Handling Finances ???

[brokenbananas]

Just wondering for those married out there, just wondering what other people do:

1. Who handles the finances in your marriage?
2. Do you work with a budget?
3. Do you do financial planning?
4. Are your assets legally protected?
5. If one person handles the majority or all the finances, how do you involve your spouse?
6. Do you fight over finances?
7. How do you resolve financial conflicts?
8. Do you have separate or joint accounts?
9. What are each of your spending & saving styles?

Ok, I think that's enough questions.

My answers are:

1. I handle the finances like the checking account, all bills. My husband handles about 70% of our investment accounts. I do the rest.
2. We have a loose budget. We don't really adhere much to it.
3. Yes, we do financial planning: long, short-term savings/investments, retirement, emergency funds.
4. We are currently working on setting up a corporation to manage a limited partnership to help with tax reduction and setting up living trust for our children and a land trust.
5. We don't talk about the details much, but the accounts are open for the other to do a periodic audit or check. It's important to know what's going on. No secrets between hubby and me.
6. We do not fight over finances. We used to a lot. That's a long story but God has greatly worked on us. How we manage our finances is tons better than when we first got married 4 yrs ago.
7. We pray and talk about our financial conflicts.
8. All our accounts except for our individual IRAs are joint accounts.
9. I'm a big time saver. Neither my husband and I are big spenders.

 

[HeatherJay]

1. Who handles the finances in your marriage?

My husband.


2. Do you work with a budget?

Yes, and since we starting working with a budget, we've paid of 5 credit cards in the last year and a half. Unbelievable the difference it's made.


3. Do you do financial planning?

Not at the moment, although it's something we plan to start actively working on in the very near future. At the very least IRA's and college funds for the girls.


4. Are your assets legally protected?

No.


5. If one person handles the majority or all the finances, how do you involve your spouse?

LOL, I'm only involved in them when I need some money for something...in which case I ask him to give me some.


6. Do you fight over finances?

Sometimes, but nothing major. If the phone bill is too high, or if one of us wants something the other doesn't think is necessary.


7. How do you resolve financial conflicts?

Give and take. If I give in to something he wants, then he's more likely to see reason when I want something.


8. Do you have separate or joint accounts?

We have a joint credit card account but only his name is on the checking account.


9. What are each of your spending & saving styles?

We're both pretty frugal, but we both like to splurge on really nice things occassionally (trips, furniture, activities with the kids, etc.). Our styles are very compatible, I think.

Love, Heather

 

[JillLars]

1. Who handles the finances in your marriage?

We share the responsibility.

2. Do you work with a budget?

Yes.

3. Do you do financial planning?

Not anything formal right now.

4. Are your assets legally protected?

No.

5. If one person handles the majority or all the finances, how do you involve your spouse?

I take care of the utility bills, and then Josh gives me a check for half of them. He knows how much each bill is, so he knows what to set aside for them each month.

6. Do you fight over finances?

No.

7. How do you resolve financial conflicts?

We don't really have many financial conflicts.

8. Do you have separate or joint accounts?

We have seperate checking accounts, seperate credit cards, but a joint savings account.

9. What are each of your spending & saving styles?

I don't really know how to classify our styles, but they are similiar, which helps.

We do things differently than some people. We each take care of our own personal bills (e.g. he pays his car payment, we each pay our own cell phone bills, credit cards, ect.) and then we split the cost of rent, and utilities. We also own a number of things together that we split the cost of, like a table we recently purchased, and a set of pots and pans. We each have our own budgets and save as much as we can. I am able to save more than Josh right now because he has bills like school loans and a car payment that I don't have. We don't usually worry about who pays when we go out to do fun things, sometimes we will split like I pay for the movie, he pays for dinner. We also don't worry too much about grocery shopping, if we go on a big shopping trip we'll split the cost, but if we need milk or just a few things, whoever gets to it first takes care of it. It's worked well for us so far, we haven't really had any conflicts over it. I'm sure our style will grown and evolve as we finish college, purchase a home, and have children.

