the parents then excuse their letting them run wild later as "We can't do anything with them!") And then when the obvious thing happens he admits it was all his fault and feels guilty for five minutes.
And as for the money, we don't see anyone actually spending money so it's hard to know where it went in the book. But if he stopped his wife at two thousand pounds a year (which he did only so he wouldn't have creditors telling him what to do), he could have done so at a level below that as well, if he actually cared about what would happen to his family after he died.
He could have been an abusive drunk or a serial philanderer who spent his entire income on mistresses and gave his wife 'the French disease', and that would be worse than what he was, but by the standards of the fictional universe he inhabited he was pretty bad. In the context of the book he was the guy with all the authority and responsibility and he doesn't bother to exercise any unless he is personally going to be pinched.
