Which one are you, are you the spender or the saver? In my marriage, I am the saver and my hubs is the spender. Throughout our five years of marriage, this has resulted in many disagreements and way too blown-out-of-portion arguments.
Chances are you have a similar predicament in your relationship after all, opposites attract. My hubs has blown through over a $100 a week before just in eating out and I could beat him over the head and scream and yell until my heart’s content, but what would that really solve?
Nothing.
Personal finance is personal and it can get hairy when you throw another person in the mix that holds different perspectives on money from yours. Over the course of our marriage, my hubs and I have had to work through some serious issues, and many of them correlate to money. As I am sure for many of you, your issues revolve around money or the lack-there-of.
In order to keep the peace and the happiness flowing in our marriage, I have had to come up with a few ways of dealing with my hubs spending habits. But, before I share them, I want to caution you that if your marriage is already suffering, whether entirely money related or not, you may need to consider improving your marriage first before attempting to work on your money issues.
Strengths
What are your spouse’s strengths when it comes to money? Do they spend a lot but work endlessly to make sure they have scored the best deal? Before attempting to work out money issues, find some positive attributes to your spouse’s spending habits so when you bring up the issues, you are not attacking them. Starting the conversation off on a positive note helps to keep the conversation productive and less argumentative, this allows you to reach a better resolution. (If you cannot find anything positive about their money habits, find something positive about another area of your lives. Are they great at getting the kids to eat their dinner or helping you around the house?)
Communicate
This is the key to a successful marriage in my book, I am not a pro at this thing called love but as a child from a divorced family, I can attest to communication as being key to a successful relationship. In order to have financial peace in your home, you have to communicate your concerns and issues with each other.
I remember a couple of years ago; I made a huge budgeting mistake, a bad one. It almost completely wiped out our savings. I was so upset with myself and I did not know how I was going to tell my hubs, who I constantly yell at for making us go over budget that I was the one to blame this time. It was difficult to sum up the courage to tell him what I had done, but it brought us closer together because we had to find a solution, together. He was not happy about the mistake but he forgave me, which reminded me of how often I was failing to forgive him for his money mistakes.
Forgiveness
As I just mentioned, you have to and need to forgive your spouse when they overspend. If you are communicating effectively with one another, you have to make sure you continually make it comfortable for your spouse to come to you when they have made a mistake. By offering your forgiveness when they do, you have a better chance of making your money work for you.
Make a Plan
This seems like it should be the first step in dealing with a spender of a spouse, making a plan, but in reality, it comes after the hard stuff. Before you can make a plan, and expect it to work, you have to figure each other’s strengths out, communicate openly and honestly and most importantly be willing to offer forgiveness when needed. Once those have all been addressed, then you can sit down and make out your plan.
Create your budget together, or if your spender is like mine, you create the budget and allow them to view the budget and have veto power over it. Give them a copy of the budget so they will know what and where they are allowed to spend money. (I like to tape it to my hubs’ steering wheel to make it difficult for him to miss it….. 😉 )
One of the most effective ways I am able to combat my hubs’ spending problem is by reminding him of our savings plan. Create a savings plan together and remind each other of it often, especially when spending money that does not contribute to your plan. It is never easy to hear someone point out where you have failed but remember that you two are in this thing together and you have to lift each other up as much as remind the other of the bigger picture.
How do you deal with a spender in your marriage or relationships?
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My hubby is a total spender, but he has actually decided to humble himself from all the financial mistakes he’s made, so he rarely dismisses our budget. However, there have been times when he’s decided to buy a car or an expensive tool, and it wasn’t in our budget. I agree that you have to forgive and move on.
Oh yes! My hubs is guilty of the tool purchases as well! 😉
Oh man, I am the spender in our partnership! He saves – well its not even that, he just doesn’t spend! We’ve been together for five years and in that time we’ve never had a joint bank account. It worked for us but now that we’re thinking about babies and moving back to our hometown we’ve got to face that we’ll be living off one wage. I think the guilt alone is enough for me to not spend the money he’s working his butt off to provide. Fingers crossed I can curb it!
It’s awesome of you to be able to admit you’re the spender! It took my hubs forever and a day to admit that he was the spender. You’ve got this! 😉
My husband is definitely more of a spender than I am. I think the biggest thing that I needed, was just knowing that he was being *mindful.* I hated seeing all the debits roll out of our bank account bc he’d swipe without thinking. But once we started communicating more and I could see him taking our finances into account before buying, then it really helped to ease my worries. He isn’t going to spend us into oblivion. We’re doing okay, so it’s okay to spend a little extra sometimes. (Hope that makes sense! lol)
Makes perfect sense Brittany! It is so hard when you’re trying to figure out money habits with another person. You’re an awesome wife for realizing his faults and for forgiving him. 🙂
Jessi! I really enjoyed your article and I thought that it was really well written. I think that what you said is so true, we really do need to be understanding and loving first before we fix the problem. If we try to fix the problem before we even have a good relationship basis, the marriage will falter. I absolutely loved how you said we have to have a good foundation of communication, forgiveness, and pointing out other’s strengths before we can make a plan. I really find that is the key for any successful marriage and not just for a marriage that has financial problems. A lot of what you talk about reminds me of basic principles that Jesus Christ taught. What a better foundation than Christ? Thank you for sharing your great article! Here is a video that talks more about having a marriage with a strong foundation. A lot of the things you mentioned in your article are in this video: http://www.mormonchannel.org/video/mormon-messages/topics/love-and-marriage?v=1101413012001
You can watch it if you like 🙂
Thank you so much Brooke! 🙂
Awesome share! I love Mormon messages. So full of wonderful wisdom for couples and families.
