Who Will Be Paying The Bills?
“Figure out who is paying the bills (not covering the cost, I mean literally sending off the check) and if you want a joint account to do that. My husband is terrible at remembering to pay bills so I took that over.
How much will you save each month? We, sadly, didn’t have this very important conversation and it took almost ten years to finally nail it down. We have very opposing philosophies on it.
How much ‘allowance’ will you each get? We each take $100 in cash each month to spend on whatever we want so that if I want lunch out or he wants to eat donuts, we aren’t seeing that in our credit cards each month.
I strongly encourage you to have separate credit cards. We didn’t do this until recently and boy, did it drive home for both of us our spending habits that we need to work on. Feel free to have a third just for household expenses like utilities.
Set a limit on how much either person can spend without the other knowing until after the purchase. For example, we have a deal that anything over $100 that doesn’t include groceries or normal expected bills (i.e., mortgage) has to be run by the other first for approval. This was created after he spent $500 of money we didn’t have.
Set a budget for how much money you can spend on fun stuff like eating out, movies, etc. And when you run out of that discretionary fund, you don’t go out.
Set goals. For example, we paid off both our cars. We talked about how to achieve that and we did that before paying off his student loans. Now we are actively building an emergency fund that is much bigger than what we had before. How big do you want yours to be? Vacation fund? Some couples don’t care about vacations whereas we travel several times a year. What’s important to you?
Kids. Do you want one? When do you plan to start? Can you afford it? Child care is expensive. Find out all the costs first. You can wait until you’re a little older, early 30s for example, to set yourself up to afford it.
Write down a list, both of you, of how you see your lives going and what you’ll need to get there. Maybe you have a dream to get a degree down the road. Maybe he wants to fix up a car. I had no idea that my husband wanted a workshop until we finally started making good money. But I know he would have written that down had we done that simple exercise. Goals and dreams take planning, combined efforts, time and money. These things have to be discussed many times and at length.
Sex… How often do you each want it? Arguing… What is or isn’t acceptable? We aren’t allowed to call each other names, for example. We can say we need a break to cool off and walk away for a while or sleep on it. Pets… Do you want any? What types? How many?
Your spouse or significant other is your partner in living your dream and vice versa. Work together to make it happen! Good luck and happy living 😊”