Having family budgeting troubles?

I was just watching a Financial Peace DVD yesterday and Dave Ramsey had a really good tip for those having family budgeting troubles. As we all know, finances cause the majority of problems in marriage, and as someone said in the video, when a husband and wife are in agreement about money, everything else seems to fall in line.

Dave’s analysis shows that most marriages usually have one spouse being a spender and the other being a saver. The saver often being the one who manages the family budget and the spender being the one who freaks out at just the mention of the word “BUDGET”.

So, it goes without saying that two people like this are going to have a difficult time together when they are pulling in opposite directions – towards two different goals.

Find common budgeting goals!

The solution to the problem then is to get in agreement in at least one area and build from that. Without any talk of budgeting at all, husband and wife should discuss what their financial goals are.

• Do you want to retire? (Believe it or not, not everyone does)
• Do you want to go on vacation each year?
• Do you want to save for the kid’s college or do you want them to pay for it themselves?
• Do you want to be able to give more to your church and those around you?

Once husband and wife understand each other’s goals, it is easier to discuss a budget. The suggestion I saw in the DVD that I liked was that the “saver” should create the budget (with a budget spreadsheet perhaps) and present it to the “spender” and have them make some adjustments to it. By allowing the “spender” to make adjustments, the “spender” has more ownership of the budget and is more likely to work with it.

The key of course is not to spend more than you make, so if you want to spend $200 on clothes each month instead of the $100 that the “saver” proposed in the family budget, then you have to sacrifice $100 in another area. It isn’t rocket science, it is just that it is easier to play dumb and use that as an excuse to spend!

Our family budgeting challenges

When Linda and I got married, I had already been spending a couple years cleaning up my bad habits financially – she had not. So, we were a perfect example of the “spender” and “saver” couple. Being the “saver” who was creating our family budget, I knew that if I didn’t provide her incentives and rewards we were going to have budget troubles and probably marriage troubles as a result.

While I tried to give her opportunities for input in our budget, I must say that she did an amazing job of quickly adapting to a major lifestyle change. She went from spending several hundreds of dollars more than she made each month to spending several hundreds less than she made each month. To this day, I am still amazed at how much quicker she adapted to the whole budgeting thing than I did. I picked a good one!

Over the last few years, as the saver, I have made sacrifices to my plan in order to create a budget that will actually be accomplished. I learned that while my calculations on our budget might be the best mathematically, if one of us gives up on the budget, then it doesn’t really matter – does it?

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