MONEY MANAGEMENT FOR COUPLES
Newlyweds are happy and know a lot about love. But there’s one thing they really don’t know, and that’s money management for couples. And money and couples don’t get along unless there is a clear understanding of finances in marriage.
Raphael and Cecilia. They were the definition of ruthless manhood and beautiful, carefree looks in the college years.
Raphael was the kind of guy all girls wanted. Popular, compassionate, understanding, handsome. pretty much the guy a girl would like to spend the rest of her life with.
Cecilia possessed that kind of look that left many men in awe as she passed. She was a perfect marriage of beauty and intelligence, and the kind of girl any man would want to take home to his mother.
As fate would have it, Rick and Rachael fell madly in love and began dating each other. Life had never been better.
It was all about having fun, lots of celebrations and anniversaries, shopping on expensive gifts and parties, concerts and regular trips to the cozy coffee shop around the corner. And the insatiable thirst to talk to each other for long hours on the phone, without any consideration of mounting bills.
This was life, Raphael and Cecilia’s perfect life.
Their friends were green with jealousy, but they couldn’t stop admiring the extravagant extravagance of this loving couple. Life for this couple had never been so thrilling, and Cupid’s smile had never been so broad, the trees never looked green again, the birds were never so lovely, and the rains never so romantic. Aah, it was really love straight from Dean Martin’s records!
Their romance led them to commit to each other with wedding vows, and so, the lovely doves cooed together in a romantic wedding.
They are prepared to live happily ever after to fulfill their dreams of blissful union. Locked in each other’s arms all the time, it was hard to stay separate from each other even if they had to go their separate ways and get to work. In the evenings, they went shopping together to give themselves the perfect home.
From crystal ware to a light-hearted refrigerator and other “seemingly” basic necessities, it was nice to buy things together as newlyweds. The ecstatic feeling of the new freedom of being able to do whatever they wanted, without parents looking over their shoulder, was intoxicating. They lay down in each other’s arms every night and they silenced each other about how happy they were. The spouses were quite drunk with love.
The loving couple who had eluded the evil stepmother in their courtship days were soon at her mercy. It has affected the lives of this loving couple in the guise of Money. Soon the fairy tale became a nightmare.
The dizzying rush of passionate love was forgotten as the seeds of their extravagant spending showed up in Rick’s bills. What shocked was that their extravagance was more than a couple of months’ worth of both their earnings! Drastic measures were required. But they could really change their entire lifestyle just because of one big bill, it’s only this first month because we moved, Rachael thought.
Is this story a page in your life? Read on to learn more about spouses and money management, and also understand what you can do if your wife or husband is spending too much money.
Money management in marriage
Money is the second biggest cause of quarrel in any relationship. The first, if you were wondering, seems to be the conflict with each other’s relatives.
Each of us in our relationships, or if inexperienced thinking about parents or couples of friends, can confirm or deny this statistic.
The starting question was: “how should money be managed in the couple?” , meaning by couple a stable relationship , whether it is a marriage or a cohabitation.
So how do you manage the money in the couple?
- Sincerity. There is no sharing in the absence of sincerity. At the “ready go” of the couple’s journey, but also in the course of life, if there are, or have been financial problems, hiding them from the other undermines the relationship in its founding element: trust.
- Talk calmly about money without adding emotional or moral burdens. Pointing out the other as a spendthrift or stingy (I mention these because they are the most common) means not having defined a path to follow together and giving money a meaning that goes beyond the instrument.
- Give yourself common goals . Having a goal means knowing both how much to spend, how much to save, what to save, or even how to enjoy life. To do this, it is necessary to have a good monitoring of expenses .
- Both have control of the situation . Too often in couples, the financial management is delegated to only one of the two. Often who of the two is not interested, falls from the clouds when the accountant presents the accounts or suffers from strict management. Those who deal with the accounts, on the other hand, can experience the heaviness of having to deal with everything or, even worse, feel superior. All harmful dynamics, which would be enough to become interchangeable in management control.
- Plan the details to shelve possible problems . Planning the details means making an argument that goes beyond the current newspaper or month. It means securing the family from extraordinary and therefore unforeseen events: death, illness or job loss. Protecting oneself also means protecting the other (and the children) if the economic conditions on which one is planning a life together should fail or should change.
- Live within your means. Once the goal has been defined, the way to reach it has been decided by mutual agreement, everyone must do their part to stay on the path traced , whether there is only one common account or that everyone also maintains their own personal account.
