How We Eliminated Fights About Money in our Marriage
Money. Sex. Work. Parenting. Housework.
Of these, a study done in 2012 reported that money consistently takes the number one spot.
These studies surprise me. My wife and I don’t consider ourselves the model couple but we haven’t had a conflict involving money for well over a decade. We sat down recently and tried to diagnose why that was and came up with five simple practices that have consistently defused fights about money before they even began.
These are not silver bullets and because your marriage is different than mine, may not be as effective for you as they’ve been for us. Still, if you find that talking about money is difficult and almost always gets things heated for you, these are a good place to start.
Make a Plan
Yes, I’m talking about a budget. Some of you have convinced yourself that you don’t need one. You would be wrong. I’m sorry. There really is no way around this one. If you don’t know what your expenses are and haven’t mutually agreed on a plan for how you will spend your money, conflict will be inevitable.
Don’t know where to start? Sit down and go through your statements for the last 1-3 months and find out where your money is really going. Put these expenses into categories. Once you have an accurate picture of what you’ve been doing, make a plan for what you would like this to look like going forward and ensure that each of your priorities are being addressed (e.g. savings, charitable giving, high-quality coffee, etc.). Use these free budgeting templates to get you started. You’re not done making this plan until each of you are 100% on board.
This will require compromise and a firm grip on reality as you realize that you can’t do everything.
Track your Budget
A budget is useless if you can’t track it and see whether or not you stuck to the plan in a given month. We started off by recording our purchases on a simple spreadsheet that we printed off every month, but have gotten progressively more digital over the years.
A helpful transition for us was when we switched to an app that could sync across multiple devices. Now, if we need to see how much money we have left in our groceries line, for instance, either of us can check at any time, regardless of who entered the amount. This creates a great deal of transparency and accountability and virtually eliminates secrecy and suspicion.
YouNeedABudget and Toshl are two apps that work really well, but still require you to manually enter your expenses. If you like things to be even easier, try Mint.com, which automatically tracks and categorizes every transaction. Use whatever works for you, just make sure you have a system that is sustainable and effective.
*One pitfall to avoid here is having one person do all the work of budgeting, while the other is left in the dark. The last thing you need is one person feeling like they need to ask permission to spend money from the one who controls the purse strings. Nobody wants to feel like their spouse is their parent. A transparent system combined with weekly check-in conversations can help eliminate this power dynamic.
Give Each Other an Allowance
There will always be one person in the relationship who is a bigger spender (e.g. it’s definitely me) and this can be incredibly frustrating to the bigger saver. In fact, of all the conflicts couples have about money, this spending vs. saving dynamic causes the bulk of them.
Creating a budget will answer the savings question because you will have mutually agreed on how much to save each month (tip: set up an automatic transfer into your savings account on payday so that this never gets neglected), but you still need to answer the question of how you’ll spend your disposable income. Without a system, the spender in the marriage will use all of it every month and the other person will be left at home feeling cheated.
Our solution was to set up an allowance system. It’s easy. We have 3 envelopes that we fill with a predetermined amount of cash at the beginning of each month. One for me, one for her, and one called our “mutual allowance” which we only use for doing fun stuff together as a couple.
Now, each person has a source of cash that they can do whatever they want with. Blow it all on coffee and wings (me) or decide to save up for a couple of months and start a new art project (her). Your call.
Clarify Limits
Every month there are miscellaneous expenses that pop up that are hard to plan for, so create a line in your budget to catch these costs (we literally call ours “misc. expenses”). The problem that can arise here is when one person decides that something is essential one month and goes out and blows the entire budget line without consulting the other half.
We dealt with this by creating a clear limit of what could be spent without first needing a conversation. Early on, anything over $20 needed prior approval. Even then, the frequency of those purchases needed to be fairly rare, as the budget line we created wasn’t large. Today, the dollar amount is not as rigid but we still have conversations and check budget levels before spending money.
One place to start would be to decide that neither person can spend more than 50% of the “miscellaneous expenses” line in any given month without first talking about it. Otherwise, this may just become an “allowance extension line” for the spender in the relationship.
Dream Together
Dreaming about what we want to do with our money isn’t difficult. The problem comes when each person is dreaming separately and you’re not communicating about these competing desires. For example, one of you may be secretly hoping to use your income tax return to do some travelling, while the other person is anticipating buying new furniture. Keeping these expectations to yourself is a conflict waiting to happen.
The solution for us has been to have an intentional conversation on an annual basis about what our short and long-term financial goals are. What are some bigger expenses you anticipate in the next 6-12 months? What would you like to save up for in the next 2-3 years? Is it a vehicle, a new mattress, further education, or what else?
Again, you can’t do everything, so work together in figuring out the priorities and make sure that each of your desires are being accounted for. So maybe her goal gets priority this year and mine will happen next year.
The Original Hack
Communicate. Communicate. Communicate.
This is the thread that runs through everything else. You have to be able to talk about money. The ability to say how you feel, while also truly listening to the other person’s perspective and attempting to understand them without getting defensive is a foundational skill for resolving any conflict.
Learn to ask good clarifying questions of each other and be humble enough to realize that the financial values that the other person holds are not wrong just because they’re different than yours. You probably can’t change the values that your partner has about money, but you can understand them and you can both learn to adjust your habits in a way that works for everybody.
Be assertive and say what you want but be generous and willing to hold those things loosely in order to meet each other’s needs.
You Can Do It
Remember, this is the person you love more than anybody else in the world. You committed to love them unconditionally for your whole life. That trip or that thing you want to spend money on is not nearly as important as your relationship.
What step do you need to take this week to eliminate unnecessary fights about money in your marriage?
What’s Your Take?
What simple strategies have you implemented that have defused fights about money in your marriage? Share them with us in the comments below!
Like what you’re reading? Share it with others using the sharing links at the bottom of the screen and to the side (desktop). You can also sign up for my bi-weekly email newsletter and be notified every time a new post goes live. Just scroll down to find the form on mobile or look to the sidebar on desktop.
Thanks so much for being here!
-Dan
0 Comments