Know Your Role

I originally thought of this post in regard to being in a romantic/life partner type of relationship, and some parts of it will still be geared at least a little toward that. But it occurred to me, that regardless of whether or not you share financial responsibility with someone, its important to “know your role”, to understand your relationship to money, regardless of any other relationships out there.
Let’s start with me. Like sand through the hourglass, so is cash in my hands. I am a spender. I am a can I afford this now? And if so, why aren’t I buying it now, kind of girl. This is good in that it allows for spontaneity, but it’s also a draw back to achieving long term goals. This is something I have to know about myself, and accept about myself, in order to work around it, to prevent myself from derailing the plans we’ve made.
Because of this, I am the checkbook keeper, the bill payer, the day to day money manager of all of our money. And its not just because I like playing in Excel. I need to see the money, see the balance going down, understand the cash flow, etc, in order to curb my desire to buy what I want when I want it.
Having all of our financial information at my fingertips also allows me to plan. I LOVE to plan. I plan when our debt will be paid off (and run different scenarios). I plan how we’re paying for the hubby’s school costs. I plan vacations- mostly vacations we’re never going to take –and how we’ll pay for them with cash.
The planning also allows me to spend money in the future scenarios without actually spending it.
I still have a problem, though, with once we’ve saved up for something, I want it, and I want it now. I don’t want to delay. I don’t want to say “maybe we don’t need this, lets hold off and see if something better comes along.” I don’t want to. It doesn’t mean I won’t, or that I can’t be talked out of spending the money. It means I don’t want to, and the hubby actually does have to talk me out of it.
My husband is a natural saver. Well, maybe not saver, but he doesn’t really spend, or at least not often. He’s a homebody and perfectly content to play his video game one more time, or watch a movie on Netflix while playing a video game.
And yes, new video games cost $50-60, but considering he plays them for more than 20 hours when he initially gets them, and then will return to many games years later, it averages out to less than I used to pay to keep my acrylic nails.
He also isn’t a have it now person. He’s more than willing to wait a few months for the price to go down, or for used copies to be available for a discounted price.
Now, the hubby is not a paragon of financial virtues. It took a long time for me to convince him that we needed an emergency fund. His theory was always that as long as we had debt that was costing us more in interest than we were earning on savings, why should we have any savings. And our expensive (or more $ than I ever thought I’d pay for a car) car, is totally the car he wanted. I wanted one that cost about half as much. At the same time, the car we got should last years (decades even) longer than the one I wanted.
He’s a big picture person (where I’m a details person), so he often sees where he wants to go without looking at the steps needed to get there.
Our strengths and weaknesses tend to balance each other out. We have an EF, but we also have a step by step plan for paying off our debt. We take advantage of low interest rates when we can. Together, we make a pretty great team.
But sometimes, our differences really come in to play.