How to Debt-Proof Your Marriage by Mary Hunt

Author:Mary Hunt [Hunt, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BUS050030, FAM030000
ISBN: 978-1-58558-772-8
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2012-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

First Week Review

At the end of week one (seven full days of recording), schedule a review meeting. Take your fourteen individual records (seven from each of you) and merge them into your Week One Spending Record (see pp. 182–83) by combining like expenses. For example, if you went to the grocery store seven times and your spouse went once (Ha-ha, it’s a joke, but then again I must admit that I used to go to the store nearly every day), add together those eight amounts to come up with one figure for “groceries.” If you have entries for two payments to two different credit card companies, combine them under one category such as “credit card payments.”

Continue to combine your spending entries into categories until each entry on each record has made it from the Daily Spending Records to the Week One Spending Record. Depending on the week, this could be quite simple or quite complicated. That’s okay. Just take it one step at a time, avoiding the temptation to combine many things into that famous catchall category, “miscellaneous.” For now, you want to be as detailed as practical. Once you have everything onto one sheet of paper, calculate a total.

Now would be a good time to review the week and discuss the spending that took place—without criticism or hysteria. Remember that as much as humanly possible, you are doing this unemotionally. Refer back to brainstorming in chapter 8. View the situation before you as you would review a business if you were a paid consultant. Do you find the total amount spent in the week shockingly high or surprisingly low? If high, what are the areas of concern?

Do all you can to not let this review meeting escalate into a fight. You are going through a season of discovery. You are committed to integrity with your business partner, who happens also to be your spouse. These first few steps on your journey to financial harmony are going to be among the most difficult. However, the more intimacy you create in the other hours of your marriage, the safer you will feel to reveal the role money plays in your life and what you do with it on a daily basis. As your spouse is increasingly willing to share his or her life at that level, a new level of understanding and empathy will emerge.

Make sure that your weekly records include everything both of you have spent in that week, including checks written, cash spent, purchases made with plastic, gift certificates redeemed—everything, regardless of the source of those funds. If, for example, you took $200 from the ATM machine, you would not enter “$200” on your Daily Spending Record. Instead, you would enter exactly how you actually spent the cash at the time you spent it—every single nickel of it. Once you are satisfied that the Week One Spending Record reflects the truest picture possible, toss the individual records and put the Week One Spending Record into the drawer. You will need it later.

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