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Wellness Wednesday for July 19, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I'm having marriage financial woes.

I come from a family of misers, my wife comes from a family which is nearing the bottom of the stairs with their silken slippers. Before we merged our finances, I was always wondering why she was never able to save, and introducing budgeting soon told me why. Our budgeting is virtual, which is to say we assign transactions to categories and there's nothing technically preventing one of us from overspending on a category. We still have our separate bank accounts.

Out combined income is about 175k (65% me). We each get a "personal" category which is funded by $1000 per month. This funds clothes, going out without the other person, gadgets, sports gear, whatever we want. To me, $1000 is overkill. I read other couples' budgets online and $250 is more typical. I save most of mine.

She managed to get into the negatives pretty quickly with hers. We kept on making exceptions for why we could recategorise her purchases, but soon she was -$1500. Eventually I agreed we would reset the balance, as long as she didn't overspend again. At half-way through July she was at $800 spent.

It's really having an impact on our marriage. She feels really bad about it, but can't seem to keep it under control. It's building resentment in me. We've still got a decent savings rate, but we're trying for kids at the moment, and we would go backwards financially if we had a child now. It's not just the personal fund, she consistently buys more expensive stuff in other categories. Even assuming perpetual DINK status, I'm pretty sure I would save more money being single.

She thinks she's doing well, and points out that her family would consider her a miser. I think even I'm doing poorly, and my family would consider me to be wasteful with my money.

I see frugality as a virtue, she sees it as a preference. She feels massive social pressure to not look poor. I'm quite happy to tell my colleagues that I can't afford to go to lunch with them.

She's not a feminist by any means, but does have a strong aversion to feeling controlled in any way, so I'm hesitant to suggest I have greater control over her finances.

Any ideas?

Man I feel your pain, my girlfriend is certainly a spendthrift, even if both of our finances are in the red, it's really not a big deal for me since my family is like 1 or 2 OOM richer.

At least she's self-aware about it, and has already committed to giving me control of the purse-strings when we're making actually reasonable salaries abroad or getting married.

Is there some way to automatically shift the money you're budgeted to spend to a different account, so that it can't be mixed up with the discretionary spend? You can frame it as a way for her to control herself better, if you guys can both agree that dipping into the joint savings account should require both your approvals.

Is there some way to automatically shift the money you're budgeted to spend to a different account, so that it can't be mixed up with the discretionary spend?

This is what I see as the next step, but getting there without her feeling like I'm controlling her is going to be difficult.

Also, she's going to need a new phone soon (she's somewhat locked into iPhone out of habit). Realistically that would mean saving up now. What am I going to do, tell her she has to be phoneless until she saves up the money?

I see phones as being so important both as an essential and for QOL that I wouldn't begrudge the additional expense, but I'm sure you have your own priorities, at least if her current phone is in working condition.