Is money a problem for you and your spouse? As the old saying goes, money can not buy a happiness, but money problems can shred a marriage and leave you and your spouse frustrated, angry and arguing with each other.
Now, I am the last person to offer money management advice, in fact – I was terrible at it for years. It was my husband who managed the bulk of the finances for years and then we developed a system of trading off managing the books so we were both aware of what was going on and we alleviated the pressure on each other.
You can visit the Money blog for some great money management advice. What I can offer you, is some tips on how you and your spouse can balance your money responsibilities with each other. Financial mismanagement can cause the death of a marriage and create a lot of misery in the marriages that do survive.
Creating a Positive Atmosphere
The first thing you and your spouse have to do is to set priorities. You both need to know what is important. If this means seriously sitting down and looking at your finances and your standard of living and making sure that you are living within your means, it allows both of you the opportunity to relax and enjoy that living – then that is what you need to do.
Making Long Term Plans
The next thing you have to do, after you have set your priorities, is to put a plan of action into practice. This could be making a budget and sticking to it. It could be setting an allowance for each of you to enjoy as expendable cash. The joy of expendable money is that you will be able to enjoy the things you like to do whether it’s saving up for a vacation or buying books or going to a museum or the movies – this will alleviate a lot of stress on both of you.
There’s nothing worse than working all the time, but feeling like you never really get to enjoy the fruit of that working. This may be the step where you look for professional advice whether it’s from an accountant, a money manager or other. This can help you reach the next step in money management, which is financial independence.
Most of us don’t want to live paycheck to paycheck. We want to retire comfortably, we want to go on vacation and we want to show our children the world and new experiences – money management can help us to achieve all of these goals.
How do you and your spouse manage money?
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