Hi! Ha, $100 a week? My sweet husband has blown over $240,000 in the past six years. No lie. Being married to a spendaholic is not much fun at all! Forgiveness is the key to staying married, for sure, but a plan and putting one’s foot firmly down are absolute necessities. I had to wait until the money completely ran out before he would even listen to me at all. It’s still a daily battle (more for him than for me as I do not excrete money from my pores) but when there isn’t any, there just isn’t. I took away the cards — he agreed to it. His only other choice was to move out.It’s been 10 years and I’m only beginning to see a faint light at the end of the tunnel. While I love him dearly, this is something I wish I had understood about him before making the commitment. Cheers.
Goodness Kellie! I hate that has happened in your marriage and it was and has been a struggling helping my hubs realize that he’s a spender. You’re doing a great job as a wife and I’m sure my hubs number is probably very close to your hubs’, you’re not only in the struggle. 🙂
This came across my feed and I started to comment, not realizing I had commented over a year ago! LOL. Anyway, seemed like a good idea to update on how things are going with me and my sweet, spender hubby.
When the money completely ran out, and the extra income dwindled, sweet husband had to do some soul searching. We had MANY loud “discussions” with wailing and gnashing of teeth. Over and Over, I had to ask myself if I thought he was capable of change and I capable of forgiveness. I love our marriage, but there’s only so much a person can tolerate. Happily (I think for both of us) we were able to address our overburdened budget in regards to the mortgage and other expenses. Today we have a budget that we both can live with and things are on the mend financially. I continue to *gently* remind my sweet husband that he is on a budget. He has a ten dollar a day allowance for any discretionary spending. When he wanted a new game system, I told him he would have to sell something as that was not in our family budget. He cheerfully agreed and came out a little ahead on cash. I took a part time job which helps contribute to my own spending wants. We also get some money from our college aged daughter to help bridge the gap for her living expenses over the child support I collect for her. This also helps stave off any arguments about how we are “giving” her money. We aren’t. Her child support plus her contribution cover all of her expenses including her car payment. When you’re married to a spender, stay prepared to justify any and all spending that you do as they are continually watching for hypocrisy if only to shift blame from their own behaviors to anyone else in the equation.
More than anything, I want to say, “Stick to your guns!” Figure out what you are willing to do and what is non-negotiable and be very clear and very firm. I made up our annual budget and he was required (Dave Ramsey idea here) to look it over and make one change. He is actually much better with numbers than I am, so this was actually quite helpful. It also forces him to look at the cold hard facts of the situation in a less confrontational way — I don’t know if Dave Ramsey had this in mind, but it’s a great side benefit of implementing this idea.
At the end of the day, you have to evaluate if you’re just dealing with basic human flaws or if there is actual abuse taking place. In our case, especially since he’s been very teachable (and believe me, I know I’m not perfect so don’t get me wrong), I have concluded over and over that this is just a human flaw thing. I have tried to tailor my message when my emotions aren’t absolutely over the top so that he can hear what I am saying rather than feeling accused and becoming defensive. I am learning more about self control as well as he is, it’s just in a slightly different area.
Finally, that big old whopping quarter of a million dollars does come up from time to time (when he griped about having a car payment, I told him I could have bought ten mini vans with the money he wasted and that was the end of that!). But, I’ve learned that forgiveness is possible, but that for me it also requires seeing at least some willingness to change. If things were still going at full steam like they were a couple of years ago, I doubt we would still be married.
Only you know what you want and need from your marriage but two things that everyone will certainly have to work out at some point or another are genuine humility and true forgiveness.
Hoping my book-like comment makes sense and also that everyone reading is having a blessed winter season and Happy New Year to all. 🙂 God Bless!
Great tips! I am also the saver, and my hubby is the spender. I especially like what you said about focusing on the other person’s strengths. My hubby spends too much money on Starbucks and electronics (which drives me crazy!), but he has been awesome at saving us money in other ways. He negotiates my car repair bills down a ton and he always knows where to find the best deals on anything car related. It’s important for him to know how much I appreciate that.
Oh! Jen can you delete that last comment it has my photo on it and I’m trying to remain anonymous. I’ll repost with a different email. sorry about that!