Family Budget

I meant to continue this post on managing family food money a while ago, but we had a lot going on around the 4th of July, so I apologize for taking so long. Continuing where I left off, I was talking about our self-inflicted/self-taught budgeting “education.”

It seemed that we were very slow learners.  Although I don’t really have anything to compare to, I remember the process of learning how to manage our budget was painful. The first lesson that I learned was about communication. First and foremost, there should be some! Imagine trying to climb that mountain while just assuming those around you know what you are thinking and will act accordingly.  No discussing, no planning, no budgeting = no success.  One area in which I feel we went very wrong was that we ignored talking about finances in general early in our relationship. We didn’t avoid the subject, we just never paid any attention to budgeting in our conversations and it left a huge hole to fill.

The result was that we each entered the marriage not really knowing what the other’s philosophy was on budgeting. In fact, for the first several months we both continued to maintain our existing checking and savings accounts separately and just paid the bills out of each account as needed. Once we finally did combine everything, it was apparent that we had very different styles of managing money.

Simply put, I turned out to be the better money manager between the two of us (and yes, my wife would actually admit to this ;)). We began communicating more on money matters, especially where the family food money came into play. However, for the next couple of years we still weren’t on the same page because we still weren’t REALLY budgeting together.

Although we were talking about the family food budget, we would both walk away with our own ideas of what we had decided. She would then act (in good faith) on what she thought we had talked about and I would get frustrated when things hadn’t turned out how I had envisioned. The problem, as I see it, was singular: I was budgeting and THEN discussing it with my wife as opposed to DISCUSSING the budget with her.

As an example, I might sit down and go through our bills and income and decide through some not entirely arbitrary means that we had $150 for family food money for the next two weeks. I would then tell my wife that we could only spend $150 on groceries over the next two weeks without much explanation, just stressing the amount. When she would shop, she would get the things that we needed and might come home and say: “I got all the shopping done and I only went over by $15!!”

I should mention that I had no idea what we should be spending on our grocery budget each month, but no matter how much we spent, it seemed like a lot to me. Before I say anything else, I would also like to point out that my wife is great.  I hope this isn’t making it sound like I’m pointing any fingers at her.  Anyway, we’ve come a long way since then and we still have a ways to go. I still do the vast majority of the budgeting, but I go into a lot more detail when we talk about it.

Along the way, I found a little trick that makes our monthly family food budget seem like it’s cut in half.  I’ll tell you all about it in the next and final post in this series (Part 3).