Your Marriage and Financial Harmony

It’s no great secret that married couples love to fight about money. OK, maybe they don’t love it, but it’s a pretty common problem in a lot of marriages. Depending on what study you read it’s either the number one or just about the top problem that married couples fight about. The difficulty in maintaining a balance between marriage and money is easy to see. People simply have different views on finances and money–how it should be spent, saved, borrowed, invested, etc.

So, if you bring two people with different financial backgrounds, experiences and ideas on budgeting and spending money, and then suddenly ask them to harmoniously join these views together…well, you’re asking for a miracle. Despite this fact, though, there are certainly some basic steps to help work out the problems and prepare for some compromise.

• Talk it Out - The most basic of the basics is simply to keep up the communication. Discuss the difficult topics and keep no secrets. If you’ve had some financial rough spots in your past, this would be the time to get them out. You certainly don’t want to hide any big money problems at this point since they’ll probably make their way into the light eventually.
• Keep an Open Mind – You’ve got to realize that not everyone has had the same experiences as you, or as Nick Carraway’s father puts it to him in The Great Gatsby, “Just remember that all the people in the world haven’t had the advantages you’ve had.” Of course, it’s possible that the situation is reversed and your spouse needs to remember this advice. Regardless, people obviously have different backgrounds that have shaped both their current financial situation as well as their outlook on money in general. It’s your job to keep an open mind about your spouse’s views and work through the differences.
• Embrace the Differences – Recognize right off the bat that your views are going to be different than your spouses at some level. Studies show that there is simply a fundamental difference in the way that men and women look at money. Try to realize this idea and appreciate that variety makes things interesting. You might even find your own view on finances shifts a bit for the better.
• Keep it Together -There’s certainly no room for black and white when it comes to working out your finances, but it’s almost always the case that trying to keep separate checking accounts and splitting the bills is not a good idea in a marriage. You’ve really formed a partnership and you need to treat it like one. There’s probably one person in the relationship that makes more, or spends more, or makes more of the financial decisions, but you still need to work it out together. Remember that even if your contributions and expenditures aren’t the same in your marriage your opinions and ideas are equal.