The day I faced my spouse in the face to talk money

It was January of 2015. I was cuddled on a sofa set facing an empty fridge and my bank balance did not seem adequate to cover rentals and children’s school fees. For a while I thought it was my spouse’s fault. Yes, she did not stop me from spending lavishly on Christmas and on my birthday, which falls on New Year’s Eve.  Well, I am an economist but she is a fully qualified management accountant who should have seen that the figures were going beyond the safety zones.

Anyway, one of us was to blame. Actually, both of us—makes me feel better that it could not just have been me alone to blame. But both of us finally realized how bad our financial situation really was.

Finally, after days of regrets, I plucked courage and decided I was going to face my wife and let her know my mind. So I’m sitting at the kitchen table waiting for her to come from picking children from school.  I rehearse on how I will plead with her on the need for both of us to make some changes to our spending habits. I’m scared to death. Scared because she is the least spender that I have ever met. Worse still, two days ago, she just put forward a request from her brother on school fees support. So the discussion about spending habits would be misinterpreted.

As I am racing with thoughts, she calls. She’s on her way home from work and has just picked up our sons from school. I’m thinking of ways to avoid this finance talk. But later I still decided I would talk about it after our sons go to bed in the night.

It’s evening. We have a strangely tense dinner. I’m fidgeting all over. My wife is wondering what’s going on. When our sons go to bed, I begin to sweat it again, not wanting to talk to her. But I finally bite the bullet. And guess what? It’s easy. Much easier than I thought. The discussion was calm and rational and we came to a lot of agreements by the end of the night. Sure, we were up until after midnight that night trying to put some pieces in place to turn our personal finance lives around—and spent the few remaining dawn hours in each other’s arms. We are glad we did have that talk because this January, we looked back and smiled.

Talking about money in your family whether with your spouse or parents is really important for ensuring a healthy and sustainable personal finance life.

One important tirade of questions to think about is this: With regard to your partner, are you sharing the same dreams for the future? Are your sending habits reflecting your income levels and future plans? Do you have debts that you are hiding from each other? Are you in better—or worse—financial shape than your partner might believe? Are you in agreement about how to handle your respective property in the event of the other’s passing? Hard questions but important to reflect on now.

Looking back, every time I made an effort to actually talk through these issues with my spouse, I found that I had put it off for too long and worried about it too much for nothing, because it went easier than I expected and there was much relief afterwards.

Have a blessed week-end as you resolve to sit down with your partner or parents to talk about how you are managing your money.