30
Aug
Making sure we both know where our money is
My wife and I were talking about where we have some of our savings accounts. For the wedding, we opened up a savings account at a nearby credit union and we currently have a good little chunk of money left in there since her salary was going straight into that account. I was talking about moving the money from that account to our on-line account because of the 4% difference in interest rates between the accounts. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while and something she’s been resisting for a while.
As we talked about it, I found out that she is mainly resistant because she doesn’t have a good grasp on exactly how to get a hold of that money that is in the on-line account. So for her, when the money goes there, it might as well disappear. I’m the one who has been managing things since we got married, mostly because I enjoy it more than she does. We have this long term plan to switch off financial management every year, but for the moment, it’s pretty much all me.
But talking to each other about it and me listening for what she needs was very important, and saved us a lot of conflict. If I had just moved that money, she might have gotten upset at me, and I wouldn’t have really known why. By talking about it, she knows why I want to move it, and I know why she doesn’t want to move it.
So for the moment, I’m going to make a hand-written account of all our on-line assets and accounts (hand-written because I would hate for my computer to get stolen and my account numbers and partial passwords to be listed on it) that we can store in a safe place that she can use to access all of our on-line accounts. We’ll go through how to log into each one of them so she’ll know where all of our money is. Hopefully this will give her a sense of what we have and where it is, and give me a chance to make some extra money off of our money. But it would never have happened if I didn’t listen to her and she didn’t listen to me.
September 3rd, 2007 at 6:34 pm
[…] from the Family Finance Blog writes about making sure we both know where our money is. Now here’s a novel approach - FFB listens to his wife when they discuss money. And they both […]
September 3rd, 2007 at 7:37 pm
Great advice. I really need to write things down for my husband, should anything ever happen to me. We make the budget together, but I pretty much take care of the day to day managing of the money, because I have more time. He’d be lost without me.
September 4th, 2007 at 4:51 am
“Seek first to understand, then be understood“. Thanks for providing a really great real world example.
I keep ours on our computer and a copy of all our accounts and passwords on a flash drive that I have. Both are encrypted with a password using a free open source product called called Cryptology.
September 4th, 2007 at 6:02 am
That’s great example. I am trying to teach my wife more about financial management too. I also password protect my computer and software that store my passwords.
September 4th, 2007 at 6:20 am
[…] Making Sure We Both Know Where Our Money Is […]
September 5th, 2007 at 9:07 am
[…] Making Sure We Both Know Where Our Money Is (from FBB, The Family Finance Blog) […]
September 13th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
That’s exactly what I did for my hubby last night, and he gave me his account info too. We each wrote down our accounts and passwords on a notecard. I had a lot more accounts than him and he was rather overwhelmed. He didn’t want to type all of my accounts into his Microsoft Money so I am managing everything now.