Money is often the downfall of many a marriage. If you don’t want it to be so with your marriage, you and your spouse will need to learn how to communicate, compromise and budget. Even if you are the most frugal of misers and your spouse is an incurable shopaholic, there are ways for you to get along if you really work at it.
Set Common Goals
The first step to preventing money related arguments is to agree on goals. If you can get your spouse to agree to a goal, it will be easier to ask your spouse to be mindful of the goal when he or she is tempted to overspend. It helps to keep you honest as well. Make it “romantic” make your spouse feel that you are working as a team towards a common cause.
You should also decide on how to handle your finances. Will you keep separate accounts? Or a joint account? Will you be pooling you money? Or will each of you control how to spend what you make. It is important to set these rules early in a marriage, so that arguments can be minimized.
Budgeting
A budget will serve as your step by step guide towards reaching you goal. List your projected income, and then make an itemized list of your projected expenses along with the individual costs of each item. Then arrange your expenses according to priority, at this point you will be able to see what you can and can’t afford. As your income increases over the years and you improve your lifestyle, you will be able to celebrate milestones by adding things like cable TV or high speed internet, or even long vacations to your budget.
The beauty of a budget in black and white is that it makes it that much easier to adhere to goals and to inject discipline into spending habits. Budgeting doesn’t have to be an unromantic concept either. The idea of a two people sacrificing individual wants to be together is a very romantic situation. As you income increases over the years, you’ll find yourselves fondly reminiscing the times when you needed to sleep in a single bed because the only flat you could afford wasn’t big enough for a queen sized bed. Ultimately, agreeing to a plan and sticking to it together, and helping each other stay on track can only be good for a marriage.