 

[charligirl]

We discussed our finainces alot before we got married and decided to have a joint account because we believe that what's mine is his and his is mine etc even though we both work. I manage the day to day account in terms of what we have and budgetting for the month.

We have a bills/mortgage account that we pay a lump sum into at the start of each month and the bills come out monthly on a direct debit so that pretty much runs itself

We also have a budget based on a 'flat' month (ie: no overtime) and that is our basic needs, any overtime money gets put straight in to a savings account.

We have one debt from pre-marriage which we have a plan to pay off over the next 18 months but other than that we have no credit cards, loans or borrowings at all (apart form mortgage obviously). If we want something we save for it or pray for it.

We don;t really argue, it casues stress sometimes because my husband is prone to worry about money and I tend to trust God... but he has only been saved a year so he is still learning to trust God for things... God gave us a brand new car recently so He has proved himself as provider!!!

 

[Flipper]

1. Who handles the finances in your marriage?

Both of us, though he handles the day to day bill paying, more because I don't want to mess with it and I think he's better than I with that. I am better at the long term investment thing, so I tell him what to invest his profit sharing in, etc.



2. Do you work with a budget?
Sort of, we are working on that. The big thing we did that has worked is that we have two checking account. One for bills and one for everything else. When we get paid, enough for the bills is switched to the bills account. That way, we know exactly how much we can play with. When he came up with this idea, I thought he was crazy. It's the best thing we have done to control the spending.


3. Do you do financial planning?

Yes.

4. Are your assets legally protected?

Not sure what you mean by that. I guess they are. We don't have a will (big No-No - everyone should have a will), but it is fixed for everything to revert to the other if one of us dies.

5. If one person handles the majority or all the finances, how do you involve your spouse?

We do everything on-line and on Quicken so I have access to everything that goes on. If I really wanted to, I can trace every paycheck to see where it went. I haven't the need nor desire to do so.

6. Do you fight over finances?

We've never fought, but we've had disagreements before - not many.


7. How do you resolve financial conflicts?

Talk it out.

8. Do you have separate or joint accounts?

All accounts are joint.

9. What are each of your spending & saving styles?
We both spend too much and don't save enough.

 

[Jenna]

1. Who handles the finances in your marriage?
For the most part, we share the burden of managing our money.

2. Do you work with a budget?
Yes, we work with a loose budget. We take care of all our bills, savings, and alot pocket money for whatever.

3. Do you do financial planning?
*laughs* Almost sounds like an oxymoron when you're always broke, eh?

4. Are your assets legally protected?
Heeheehee..... what assets?

5. If one person handles the majority or all the finances, how do you involve your spouse?
When I was the one responsible for all finances, I would make up spreadsheets, pay bills and everything. Then I would show my husband the ledgers of everything that we've done, have yet to do, and then we'd have talks about what we could/should do differently.

6. Do you fight over finances?
Nope. We're both pretty easy to please. I'm happy if he lets me buy a skein of yarn, and he likes magazines. *laughs* Makes it easy to keep us from getting anxious over tightening down on the money too much. So, no fights. *shakes head*

7. How do you resolve financial conflicts?
We just do a lot of talking, thinking, praying, and more talking. It keeps us from making frivilous purchases for the most part. Other than that, we're pretty good at compromise, so it isn't too hard for us to work through financial conflicts.

8. Do you have separate or joint accounts?
We have a joint account. I thought about opening a separate account though, just so we could hide money from ourselves. *laughs* Out of sight, out of mind. It would just be up to me to do since the bank is closed by the time he gets home from work.

9. What are each of your spending & saving styles?
We are both prone to impulse buying when we are alone, so we shop together for the most part. We sometimes hurt ourselves by nickel and dime-ing ourselves to death. However, I'm usually able to counter that by stealing pocket change and floating dollars. lol I clean out pockets and swipe change off of dresser tops. I toss it all in a jar that we don't open again until it is time to take it to the bank. It works to help cut down on the waste. Other than that, we will set aside a certain amount of money for savings, and we'll move it as soon as my husband gets paid. Then we budget ourselves like crazy on the pennies that we've left ourselves. It calls on our more frugal sides, since we FEEL broke when we look into a nearly empty account. However, the number in the adjoinging savings account grows at a wonderful pace. We learned quickly that we couldn't save anything so long as we were looking at it constantly.

