Money, Communication, & My Wife

When there's plenty of money coming in it's not hard to talk about budgets. It's when things get tighter and expenses are cut that these discussions are a little tougher to have.

I hate disappointing my wife. That's the bottom line. And when I have to tell her that she can't spend as much or we can't go out to eat, I feel like I'm not doing my job as husband and provider. I want her to have everything she wants and more but, at the same time, I have to make sure what we do fits into our budget.

Last week, I had been going over some numbers and making some tweaks to our budget. I noticed that we had been over spending on our monthly American Express bill. I found that if the trend continued we would be in some trouble later on in the year. I calculated the new magic number for the AmEx bill and it was much lower than what we had grown accustom to over the past few months.

I wasn't sure what to do. I didn't want to present this new (and leaner) budget to her. But at the same time, I couldn't allow the status quo to continue.

In passing one night, N. mentioned how well our spending was on the AmEx this month. I told it was good but we needed to be cautious to keep it at the new number I had come up with. She inquired to where the new number came from and I showed her the new budget I had developed. She was very quiet and we did not speak of it again that night.

The next day we started talking about it. She said, at first, she thought there was no way we could do anything with a number that low. But once she thought about it, it wasn't as bad as she had initially thought and could be quite workable. She told me that if I would keep her more informed of our financial ins-and-outs she could play a better part in meeting our financial goals.

The lesson I learned was that if I made a better effort to communicate with my wife on financial matters I could avoid uncomfortable conversations later on. One good thing that came out of our talk was to employ having money talks on a regular basis. A talk once a week, like Sunday evening, to update ourselves on where we are in relation to our goals. Are there any big expenses coming up? Where is our money going? Things like that. I really feel these new "Money Meetings" will help us weather these tight times. And in the end, I think it will help strenghten our relationship along with our bottom line.