How do I talk to my wife?

[asmom]

Please don't take this personally. I'm very glad that your system works for you and your husband. What I'm going to say is my own personal opinion of what I want and expect in a marriage. I know others here disagree with me.

If it is necessary to have a "rule" like that, than one of the people in that relationship is NOT interested in working together for a common goal. That would be a deal-breaker for me as far as any relationship went. I think I would have a great deal of trouble staying with someone who ran off and acquired tens of thousands of dollars in debt secretly. Monetary infidelity is just as damaging to relationships as sexual infidelity. It is all about trust. Once one partner demonstrates that he or she can't be trusted, the relationship is never the same. I wouldn't want to have a wife who I had to monitor and track constantly to make sure she wasn't overspending or opening credit accounts secretly.

Not only is it about trust, but it is about open communication. It is perfectly fine, IMO, for one partner to handle all of the household finances, pay the bills, manage the investments, etc. That's how we do it and we've been together over 18 years. BUT there MUST be communication. I maintain a spreadsheet of our finances with all of our accounts and investments and at least a couple of times each year, the two of us sit down and review that information item by item so my wife knows exactly where things stand. So even though I'm the one physically doing the money stuff, she stays well-informed about it all.

Actually I agree with you. I started my marriage with pretty much the exact same ideas as yourself. But you have to meet people where they are. And as it turns out, my husband comes from a different belief system and he has had some life experiences that cause him to view money differently from me. Of course had we been more mature when we married, I would have realized that we were not compatible in this way but we weren't more mature. By the time, I fully grasped this we had already been married 3 years and had an infant daughter. When there are other people who will be affected by your decisions, you have to decide how to make something work. There are deal-breakers and there are negotiables and this was a negotiable. It would have been different if his irresponsibility involved gambling or not paying the mortgage or something like that. And after our phone was disconnected after the early days of our marriage, I made it clear that was to never happen again and it hasn't.

I should clarify that the debt wasn't acquired secretly. I just wasn't paying attention. He does his thing with his money and I did mine. It was only when it got too big for him to handle that he became secretive because he didn't know how to fix it and he was embarassed.


Soooooo, here we are. He is in the process of retiring the last of his CC debt. He has stuck to the budget I created for him. He is contributing to his 401K(TSP) He has a small EF. I don't peek over his shoulder but I am engaged. We do discuss how we are going to handle common expenses like household emergencies or our daughter's upcoming college education. It'll do for now.

[disneysteve]

asmom, I think it is very commendable that you both worked together to deal with the issues at hand and found ways to make things work rather than taking the "easy" way out and splitting up. We always hear that money problems are the leading cause of divorce. I wonder how many of those divorces could have been prevented by better communication and perhaps some marital/financial counseling to help the couples work through the money issues. As I've said many times, fights over money are rarely actually about money. They are about trust. They are about maturity. They are about communication. They are about insecurity. They are about self-esteem. They are about control. They are about anything and everything other than money. Money is just where it shows up.

[lovcom]

Ray,

Time to face facts.

You married a horrible person. You keep trying to improve an impossible situation. I believe in working things out, but not if the chances are abismal and the other person is a loser-twit, like your wife.

Get out of that marriage and make better choices. Staying with this insensitive unfair Cabrona is just going to bring you down, down, down.

Life is too short to even try to deal with such Jodidas...seriously get out and rebuild your life without her.

[bluewaves]

The reason this is disturbing is because the two of you can't communicate about important issues. There are no common goals that I saw. If you were to picture a reward for all your budgeting efforts in 10 years, could you both enjoy it and would you both have contributed? His and hers finances are fine to protect credit in case one of you goes crazy, falls in love with someone else or is just plain wasteful for selfish reason. You two need to talk to a financial advisor.

[RayMetz100]

3 days in Vegas was great. I left my house with $307. Spent it on hotel, food, ground transportation, entertainment, gambling, and came home with $31 in my pocket. The cheapest things I did was walking all over the strip, hanging out at the pool, playing $1 blackjack, playing penny slots, one line x 1c. Sleeping. Ate the $1 spicy McDonalds chicken sandwich 3 times. There were a few hours where I thought I was going to beg/borrow $100 from my wife, but then I hit a $100 slot winner and that got me home.

I called att wireless and lowered our bill by $100/month (might go up a little after pro-ration settles in) I lowered my Internet to 1.5MBps and saved $30. I cut my pocket money from $840 to$720 per month. So now my budget has $327 in savings. I want to really focus on not spending that for 3 months to build the Dave Ramsey $1000.

I think the problem that some of us here are having with your "pocket" money being so high is that you are using it on such a variety of things that should be itemized in your budget. Your budget needs to account for every dollar. Throwing $700 in a basket and calling it "pocket money" is not budgeting.

I lowered my Friday pocket money from $180 to $152. I still save $60/month extra for Clothes, Haircuts, Gifts, and Oil Changes. For a year, that calcs to $152x52 + $60x12 or $720 per month. Do you think I should put the Clothes/Hair/Gifts/Oil in my main budget or leave it as a sub-item of my pocket money budget?