 

[Svt4Him]

1. Who handles the finances in your marriage?
My wife did, but now I do as it got too stressful for her. And I'm a professional accountant, so I guess it would be expected I'd do it anyway.

2. Do you work with a budget?
Well, not a budget, but we do have a plan. Right now our schooling costs about 1/3 of our income per year, and our mortgage takes the rest...almost.

3. Do you do financial planning?

Yes

4. Are your assets legally protected?

I don't understand this question. Like insured? or with a will?

5. If one person handles the majority or all the finances, how do you involve your spouse?

Well, she spends it, I record it. And sometimes I talk to her. Ok, I'll take the tongue out of my cheek. We do talk.

6. Do you fight over finances?

I use to teach thaiboxing. We've only fought once, and she...oh, you mean...oh, just ignore that. Sometimes we do, but I realized I was worse than her when it comes to shopping. They say if a husband goes shopping with a wife, they spend 20% more, so I tell her to leave me at home. Where I err is when I want something, I just go get it. I said sorry just last night for this.

7. How do you resolve financial conflicts?

Again, I'm a professional accountant, so it's fairly easy to see what we need to do.

8. Do you have separate or joint accounts?

Joint

9. What are each of your spending & saving styles?

"If our outflow is greater than our income, our upkeep will be our downfall."

We are in no position to save now, apart from RRSP's. I was going to take them out, but they are currently making 26-30%.

Here is a good plan though:

G- get
O- out
O- of
D- debt

that is our plan now.

 

[brokenbananas]

Thanks for the responses. It seems most of us have some things in common. I wonder how many out there who struggle in this area and have a hard time answering these questions.

What I meant by legally protecting your assets are: Do you have your assets protected legally in case of a lawsuit? Would people be able to get your home, investment accounts, etc?

We are working on becoming debt free. My husband was laid off over a year ago and we are making a go at the stock market trading. Today at my work, they laid off a bunch of people. I wasn't one of them, but this further reinforces that we need to be debt free, make the stock market trading profitting consistently and enough, and work on ways to reduce our taxes.

 

[Flipper]

What I meant by legally protecting your assets are: Do you have your assets protected legally in case of a lawsuit? Would people be able to get your home, investment accounts, etc?

My guess is that if you have an insurance policy (homeowners, automobile, etc. - depending on the circumstance), lawyers are most likely to focus on the policy limits because that is most easy to collect on. Unless you have hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in assets, it would seem to be more of a pain in the neck to go after personal assets.

 

[mgutie2002]

I think the way couples handle finances varies from couple to couple. You just need to adjust and find what works for the two of you. In marriage counseling, we were counseled to get one account. I can't remember the reasoning behind it. But I am a major spender, and my husband is not. So we balance each other out. We make a financial plan together and do the bills together every month. We then decided how much we have to spend and divide it.

 

[JigsawHC]

1. Who handles the finances in your marriage?
I do

2. Do you work with a budget?
Yes, we have a rough budget.

3. Do you do financial planning?
Only to the extent taht we save some every month and have an order we want to pay off our student loans..

4. Are your assets legally protected?
Yes

5. If one person handles the majority or all the finances, how do you involve your spouse?
After I pay the bills I tell my wife aht all has been paid, what all si left to be paid that month, and how we are doing compared to our budget.

6. Do you fight over finances?
no

7. How do you resolve financial conflicts?
We don't have to many. We each get a certain amout we can spend each month without the other saying anything about it.

8. Do you have separate or joint accounts?
All joint accounts.

9. What are each of your spending & saving styles?
We both don't like to waste money, but we are willing to spend it on ourselves from time to time.