Realistic budgeting: The marriage saver
Posted
Mar 06 2008, 10:31 AM
by
Karen Datko
This post comes from Margaret Garcia-Couoh at partner blog Wise Bread.
Twelve years ago, a priest who did marriage counseling told me what he saw as the personal truth to marriages that stay together and marriages that break apart. "It's about a little thing," he said, "a little thing called money." No way, I thought. Wouldn't the big things be infidelity, children, catastrophes?
Nope. Divorce, he informed me, starts in the checkbook.
Fast forward two marriages and a mortgage later, and darn it if Father Peter wasn't right.
Our No. 1 issue is always money -- and little things about it. So how can we keep marriage together and keep ourselves moving forward out of debt and into prosperity? How come my purchase of a $20 shampoo seems justifiable to me, but his $20 purchase of baseball cards does not? Why do I hide skeins of yarn behind the easy chair, and how come I get angry when I find eBay receipts in the printer?
Nearly every couple I know hides purchases from each other or verbally decreases the expense when the partner asks how much something cost. I am guilty of rounding down. The new dress I'm wearing right now did not cost me $29.99 when my husband inquires whether it's new. It cost $25. Likewise, the software he just downloaded was $9, not $15.
If you can be honest with each other about sex, you should, in theory, be able to be honest about expenses. At least that's what we are working on.
How do we bring it together?
We swore an oath: no more rounding down. For my part, I'm trying to stick to it. I'm also looking at purchases differently. If I would round it down, then maybe it's not the price it should be for me to buy it in the first place. He assures me he's doing the same.
But how hard is that? When we got to the end of the month, I started looking around the house and making mad-dog eyes at newish purchases that were his, not mine. He thought about my student loan. I thought about his business ventures that seem to cost more than they make.
If we didn't still think of each other as the cutest thing on the planet, I could see us both walking out the door and sticking the mortgage to the cats. But cats don't like to work for a living, so saving marriage and sanity had to come down to other things: the realistic budget.
We sat down with a spreadsheet and tallied up every last thing we spent money on in a six-month period. We did it together while we opened and drank a bottle of wine (I recommend the wine if it relaxes you as a couple, but not if it makes either of you too intense). Other than the wine, it was a pretty horrible experience. We realized our groceries were $300 above what we thought and that our credit cards were out of control with old debt, not new.
But we also realized that the hundreds we'd thought each of us was spending on ourselves was actually about $60 of mad money a piece per month. (It wasn't as bad as when my sister-in-law did the same thing. They discovered how much they spent on going out to eat. Ouch.)
Next came negotiation. Most items had to stay: mortgage and utilities, etc. But we also realized that we'd go crazy if we weren't allowed a few indulgences. That's where the lying to each other always starts. We had to agree that mad money was a necessary aspect of the budget and our lives.
What is mad money? We decided it meant any purchases enjoyed by only one of us, not both. This includes food items that only one of us likes: his ice cream, my chocolate-covered ginger, lunch out with a co-worker instead of brown-bagging it. In reality, $60 wasn't really all that much for each of us, though we agreed that setting it at $50 each would help.
So that's where we are now. Trying not to snoop, trying not to pry and coming to terms with our groceries and high-interest credit cards. He's trusting that my iTunes purchases are hovering around $15 a month, and I'm trusting that his etopps collection grows by that same amount. We are hoping that going this route will mean we're more trusting and smarter about the financial aspect of the marital partnership.
The new vegan raw foods diet we're doing is cutting back on some of the groceries. Now if we just get to the last few credit cards, we'll be set.
Other articles of interest from Margaret Garcia-Couoh:
"Did I choose the wrong profession?"
"My daughter, the princess"
"Top 10 things not to say to new mothers"