Considering my debt, income, and situation, what do you recommend for a vacation or Christmas budget? I will work on adjusting my pocket cash down. Having other buckets will help.

I want to end up with something like this:
Friday cash: $150/wk (=$650/month)
Savings, Clothes/Hair/Gifts/Oil: $60/mo
Savings, Vacation: ?
Savings, Christmas: ?

how do you know she saves $ if you don't have any idea what she is doing or not doing with her income really.

I know she keeps cash stashed away. Seeing $400 - $1000 of her stash around the house is common. In comparison to me, that makes her a big saver. The normal scenario for me is to pull out my $180 from the cash machine on Friday, then on Monday I'd be lucky to have $55 left to last me till Thursday night at midnight and I'm dying to get my Friday money. I regularly live week to week. It used to be payday to payday. My old routine was to get paid, pay as many bills as I can remember, then look at my balance. If I saw $500 balance, I'd dream up something I "need" to buy, buy it within a day or two, then be flat broke the remaining 12 days till payday, borrowing from my kids accounts or my wife. My wife doesn't operate like that. She "saves" and seems to have $500 all the time compared to me. Not the same kind of saving talked about here on the message board, but that's why I was calling her a better saver than me. Because she doesn't blow her paycheck in the first two days like I was doing.

the two of you can't communicate about important issues. There are no common goals that I saw. If you were to picture a reward for all your budgeting efforts in 10 years, could you both enjoy it and would you both have contributed?

I was thinking about that. Why am I so mad about a $10,000 tummy tuck? What if we saved $10,000 and were out of debt. Would I still be mad? Yes I would. But why? One thought is what if we saved $20k and I went to India for a month while she got her tummy tuck, would I be ok then? A little more, but now I'm thinking I'd want to pay off the second mortgage on the house or something with it. So I can't think of any healthy scenario where I'd be cool with her spending $10k on a tummy tuck. Maybe if she had her own pocket/money savings, separate from mine and if she scrimped on her weekly expenses for years and really wanted to do it, maybe then I'd be ok. But even then I'd be thinking her weekly allowance must have been too high if she could save $10k. Besides the money, I don't like the idea of some doctor in Mexico cutting into my wife. I don't like women that have plastic surgery in face or breasts either. I don't even like tattoos and piercings.

The only 10 year reward I can think of that we'd both like is a trip to Paris. But my wife says if we haven't saved for that by the time she's 40, she's charging the trip since it's been a life long dream of hers. If I go, then the debt would double. If I don't go, then I'm even more resentful. If I save now and actually pulled it off, I'd still be resentful that the money didn't go to the house payment or something else. I don't know of any healthy savings goals for us.

[RayMetz100]

Stupid mistake of the weekend... I found a car on craigslist for my son, paid $1000 cash for it, and drove it home. This morning I went to complete the registration into my name and it required an emissions test first, which it failed. So now the car is still in the sellers name. I'm not going to put another $500 trying to repair it so I'm sort of stuck. I can try putting it into another family member's name who lives out of the city not requiring emissions, or I can try selling it back to the seller for $500 maybe. Most of the money came from him and my wife, so it hasn't affected my budget that much yet. Maybe $100. But I feel responsible to help cover the loss if there is any.

My wife and I did start counseling, but at this point I don't know if it's divorce counseling or marriage counseling. I'm trying to do things that will help/save our marriage. I'm not sure what she's trying to get out of it. The good thing is I have enough things just on my side to keep me busy each week whether she decides to stay or not. Hard on my mind and heart though, and hard to keep from getting angry at the situation and her response. We started counseling after I caught her with another man on July 4th so keeping positive during this is a challenge.

If she leaves, I will likely have an upside down house to get out of. I guess that makes this car mistake seem trivial. I still need something for my son to drive asap though.

[Debt Relief]

I recently did my budget and found after spending my paycheck on all the bills and gas for $5000, I have $840 per month left for restaurants, pocket money, haircuts, oil changes, gifts, and clothes. My wife's bills and groceries add up to $1600 and she apparently has $1400 left for restaurants, pocket money, haircuts, oil changes, gifts, and clothes. She won’t admit it though. She won't tell me exactly how much she makes or how much she spends. I found one of her 80 hour paystubs and calculated this.

At this point, I'm more interested in her admitting she spends $1400 a month while I spend $840. I'm hoping if I can get her to acknowledge that, then later we can decide together if we want to keep it that way or change something. Part of me thinks I should just focus on reducing my $840 and mind my own business. But I also feel like I've had my head in the sand for the last several years and can't ignore the surprise when I noticed she's spending more than me. I thought I was the spender of the household.

She also wants to spend $500 less on the household this July because her $500 car payment will be paid off. If that happens, she'll have $1900 per month of pocket money. Am I an idiot?

Ray

I'm a big believer in the concept that if you're married, it's a joint venture... a partnership. Good or bad... I've always had a joint account. My paycheck goes in there. Her paycheck goes in there. All bills come out of there... and we each take a bit of spending money out for personal use each month as needed. So I've never had to have the talk... it was just that way from the beginning.

Why do you spend $4200 and she only spends $1600? Did you already have tons of debt when you got married?