The Great Monthly Budget Maintenance Update, September 2021
Since taking the budget maintenance back from my partner last month, I have been pulling my hair out. He has made a total mess of things.
At the beginning of our marriage, I kept the budget. When my partner overspent a category, I reconciled it. It was a heavy burden to carry. A few years in, I invited my partner to do the budget with me and that was going well. We seemed to be of one mind about the importance of the budget and making financial decisions together.
Then a few months back, we decided my partner would maintain the budget on his own. I now have no idea what the reasoning was behind this decision. While my partner was maintaining the budget, we were not sitting and making the decisions about some big expenses (car repairs and buying new furniture). Instead, we were talking about these expenses in the abstract. I was trusting what he was telling me about the money without looking at it myself. I was trusting that we had the same mindset. (We didn’t.)
What is crystal clear now is that he and I have very different mindsets about money. (This is not the first time I’ve seen this.) I look at the accounts and categories as they stand today when making decisions about spending. It is very black and white to me. either there is enough money in the category or there isn’t.
Debt Mindset
With my partner, the account and category balances are very fluid. He adds in what will be available when his next pay or two, or three, comes in. He doesn’t respect the boundaries between the categories in our budget. And in that mindset, he pulled money from categories that he shouldn’t have (gas, electricity) to cover those big purchases (car repairs, new furniture). In his mind, it was justified because August had a 5th pay period and upcoming commissions. In my mind, this is debt thinking.
He created a debt within our budget against future income! And he committed theft when he stole from gas and electricity to pay for the car repairs and furniture. Argh! As a result of the gas category being emptied, when that bill came due, in August, we had to decide together which category to steal from. Argh! again!
What to do? How do I (we) sort this out?
First Things First
From now on we do the budget maintenance together. We used to do this and for some now unknown reason, we stopped. And I have to speak up when I don’t agree. (my personal challenge)
Second, we discussed that while some shuffling of money is ok, there are certain categories that cannot be touched. These include rent, electricity, gas, and a few others. In the beginning, he didn’t agree with me. But as we went through the whole list of categories, I shared my reasoning why some were touchable and others weren’t. By the last category, he understood my logic and was in agreement.
Now, our budget categories have one of three designations: red, yellow, or green. (I will explain this system in a future article.)
And lastly, there is NO pre-spending future income. Today, we have no debt except for that bit within our budget that was mentioned earlier. It will be squared up by the end of this month. When we have an expense that we have to save up for, we wait and save up for it. It is that simple.
Planning for the Future
Once the internal debt is squared up, we can focus on our goal of getting one month ahead on all of our red categories.
Next month, I will share an update on our financial goals, how the money meetings are going, and explain red, yellow, and green designations.
We use the YNAB ( You Need A Budget) budgeting app as our budget maintenance tool and highly recommend it. When you sign up through this link, you get a month free and so do we. Thank you.
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Originally published at https://letstalkabout.com.au on September 22, 2021.