Dollars and Cents

This Together on Tuesday's topic is related to managing money.  This is actually a very important subject, especially if you are in a relationship, since I've heard many say that it is one of the top reasons for break-ups.   I can see how this could be, considering money issues can cause all types of added conflict and stress.

Fortunately, my household has a pretty good plan set up to budget finances.  It is definitely a team effort.  My husband and I are actually opposites when it comes to our style of budgeting, however we have found a way to make our differences compliment each other in this area.

I'm the spender and he is the saver.  We make this work by essentially having three accounts.  We each have individual accounts, as well as a joint account.  We have found several useful budgeting spreadsheets, and once we chose the best one for us,  we actually created three different tabs to coincide with the three accounts.  We use the joint account to pay for the household expenses, that we have calculated on a monthly basis, and contribute set amounts from each pay check to ensure all of these expenses are taken care of.   This works out because we know that there will always be a set amount of deposits in the joint, to coincide with the set amount of expenditures.  We do leave a little cushion for bills that have some type of fluctuation on a monthly basis.  We also take into account annual expenses such as vacations or  property taxes and include those in the monthly amounts that we contribute, so that the funds are there, when needed.  We then use our individual accounts to pay personal expenses, such as individual credits cards, or our day to day spending money. 

My husband takes care of day to day bills, since he pays more attention to details and I handle more of the longer term items, since I have more of a financial and investment background.  My husband and I have found it very useful to use our individual bank's bill pay option to schedule when bills are paid, and we find that this saves us lots of time each month, as well as cuts down on the possibility of missing something or being late.  We also find it important to budget splurge money, so that we don't feel like we are constantly depriving ourselves of extras.  Overall, I believe that our budgeting style works for us.  Since I am the spender, I honestly am still working on better management of my individual account, but I do have reassurance in knowing that my spending habits will not affect the household bills. 

Happy Budgeting!