Since a lot of us here have expressed interest in not starving to death in a gutter, I figured I'd start a weekly thread to discuss financial matters.
Ground Rules
- Remember that we're all just Internet randos. Don't bet your life savings on a hot tip from this thread.
- Keep culture war in the culture war thread. Yes, global events may impact our personal finances, but that does not mean we have to incessantly harp on culture war aspects here. If you are going to discuss it, please stick to the practical impacts of it on an individual level.
- Be kind. Remember that everyone here comes from different circumstances. We all have different resources available and different risk tolerances.
- Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Better is better. Celebrate people when they take a step up and work to move their finances in the right direction. Don't flame out because they haven't followed what you consider the optimal path. Everybody has to start somewhere.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Interpersonal finance question: how do y'all reconcile different finance/investing approaches when married?
Luckily, my wife and I don't have differing consumption habits; our main line items are taxes and our mortgage, and beyond that it's probably under $2k/month in expenses. But what we do with the remaining money is quite different. She's a balanced portfolio type; I'm more of a... adventurous type, though we both consider ourselves Bogleheads.
We reach compromises; e.g. recently I agreed to her requests for a $60k emergency fund, while before I kept as near $0 in cash as possible (her preference is $100k). Most of the compromises lean her way, though. At the same time, I've been planning to deleverage anyway as I draw closer to retirement, so it's not a big deal. But other situations have led to conflicts. E.g. we both have family members who want money; she sees familial handouts as a way to make life smoother, I see them as throwing away money to enable bad patterns.
Meeting halfway, or near enough, has worked fine for us. And most financial conflicts dissipate into irrelevance if you have money (so, maybe the generic solution to financial issues is to have money). But do you have a different approach?
In our case, we've kept our finances largely separate for our entire marriage, and it continues to work relatively well for the two of us. When we first started dating, my wife had a sizable inheritance that I was conscientious about leaving in her hands and not accessing, so we just split the bills and evolved into each of us paying for certain things and not questioning the other's spending habits too awful much, excepting some big ticket changes, of course. If we had managed to have kids, that probably would have changed things, but here we all are.
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