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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?
It will be much easier if you frame it terms of the percentage of her income she gets to ‘keep’. Whatever hers minus $1000 (assuming you’re handling taxes) is, she should transfer to you every month. The remainder (her $1000) she can do with what she wants. She will still ask you for money, but her having to do it every time will remind her of her profligacy.
I won’t be able to combine finances with my partner for tax / IRS reasons (one US citizen spouse, one foreign spouse, both living outside the US is a nightmare if you want joint finances), but I’m kind of glad about it anyway. It’s way too much drama, if one partner is much richer it’s better for them to either hand over their card (if enough trust is there) by doing the Amex secondary card thing, or to pay the other person a set amount each month (if the trust isn’t there).
I have a coworker who constantly gets notifications from his shared bank account whenever his wife spends their money. Seems like a recipe for relationship resentment if you’re hard at work and you’re getting pinged with every purchase on her $10,000 Harrods shopping trip, even if on some level you accept it/are fine with it.
Shouldn't it be more like "whatever's left after deducting shared expenses she can do with what she wants"? The 1K discretionary sounds a tad lower than that (depending on the magnitude of those expenses of course) if she's making 35% of $175K.
Sure, that's as good a way, it depends on how much room they want to give each other I suppose.
Just that considering the numbers here, it seems like part of what's going on may be OP imposing his taste for saving on the wife -- if she's making ~60K, that's probably something like 4K/month after tax in the US. If they live someplace expensive I guess they might be spending 6K on general living expenses, but given the 'frugality' aspect of OP's personality as described I'll bet he's got a fair chunk of the wife's money going into savings. If she doesn't want to save as much as him, and he wants to make her by imposing an artificial cap on discretionary spending, it's not clear to me that it's her (or her spending) that's the problem.
Well, yes and no. Yes, because 90% of all the bills come from my account, but no, because if she'd paid "her share" she'd have almost nothing left. I think this is part of the problem. Because all the bills are coming from my account, she has quite a lot of money left in her account, and this makes her feel like she hasn't spent much. In fact, she "saved" $10000 in her account over the last 9 months or so, and was quite proud of it. Pointing out that this number wasn't very meaningful because only 10% of the bills came from her account didn't land very well.
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