Be Frugal With Your Money: Not Your Words
If you’re like most of us, you’re probably not in sole charge of all the spending in your household. While it’s easy for singles to keep complete control of all their spending– it’s not quite as easy for the rest of us to keep control of spending when one has a spouse who needs to be consider.
I doubt I’m alone in being glad the days when one spouse made all the financial decisions for the household are behind us. Now it’s a matter of give and take, and more importantly: Communication.
Frugality is all about controlling your spending and not letting it control you. That’s doubly true when there are multiple people with access to a single bank account. The question is how do you do it when you don’t know whether someone else is going to come along and withdraw money you have earmarked for something right before you need it – or worse, just after you write the check but before it gets cashed.
That’s what we call a bad thing.
Read on after the cut, for more on avoiding that particular kind of bad thing.
The best way to avoid expensive problems like the one I just mentioned is simple:Â Communicate.
If you’re part of a couple, you don’t live in a vacuum. You need to share your thoughts with the person you’re sharing your life with. If you’re working from a shared account you need to let the other person know what you’re doing. This isn’t a step back to the fifties where the wife would ask her husband’s permission to spend money– it’s common courtesy mixed with common sense.
If your better half knows you left the money in the checking account to cover the check you wrote for fuel oil, they’re going to be that much less likely to go and do something else with it:Â and if that’s not the case, maybe you need to trade them in.
Communication isn’t just a buzz-word, it’s a process.
It starts when you’re making up a budget – when you’re sitting down and figuring out how much money you have and what you need to do with it. You talk honestly about how much money each one is bringing in – and set up a plan for spending it. One good idea is to use a spreadsheet such as Google Docs to manage your money. The big advantage of Google Docs is that you can both work from the same document without worrying about keeping things straight. After all, the spreadsheet loses half of its effectiveness if only one of you can see it.
One thing that affects us, but may not affect others as much is that even though we both work, we don’t work anywhere near the same amount. Not only do I work fewer hours, I’m a freelancer.
Freelancing comes with a lot of freedom – and a number of benefits – but there’s one massive downside.
It’s inconsistent.
I can work fifty hours one week, and five hours the next.
The heavy weeks are great for the budget, but not for everything else – and the light weeks bring another set of problems. There’s also the fact that it varies on very short notice. so it’s not really practical to budget too far ahead on my income. It does bring up the importance of communication, though. The only way we can plan anything is if I make sure she knows how much money I’m going to be bringing in as soon as I do. It’s great when I get a large sum just when we need it, not so great when work disappears.
At least it’s something we can mitigate by communicating far enough in advance that neither one of us is taken by surprise.
Talk to your spouse.
In the meantime, if you have any comments or questions, don’t hesitate to use the box at the bottom of the post.
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