dealing with money. men & women

tanith

I learnt a good lesson in my first marriage that was to have 'our' money 'your 'money and 'my' money.......... my first hubby was good at spending money that wasn't ours in the first place... and ended in huge debts... :eek:

Now remarried for 10yrs my hubby and I have a joint acc for mortgage, bills and a little extra for suprise bills... and we both have our own accounts for the rest of our salaries... We pay almost equal amounts into the J/A and the rest we save or spend as the fancy takes us, I SAVE AND HE SPENDS .....

Come to think of it most of the women I know are good savers with partners who run out of cash 2 weeks into the month and have to come cadging off the partner who has planned her monthly spending. I am sure there are gentlemen out there who can plan with money , just seems I only know one and thats my wealthy brother.... :rotfl: well by my standards he is

tanith

tango

thanks for your repiles,as i have said money has probably caused 90% of the rows in our marriage. to often i went along with oh because i knew if i didn't we would row,also its hard as it always seems like the woman is the old spoil sport, always saying no to the kids as well!!
i know deep down that we are in #### now because of not saying "no"
but we are much better now,thinks are really tight,and we cannot get the cards any more, thank goodness.
we do have our house and two great kids and both working.
if i had my time again though, i would defintley have been even more of a old dragon when it came to the money :eek:

System

Ok I have a different slant on this.

I used to live with my GF. I took out loans willy nilly (more or less) and I even thought I knew how money worked etc etc. I got a secured loan etc (still thinking I knew what im doing, I can pay it off. Ok a lot of it went on house improvements but anyhow) Then I came across MSE. It was like OMG, I had naff all clue what I was doing. It was a wake up call to the extreme

But she moved out and back to parents and it was truly telling.

We both feel it was a good decision because we no longer spend money like water and look to each other for reassurance that its ok. We both have a lot more money and my finances are in the best shape (or should that be control) that they have been for a while.

Basically, it comes down to the lightbulb moment and realising you really, really, dont need half the stuff you buy. An example was our late night visits to the 24hour tesco to buy snacks, pop etc and easily spend £10 between us if not each. Similarly the shopping for the two of us would easily top £200 a month, now, although im by myself its £60.

I think a lot of the money spending can be termed "money drip" in as far as its £2 here, £5 there, but it all adds up. Once you get that idea into your head, you have won more than half the battle. Then you can prepare and budget, for example you KNOW you have an MOT due next month, so put away a coupla hundred this month and the same next month, so you can cover the bill without credit.

Another way to put it, is that if you max out just one credit card for £2000, you can easily end up paying back £350 a year in interest alone. That £350 could buy you and your beloved many meals out, for example a monthly treat of a night out dining

If I had known 5 years ago what I know now, I would have a *LOT* more money to play with.

However, what I, personally cannot understand is people who have several cards with £2K or more on them and they carry on spending. I guess these people need to have a lightbulb moment BUT that level of spending is way excess, even just by comman sense terms.

tango

many true words said 13000, :cool:

pickle

Thankfully my husband and I have a similar attitude to money. We met early in life and never had much so we've kept the same parsimonious attitude into middle age. We have a joint account. I organise all the finances, usually because he's too busy and he usually comes and asks me for money if he needs it. He's happy with this and wouldn't know how much is in the bank account from year to year unless I told him.

nearlyrich

We have a joint account for bills, pay in £150 each and split the shopping bill and anything else we spend equally between us. I pay the cleaner, he pays when we go out for a drink or a meal. Any other money we have is ours. We had a joint plan to kill off the mortgage which involved a joint savings account.

My ex didn't let me spend any money even though I was earning plenty althought he could, he left me with joint debts for his car and other expensive toys which he took with him and I ended up paying for. DH also had a bad with money ex so we decided early in our relationship that we would not fight about money.

I think if you have similar ideas it works well and whilst some people think it's wrong to not totally pool money in a relationship it works for us.

£Ronnie

nearlyrich wrote:

I think if you have similar ideas it works well and whilst some people think it's wrong to not totally pool money in a relationship it works for us.

But what if you see the way your OH spends his spending money as a total waste of money??

When we first met I thought my DH had a good money head, he always saved some money first etc etc. However we had a lot more expendable then. Now 6 years, a mortgage bills and two children later, and a lightbulb moment re overdraft, means in my mind that we have no expendable money. Ie any money left at the end of the month should go straight to paying off OD, no non essentials excusable!

At the end of January when doing our Febuary budget, as our excess was larger than normal, we decided to allow £30 each for the month to spend on what we wanted...so I decided to go swimming twice a week, and he decided to go to the pub on the very first night of the Febuary budget:eek:

Bearing in mind that he spent £6K last year in the pub:eek: I see this as a waste of money. Then during the month he has asked me for money for various things eg computing mag approx £6, would never consider borrowing from the library, etc.
Now all I want out of life are things like a slow cooker so I can have the joy of buying cheaper cuts of meat and getting our shopping bill even down further, but I daren't buy one due to having to explain myself.

He has no access now to any money as there simply wasn't enough coming in at one point but now we need to think about reinstating some non essentials i think, eg haircuts, clothes etc, but I am reluctant to give him an allowance as such as I know he will go down the pub with it, and it breaks my heart when he could do so much more with it for the family.

FrankieM

pdoff wrote:

u sound just like me & dh! i work part time - on maternity leave at mo, he thinks cos he earns more he can spend more. not sure where the kids fit in as they earn nothing - lol! how did u reign him in?



In the end he got a bit of a shock when our debt equaled his yearly income...so that certainly helped.
I also now give him £10 cash each week thats his to spend, so he has something.
And we went through a period of time when he wasn't allowed to put anything on the cc unless it was expensable from work.

I think its a lot harder when there is just one wage earner because those of us at home don't actually 'earn' anything so its trying to make it fair so that everyone has something to spend on themselves......no real easy answer though!!!

buglawton

£Ronnie wrote:

....Now all I want out of life are things like a slow cooker so I can have the joy of buying cheaper cuts of meat and getting our shopping bill even down further, but I daren't buy one due to having to explain myself.

A pressure cooker is less glamourous but does the job - I remember when I used to help run a shelter, we used a pressure cooker to cook a complete ox tongue in under 1 hour (cheap cut you see). Tasty too.

Dora_the_Explorer_5

When I was married my OH and I developed a system which played to both our strengths and supported our weaknesses. Although we didn't describe it as such, it was based on a partnership business model with one of us as finance director and the other facilities director. It worked a treat as we had confidence in what each of us was better at and we trusted each other to do a good job.