Uncommitted partner

MRSMCAWBER

Morning and happy new year all :-)

Im lucky that even though my hubby is the wage earner.. he agrees with my view that although "he" earns the money i see it as my job to make the money go as far as i can...very old fashioned perhaps -but i have "housekeeping" -I love it...

Happily hubby loves good old home cooking and keeps his snout out of what i buy in the shops -usually because i shop whilst he is at work lol....

He takes a flask of HM soup and some HM bread to work most days and loves it - in fact on the odd occasion when i have given him something else -he looks like a puppy thats been kicked hehe

If your hubby is digging his heels in... perhaps start by making gentle swaps that he might not notice, in fact if i knew my hubby was liable to turn up having had a trip to waitrose etc that wasn't budgeted for... i would just buy less out of "my shopping budget" and that way you can sort of counter act what he is spending.... and pop it in a tin to build up a little ...

Im sure you will soon have him onside -or at least creating less fuss... after all once he has been eating XYZ brand beans quite happily he can't really moan when you tell him they aren't the "branded ones" lol

Good luck and just keep chipping away :-)

apple_mint

I'm lucky Cheap Date as my OH is solidly behind our OS living - he's not keen on the cooking but he does make our wine and does all the washing up

We became OS for two reasons: 1. to improve our health (controlling fat and salt levels) and 2. to control our finances. Our health has definately improved and our finances are so much better. This past year we have tracked every penny of our spend and our grocery (not just food) costs last year were £6 per day (£42 per week). I used to spend £125 per week :eek: So you can see that these are very visible benefits.

I used to have problems convincing OH that the cost of new gadgets would improve our OS living even more though. I saved up for our Panasonic Breadmaker from the initial savings on our grocery budget. OH wasn't convinced but from the day I got it he took over. Firstly I got £10 off in the shop by telling them I could get it cheaper online OH was impressed by this. Secondly the Panansonic requires a measure of electronic setting ... it's like giving a man a gadget with a remote control :rotfl: Thirdly the bread is brilliant from the machine and OH likes being the one who produces it! I've only ever used it once.

On the whole, OS produced food actually tastes better than shop bought and certainly costs a lot less. Perhaps you could convince him there is a certain amount of 'cachet' in eating home produced food? Jamie Oliver, Nigella etc. are making a lot of money out of selling the instructions for producing good meals at home. Not everyone is doing this to save money, but simply to eat better. (We all know that saving money is the bottom line of this though ). I take home made biscuits and muffins to work and they are snapped up in preference to the supermarket taste the difference ones

Please don't take offence, but it shouldn't be 'his money' but rather the 'family income'. Its about what you both contribute to the running of the home. He provides the means by which the bills are paid but you also have a value in your 'home economics system'. If you were to go out to work there would be a cost to the household for you working (childcare, transport, clothes and haircuts for work etc.) The savings you are making by staying at home and raising the family on behalf of the home economy are significant. I'm not putting this very well, it is much better argued in the Complete Tightwad Gazette. In this case the husband eventually retired and raised the family and the wife ran the home business.

I'm sure someone will come along soon and put this far better than me (and in a lot fewer words :rotfl: ).

A lot of us have had to do some level of 'convincing' with family members (not always OH's but children or parents etc.) over OS living, but perseverence does pay off

kunekune

This is a problem for us, too. My money saving plans for 2008 require a strict budget, but that's in order to stash away money for a house deposit, not because we are short of income. We both work full-time, and I have an extra contract job which will bring in around £3500 on top of my salary this year, so I'm often working at weekends/evenings. So we're time-poor.

We have never had a budgeting system at all. At one time, we were in debt but when we sold the house and relocated to the UK, all that was paid off. We no longer have a credit card or overdraft limit, and for the last 16 months have saved a bit, but we still spend far more than we need to. We put what is left over at the end of the month into the saving account - we should put money in at the beginning and then live on the rest. At this rate, we'll have retired before we manage to buy another house (we want a 20% deposit and anyway, I want to prove we can afford the mortgage payments, by regularly saving at least the difference between mortgage and our current rent). So we need to save at least £1000 a month, and I think we can save more than that without cutting back on our lifestyle very much at all.

The plan involves a version of Martin's envelope scheme, with special accounts for particular purposes (it's not completely frugal - I am planning for a summer holiday and a special treat hotel break for just the two of us in June for our 25th anniversary). Reducing our food bills by eating cheap home made food (we have always cooked from scratch, but use a lot of expensive ingredients) is one way to do that. We also need to massively reduce our alcohol intake, for all sorts of reasons. I need to curb my amazon habit!

