First Steps to Solvency

enthusiasticsaver

I am assuming you are working on a 5 year plan to deal with the debts and the RR balloon taking all the 0% deals into account. That is obviously working for you but she does not really need to know the ins and outs. Just how much she has to spend on personal stuff and get the message in that if she overspends one month there is less the following month. It seems that for her the simpler the plan the better she understands it and may get on board. It may well be though that she never gets it because she has been shielded from financial matters for so long. 

i only work on a one year plan. Neither is wrong. Just different circumstances. 

alt80

@KxMx sorry don't think I'm explaining myself particularly well. I have a sheet for each month which feeds data back so she has all that information available. Blows hot and cold whether she wants to 'help me with my debts' so idk if it's lack of understanding or deciding she's !!!!!! off with me not bringing in a greater income. Tonight she said she thinks I'm just being obsessive about it and 'not like we're going to lose out home'.

alt80

enthusiasticsaver said:

I am assuming you are working on a 5 year plan to deal with the debts and the RR balloon taking all the 0% deals into account. That is obviously working for you but she does not really need to know the ins and outs. Just how much she has to spend on personal stuff and get the message in that if she overspends one month there is less the following month. It seems that for her the simpler the plan the better she understands it and may get on board. It may well be though that she never gets it because she has been shielded from financial matters for so long. 

i only work on a one year plan. Neither is wrong. Just different circumstances. 

@enthusiasticsaver 100 re timescale.

I've been concerned recently tbh if something happened to me how she'd cope idk why it's bothering me so much rn keep thinking my brain is trying to tell me there's something wrong but all I get from the pros is 'it's anxiety' possibly I am just anxious/ paranoid/ whatever idk. I have shielded her generally always thought it's just what you do if you love someone shield them from the bad things in life but I just keep thinking recently if anything happened to me she wouldn't have the first !!!!!! clue. Maybe better to be clueless lol she's fast asleep and I'm totally whacked but wide awake again haha.

Do you not project your portfolio further into the future based on sensible assumptions beyond the 1 year timescale and adjust as/when?

Purplelady65

You’ve given your budget a lot of thought and obviously put a lot of effort into setting it up as a five year plan e.t.c. It sounds as if you are running it a bit like a business which is fine for you as you’re comfortable with numbers and data and do it every day.  However it does sound very complicated for others to understand if they haven’t got a head for numbers e.g. your wife. Re worrying how your wife would cope if you weren’t around I don’t think there’s anything wrong with thinking about these things so long as you don’t become over anxious. I keep meaning to put together a list of all bank accounts, savings, Isas and other investments for our kids as if something happened to me and my OH we don’t have any paper statements everything is online so they wouldn’t know what we’d got and where it was. Would your wife know how to pay bills e.t.c? It’s probably another good reason why she needs to learn to budget.

getmore4less

The wife had the simple version.

You have  £xxxx for the rest of the year, £xxx a month.

She blew the year in a week on a couple of bags.

I think she understands it a lot more than she lets on. 

Chooses not to as that leaves her stranded for cash.

Her current stance is I need more money.

Your 5 year plan is just the start, needs to be that because of the cash flow and the debt reduction target and the need to put more planned spends in from the earlier extreme cutbacks to try to get it down to 3 years.

As you get through these 5 years the following years will need to be looked at in more detail as there will be a lot more free cashflow to budget as the debt and balloon drop off.

Everyone needs to be planning at least a few years ahead to avoid big ticket items leaving them short.

Most forward years are just clones of current year with minor adjustments for day-to-day and larger changes for any big tickets.

enthusiasticsaver

alt80 said:

enthusiasticsaver said:

I am assuming you are working on a 5 year plan to deal with the debts and the RR balloon taking all the 0% deals into account. That is obviously working for you but she does not really need to know the ins and outs. Just how much she has to spend on personal stuff and get the message in that if she overspends one month there is less the following month. It seems that for her the simpler the plan the better she understands it and may get on board. It may well be though that she never gets it because she has been shielded from financial matters for so long. 

i only work on a one year plan. Neither is wrong. Just different circumstances. 

@enthusiasticsaver 100 re timescale.

I've been concerned recently tbh if something happened to me how she'd cope idk why it's bothering me so much rn keep thinking my brain is trying to tell me there's something wrong but all I get from the pros is 'it's anxiety' possibly I am just anxious/ paranoid/ whatever idk. I have shielded her generally always thought it's just what you do if you love someone shield them from the bad things in life but I just keep thinking recently if anything happened to me she wouldn't have the first !!!!!! clue. Maybe better to be clueless lol she's fast asleep and I'm totally whacked but wide awake again haha.

Do you not project your portfolio further into the future based on sensible assumptions beyond the 1 year timescale and adjust as/when?

