Before my husband and I moved to Idaho, we maintained separate finances. We both earned approximately the same, so we had our own bank accounts and split all bills down the middle. The mortgage and car auto-payments came 50% from my account and 50% from his; we sent two checks for all of our utility bills; we split the groceries on the checkout line into two orders of approximately the same cost; and we alternated paying for meals out or other luxuries. We occasionally argued about who should pay for the fancy cheese, or whether this restaurant bill was significantly more/less than the last one, but for the most part it was a flawless solution. We lived this way for about a decade. Then we moved to Idaho where his pay stayed the same but I took a 69% pay cut. And then we had kids.
Suddenly, we were living with a joint account, reduced household income, and had a wealth of kid-related costs, including the huge chunk of cash that is daycare.
My husband is a spender and I am a saver. Even now, almost 6 years after our big move, he struggles to understand where our money goes each month and why we don’t have the same level of disposable income as we did previously (hello daycare plus 69% pay cut!). If he decides he needs something, he needs it immediately. He always has a justification for why we cannot possibly wait to make the purchase. I, on the other hand, love to save money. I don’t have a clear idea of what I am saving it for, necessarily, and once it is in savings, I don’t want to spend it. Ever. You can imagine that this causes some conflict in our relationship.
After 18 years together, our individual habits have changed somewhat. I am a bit more relaxed about spending and he isn’t quite as impulsive. We work hard together to make sure we are not maintaining a balance on our (shared!) credit card. It was obvious, however, that neither of us was going to change enough to avoid the ongoing conflicts about how to handle our money. But then we came up with a solution! A few months ago, my husband proposed the radical idea of giving him an “allowance” each month that he could spend however he wanted without question or judgement from me. The concept of giving him an allowance seems very silly when you consider that he is the primary breadwinner, but I thought it was worth a try. So we set up a separate bank account and started auto payments (of a vigorously debated yet finally agreed upon amount) into this from our main checking account. Everything that he buys that is related to his hobbies or something that he needs urgently that we don’t have the immediate funding for – comes from his account. Since I manage all of our finances, I maintain a spreadsheet of exactly what he is buying with a running balance of what he has available. It is not an overstatement to say that this has been a magical solution for us. There have even been a couple of occasions where he needed to make a large purchase (he recently bought a sailboat, forgoodnesssake), but didn’t have enough money in his account to cover it. In these cases, he “borrowed” money from our savings account and simply paid it back over time by reducing his auto-payments. The reduction in anxiety for me has been huge. I don’t have to fight with him over the “need” for any one item, and he doesn’t have to justify his spending. Even the big purchases come with the reassurance of a commitment to replenish our savings without impacting the main checking account. In addition, the unexpected and probably most appreciated outcome of all of this is that he now recognizes how much he spends week to week. I don’t think he realized before exactly how quickly those smaller purchases can add up, and he’s a lot more thoughtful about every transaction.
Obviously, this solution wouldn’t work for everyone, but since money is regularly cited as one of the most common causes for marital conflict (and ultimately divorce) I thought I would offer up the idea in case it helps anyone else in a similar position! And please, if your significant other regularly spends ridiculous amounts of money on ridiculous (to you) items, tell me about it so that I know I’m not alone.
So not alone. My husbands purchases tend to be vehicles and their various parts. But he probably thinks my yarn purchases are silly too. Everyone has to have a hobby and as long as its not a drain on the family, I see no reason why we can’t splurge within our means.