But I need him on board, as the plan requires him to tell me or at least enter it on a database when he spends money. He also does bill paying and at the moment the saving accounts are in his name (I don't know what's in them because they don't show up on the online banking!). When I've suggested multiple accounts in the past, he's glazed over with boredom.

Not sure what the purpose of this rant was, except sympathy with the various OPs. And the thought that, depending on your household situation, just presenting them with OS ways of doing things may not work, because that assumes that we are the only ones doing the cooking/shopping/cleaning. In a two-job family with two children, one disabled, that just isn't how it works.

belfastgirl23

apple_mint wrote: »

Perhaps you could convince him there is a certain amount of 'cachet' in eating home produced food? Jamie Oliver, Nigella etc. are making a lot of money out of selling the instructions for producing good meals at home. Not everyone is doing this to save money, but simply to eat better. (We all know that saving money is the bottom line of this though ). I take home made biscuits and muffins to work and they are snapped up in preference to the supermarket taste the difference ones

perseverence does pay off

Good thinking apple mint I think I did this a little bit, DH is always very impressed by tv chefs and I think this probably did help him see the value of MS. And I agree if you stick with it you do get somewhere eventually.

To cheapdate, I think you need to find something your DH wants more than the food treats. it might be to get fitter, lose weight, eat better. Or it might be a luxury family holiday. Whatever it takes to get him into MS ways go along with it. I also find a drip drip effect works well. So no big scenes etc, just a regular little comment on the amount of fat in shop made bread or scare stories about the e numbers in particular foods or whatever...there's always plenty in the news. The very very last thing I mention is price

Sounds to me though like your biggest problem is hubby either doing the shopping or being with you when you do it. Could you think about online shopping and have everything put away in cupboards/decanted into tupperware etc by the time he gets home? Or have a 'good' reason for him not to pop into the supermarket...

Good luck. It does take a while but you will probably get there...

Oh and KuneKune TBH I think you're on a hiding to nothing with getting your DH to enter stuff in the database sorry but if he glazes over you have no chance. The other options would be for him to have spending money that he doesn't account for (this is how we do it, and so much the better because I would really resent what DH spends some of his £ on!). I think if you tell him you need 20 mins with him to go over bills etc and get him to agree to put a certain amount towards savings each month I'd give up on the rest But that's just me knowing that OH would never ever manage to go along with accounting for every £10 never mind every penny. I'd also open the new savings accounts in my name so that I could see them on online banking etc. Sounds like at least he is already OS in principle though which is a good start Good luck with the mortgage savings. I'm trying to take down our huuuge mortgage at the minute so I know how you feel, at least a bit

moanymoany

Amy, who wrote the 'Tightwad Gazette' has something to say about choosing the right partner for the OS life. However, the books themselves are a testament to what you can get from embracing the os and frugal lifestyle.

For me, Tightwads can be summed up by saying they make £1 go as far as £2 - thus giving you double the income. This means paying off the mortgage twice as quickly, getting the same groceries for half the price - and so on!

It might be worth getting a copy and giving it to him to read, he will laugh at some of the things people do to save money - but I bet some of the ideas will rub off. It is also funny. One reader wrote a letter saying that if you go to bed to save electricity but end up with twins - not very moneysaving. My dh and I love it and re-read it regularly to inspire us and keep us on track.

kunekune

I presented the plan to him, just for one month, using a Word document, and his first comment was "that's not the way to do it, you need to have it in Excel". So perhaps I should get him to set up the database (he's a data architect for a major bank ...). It did include £100 a month 'personal money' that he can do what he wants with.

I think he is willing to go along with me taking money management back from him, it always used to be me until I had a bout of depression and ended up forgetting to pay bills. But on the understanding that we don't have to skimp too much: for example, this month's budget allows for a new computer for DS (the only toy he really plays for) and a bike for DD (we didn't spend all the money sent by rellies for xmas anyway). It's a bit like the poster's OH who said "I didn't spend all that time at uni to eat beans on toast". OH would say, "we have a combined income of over 80K, I'm not going to quibble about the price of beans or drink crap beer rather than my usual fancy schmancy bottled stuff". So it's mostly a matter of finding a balance between savings we can make and savings we can make realistically.