Your anxiety is feeding into the catastrophic thinking re how your wife would cope and I get that. Tbh she does sound a bit useless in managing money. Every so often I feed figures to my husband and have passwords etc on spreadsheet in our safe because he doesn’t deal with finances at all either. How much he takes in I don’t know but have accepted he isn’t interested. He just wants to know money is there to do or buy the things he wants.  However we now have an IFA who could help him if anything were to happen to me, all the bills are on direct debit and we both have comfortable pensions. It may be that beyond the house and the personal spends she is not bothered about the rest. She does not strike me as being a long term planner and also she seems to suffer with anxiety too so maybe this is the way she protects herself from the realities of the finances.

 In your case I would want rid of the debt and have a plan re your balloon on the car and you obviously have other financial goals for the future so keep doing as you are but how much you will get your wife involved in the projections I don’t know but you need to get her to stick to the budget plan. Her mind doesn’t seem to work like yours so the simple the better then she has no excuse like she is confused or does not understand. My husband is the same but he understands things like you can only spend £400 on personal stuff for you each month  and the house and car  account only has so much in it so if there is not enough in there it does not get done or we move from the holiday pot or emergency fund or withdraw from the portfolio of investments. I juggle the monthly amounts for food, entertainment, fuel and  gifts and savings for car/house running costs and holidays. 

Our IFA has done all our investment projections so I do not need to worry about that any more. He gives us a figure we can comfortably withdraw each year from our portfolio to supplement the pensions and at the moment we are taking way less than that. Our pensions provide a good level of income, we have savings and an emergency fund and our state pensions pay out in a few years time when we reach state retirement age so our income goes up then. So now I am doing as my husband suggested years ago and chilling a little re finances but only because I know we will both be ok if anything happens to either of us. You will get there too but it is this interim period of dealing with past financial mistakes which is causing you anxiety. 

enthusiasticsaver

alt80 said:

@KxMx sorry don't think I'm explaining myself particularly well. I have a sheet for each month which feeds data back so she has all that information available. Blows hot and cold whether she wants to 'help me with my debts' so idk if it's lack of understanding or deciding she's !!!!!! off with me not bringing in a greater income. Tonight she said she thinks I'm just being obsessive about it and 'not like we're going to lose out home'.

Maybe you could start to refer to them as our debts rather than just yours. After all she is part of the reason why you have them. She wanted the private school, she chose not to work, she spends what she wants when she wants and much of the money was splurged on gifts for her. She still sees this as just your problem when it should be a plan for both of you.  Not helpful to play the blame game now but she can’t have it both ways and that is what she seems to want. Keeping you restricted and accountable on money and at the same time kicking off because you aren’t buying her stuff any more. Crazy. 

ladyholly

Sorry I just want to add my two pennworth. I, too am not a numbers person and sometimes struggle (not helped by OH leaving it all to me) to understand. If she genuinely struggles does she have dyscalculia - like dyslexia only numbers? If so  the simpler you can make it the better to the point of just giving her a budget on the day your new budget for the month starts saying this is how much for household exes eg food etc and this is what you have to spend on what you want. Anything more than that will confuse her. A chart of some description will help her to understand the numbers.

The only other thing she needs to know is that if she spends more than the budget then next month her budget will be reduced by that amount. If your budget has a fixed amount for each month then you will need to spell it out for her. e.g. Your buget for this month is £200 if you spend £210 then next month you will only have £190 to spend and stick to it.  I also wonder if working week to week might be easier for her.
I have found that people who are good with numbers can rattle through what they are explaining because it is so simple for them and they cannot understand why others have difficulty. I  dont know if you do this but try not to and make it as simple as you would for a young child without being patronising.  Dyscalculia is often missed as children grow up so there are many people out there who have this learning difficulty without knowing they have it. Your wife may be one of them.

stymied

My friend’s husband died unexpectedly. The biggest problem beyond obviously the grief and anger was that all the cards were in his name. They were all frozen so, as the second cardholder, she had no access to money. One thing you could do as a ‘just in case’ is for her to have a bank account / card of her own.

alt80

Day 71. 

Thanks all. Few things to consider there tbh.

It crosses my mind re whether she doesn't understand or 'doesn't understand' iyswiacf, she doesn't like the restriction can tell you that much. Tbh I'm fed up buying her a load of stuff all the !!!!!! time told me this morning she isn't taking the makeup back now 'it's not worth it' and realised she was only doing it to 'please me' fml she carries on like this I'm going to lose my patience one of these days and put her on the prepay lol. Idk maybe it's me with the problem - my attitude to spending on things is different when I'm not using and haven't for a while. I don't touch the stuff and tbh my spending compulsions aren't really there either or maybe I should say I still want to buy things but am not compulsive about it, plan it out, think it through and consider the best time to be buying whatever it is. I think my head has been totally screwed in the past; my worst / unconsidered spending was always when I was using heavily some guilt driven some just driven by being off my !!!!!! head I think.

Re future tbh long term day to day I don't plan on having anymore free cash flow: commitments down, divis down and I'll decide when the right time is to buy/ commit to something and adjust. I think it's better I don't have much in the way of personal money floating around and can be more tax efficient. Think I'll always worry about her tbt she can be so 'young' sometimes lol never grew up always going to be that 20 year old girl. It's nice in a way but really !!!!!! frustrating in others haha.