I used to be very wary of buying anything nice, but now that it's budgeted for, I really love it. The beauty of having a plan and automating is that 1) we save a lot of money and 2) when we spend money, it feels like purposeful spending. And we haven't fought about money in almost 5 years. We have categories for fun money (individually) so that we can maintain some independence. Now all our savings, investing and spending is automated. I always thought of myself as the saver and her as the spender, but I would take out a lot of cash with our grocery shopping and use it for going out. The beauty of YNAB (and probably a lot of other budgeting apps) is that it makes all our spending transparent. At first I was skeptical, but then started using it after every transaction. The arguments were mainly about Target shopping. She thought we needed to still buy nice things for our house - we couldn't live like paupers. I felt like at our combined income we should be saving and investing money. All those things have made it way too complicated to maintain separate accounts.Ī few years ago money was the main source of our arguing. Since then we've moved country, bought a house, moved to a larger house, had a baby, inherited some money, invested, etc. Also, after we married, I decided to take a year off work to write fiction. This worked splendidly until we began planning our wedding, and parents gave us differing contributions for the total expense. So we changed the formula to multiply my contributions by 0.5. This lasted for a while, but I realized she could never save for a vacation or anything fun because she made about half my salary. If one of us contributed more than the other, the other would then pay the next bill. We entered every expense into a spreadsheet. Ha.īefore we were married, my wife and I started with separate accounts. Not because of what she's going to spend on it or because we don't need it, but because I know she'll forget about it, not tell me we owe or do it last minute, and then I'm going crazy creating another online account and praying we're not late to pay. I still cringe whenever she gets a store card like, Children's Place, Victoria's Secret, TjMaxx, Freaking Kohls, etc. It was significant, and since I'm a little OCD when it comes to that, I told her I'd take over everything bills related, and she, of course, couldn't be happier. Because of that, her credit dropped from the 800s to high 700s. yeah, I gotta do that." Once she forgot to pay a $20 - $30 statement from freaking Kohl's and it posted as late on her report. So, at first, I had to constantly ask her if she'd paid her cards. Reason is she doesn't care about finances and she'll forget about her own. BUT, I'm in charge of paying all the bills. We do have a few that are just individual accounts, and neither has a desire to be AU on those. On most credit cards, we're AUs for each other. It's just weird how we get along even with 3 kids now.Īnyway, we have joint accounts for banking. I don't even recall a real fight for anything except a couple of arguments since we've been together (I can't even call them arguments - more like a difference of opinions). We've been married for 8 years now, and I must admit that I got lucky.
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