Angelraesunshine

i hardly told my other half, he has realised now that we are saving so much more money being OS, and apart from me getting excited about odd bits and bobs, he has not realised that the time he thinks i just spend sitting on my bottom is actually spent finding better ways to do things or saving more money or spent making the bread and cooking his meals. he is kinda getting it now but the only thing he has complained about since me trying to go more OS is that the odd time the bread has not been cooked in a loaf tin ( me and kids like free form) and he was a loaf of bread for sandwiches. My DH has a very good appetite and never goes without but now he has better healthier meals that cost me less.

moanymoany

Just had a better read through here and I wonder how much of this brand snobbery etc comes from the non OS partners family values.

My mil used to tell me with such pride that 'her' family would only eat HP baked beans, the daughter would only shop in M&S .. and so on.

Also, the attitude to money can be so greatly influenced by what happened at home. For many people what happened as they grew up is the RIGHT way.

My sil got such a shock when the baby came and she stopped working. I'm sure that it never occurred to her that when her parents had their first child they were living in a remote cottage with no electricity or gas, lived there for five years while they saved a deposit for a house. She was born when they were in their late 30's and as she grew up they lived in a big house, had foreign holidays and her mother had a whacking great housekeeping budget. She really expected to have all of this and blamed her oh for not providing it. It was a long time ago and she has now adjusted to normal life.

It can be just the same in the way money is handled. In some families the man handed over his wage packet and the woman did all the financial stuff. Other families the man doles out the cash as and when he sees fit.

Better to get as much of this sorted out as you can before committing yourself to houses and children together. As an ex-solicitor who dealt with matrimonial issues I can tell you that these things can grow and grow in importance and are often the cause of splits.

My gran used to say 'when poverty comes in through the door, love flies out through the window'. I think debt has taken the place of real poverty these days. However the worry, stress and ill health that comes with it has the same effect.

kunekune

I echo your comments about working out how you are going to manage finances before getting in too deeply with someone. I am astonished when I read of couples who don't seem to have any joint finances at all or where one person is in complete control, but I guess there are different ways of doing things. (Though it may be revealing that I read these things in the law reports!!!!)

I can also see that sometimes one generation will want to carry on the living standard of the previous one, even where that isn't realistic, but many families have experienced upward mobility. Both OH and myself were children from the first generation in our families to go to university, and on paper we are much better off than our parents were. My mother used to run out of money regularly. So we're not trying to keep up. But perhaps there is an element of "we have good middle class incomes, shouldn't we have a good middle class lifestyle". Maybe that is a stronger urge when you have only recently reached that level in society.

The problem is if there isn't enough to really maintain that lifestyle. Unfortunately, in our case, it looked like there was enough, but it was a false picture, as we have never made any provision for retirement. We have also been far too mobile to benefit from house price rises, and got no benefit at all from the recent house price inflation. We have to fix that, hence my current campaign. At least we have the income to do it.

debtworrier

daysieblue wrote: »

I asked my DH last night how much he would be prepared to pay for a chicken (we usually only buy breasts, but DS & DD quite like legs) and he sadi a fiver. SO explained how for that £5 we would get a roast for 4, a dinner for the kiddlies, something chicken-y for us to have and then stock to make any number of things. But apparently because only I would eat whatever was made with the stock, that doesn't count! (He's not a big fan of vegetables, so casseroles, stews, soups etc are out for him in any huge quantity)

Not quite sure where I'm going with this, but he also has a shopping snobbery and when I came back from Asda the other day (we usually shop at sainsburys) he started going on ... nightmare!

He has agreed we can have a shopping budget of £400 (down from £450 - how very OS!) where I think we should be aiming for £300 absolute max. I find with him it's a bit of a drip, drip, drip thing. Since I started taking OS seriously we have eaten only two or three "ready meals", and that was mostly clearing out the freezer. So he is coming round, slowly, I just have to keep pushing the edges

Sorry for rambling

:rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:
db xx

I'm guessing that £400 is for the month...

How about making it a little competition? Take it in turns to shop each month, taking out the money in cash beforehand and each putting any left over in a separate pot. At the end of the competition period, when his spendthrift ways have left him only a tenner in odd change, you whip out this humungous wad of cash from your pot and say "well, what shall we blow this on, honey?"

Nothing like seeing real cash to drive the point home!
(And do spend the money on something exotic that he likes, even if it hurts! Tell yourself it's not waste, it's educational expenses.:D)