My best piece of advice would be to know your partner. “How long will the credit card take to pay off?” Never one to henpeck or hassle, she would make salient points and wait for them to penetrate the thick bear skull of her Hubby and eventually become lodged in the the massively active and intelligent cortex she knew was in there. It was very important that my Wife let me come to this on my own.
This was ameliorated over a decade and a half of difficult work and paradigm shifts on both of our parts, leading to ME being the super frugal one! Getting paid once a week did not help the situation. For me, a Washingtonian, this meant blowing through greenbacks like an asteroid was going to hit the Earth the instant I started making real money. My Wife, being from MA, had this lead her towards minimal spending and saving money where she could. It was a topic of debate, and fighting unfortunately, in both of our households from a young age. Neither of us grew up without money stress in our households. I have been an avid reader for a few months now, but never seem to get to the comments. What are the challenges, pitfalls, and rewards of aligning financial outlooks with your partner? What tactics and strategies work best in convincing a partner of the myriad joys that frugality brings? Or when do you navigate a means to amicable but separate finances? Or, how you blissfully cohabitate with a partner whose spending proclivities are markedly different from your own. Given how unbelievably uninformed my response to this query is, I figured I’d put the question to the smartest, most frugalist people I know: you the readers! In the future, I hope to refer folks with this quandary to all of your amazing comments.Īnd so, I want to hear your stories, thoughts, opinions, and experiences related to how you brought a formerly spendy partner around to frugality. It’s nearly impossible to divorce the two and hence, having misaligned viewpoints between partners is likely a recipe for discord. Knowing what you want out of life and what you hope to achieve over the course of it is inextricably linked to how we manage our money. What I’ve discovered is that financial goals and life goals are essentially the same thing. Since running a household, raising a family, and planning for the future all require the input of both partners, how does one reconcile divergent financial methodologies within a relationship? The challenge arises when one member of a partnership experiences this frugal awakening but the other does not. This question usually comes to us contextualized within someone’s inspiring story of discovering the incredible benefits of frugality–which extend far beyond the mere monetary–and their desire to implement frugal approaches throughout all spheres of their life. In fact, we’ve found that frugality brings us closer by enabling us to eliminate the distractions of consumerism and instead focus on our relationship. FW and I struggle with plenty of other hurdles in our marriage, but we’re fortunate that we’ve always been on roughly the same page as far as frugality and our financial independence goal are concerned. Frugalwoods and I are asked this question almost daily and I was all set to write some windbaggy mellifluous literary masterpiece in response. The only hitch is that I have to confess my honest answer is “I have no idea.” “Frugality is so awesome! Now, how do I convince my spouse/partner to get on board with it?” Mr.