This past week my husband and I celebrated 10 years of marriage and was able to get away (without the little ones) to spend some alone time together. It was Fabulous.
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Antwain & Petrina, July 9, 2005
One of the many conversations we had pertained to our goals and vision for our finances. We realize that statistically, many marriages fail over one single topic—money. And after being on the high and low side of money throughout our our marriage, we reviewed and discussed our finances. So after 10 years of marriage, we have learned that although we view and do money differently, we have to view and do money together. In order for our marriage to work, we learned we both must:
- Have the same financial goals. Getting out of debt is not something we as individuals can’t do by ourselves. If my husband is trying to pay off bills and I am going to the mall and racking up more credit card debt every month, the goal of getting out of debt will not happen. If we want to eliminate stress, worry and fighting over money, we learned that we had to work together. So we had to sit down and determine a vision for our finances—where we want our finances 5, 10, 20, 30 years from now, and then determine a plan as to how we are going to get there. So for us, at the end of each year we set goals for the following year. These goals relate to our marriage, our children, our careers/businesses and our finances and we are very specific. We know, for example, that in 2015 the goal will be to pay 50% of my student loans off and put an additional $1,500 in savings (just an example). So we our monthly budget coincide with that goal; any additional money that is leftover after paying everything else, goes towards that goal.
- Review our financial process consistently. We learned that we both need to review our budget, monthly. Although one of us pays the bills each month, the other should still review the budget and know where the money is going each month. Since we set our monthly budgets for the year, we review the month prior to see if anything needs to be changed, added or deleted.
- Be willing to make sacrifices to reach our goals. We understood when we had children that our financial life would change, but we understand even more now that if we want to “get to where we want to go” we have to “not do many of the things that we want to do (temporarily)”. We both have to understand that our sacrifices now will turn into 30, 60 or 100 fold blessings later, if we do and view our money God’s way and stick to the plan.
Although it has taken us years to understand and learn how to set a financial goal and stick to it, we are working hard so it will not take us the same amount of years to reach those financial goals/vision. We are both in sync in reaching our goals together as a married couple and are now teaching our children to do the same.
How long have you and your spouse been married? What have you learned concerning finances as a couple? Share or leave a comment on FB, Twitter or Pinterest.
