4 ms·

#4 misses some other cases. My spouse and I are firmly in this category, but we also have different spending habits for sure! They buy a lot of little stuff tha

#4 misses some other cases. My spouse and I are firmly in this category, but we also have different spending habits for sure! They buy a lot of little stuff that I don't see as particularly useful, while I don't buy anything at all for months on end, until I spend a whole hell of a lot all at once. Should be a recipe for disaster, right? Except it isn't. We just accept that this is who we are, and we're comfortable with that. The author correctly notes that things can change over time, but they seem to ignore the most important thing to this entire process working: we use our words and talk about things before they become an actual problem. Since my spouse and I have accepted this scenario as being perfectly fine for us now, our normal doesn't frustrate either of us, even though we are wildly different in our spending approaches. And when things change, we're both comfortable making changes to accommodate those changes. Some of you might be saying "but yes, averaged out over the year you probably spend the same", and the answer is no. Not even close. I may spend 600$ on a gaming monitor with a 6 month gap on either side, but my spouse ends up spending more like 4000$ on little bits and bobs throughout that same year period. Guess what? This inequality doesn't bother either of us. Why should it? We're in this together and both of us need to be happy with what we're doing. I don't need 6.6667 gaming monitors, and the point isn't to try to equalize our expenditures. Buy what you need to make your life better, and then buy no more. Or, at least, that has worked for us for the last 15 years. Things could change! Things can always change. But I'm not even remotely worried about that; because that's when we make dinner and sit in front of a couple laptops with a bottle of wine and work out a much more strict budget and emphasize a more restrained approach toward both of our spending patterns. It's happened before, it may happen again, but we'll be fine because we come to a consensus on our financial goals and priorities and neither of us have ever acted in bad faith with regards to achieving those goals and priorities. And if that changes? Well, a more fundamental thing has changed, and maybe we SHOULD have marital strife. And that's okay too.

cm2012 7y ago
Pretty much every sentence of your comment is true for my wife and I. What's "fair" is whatever everyone is happy with. I can't imagine being upset because my wife spent more money than me in the abstract.
- isbjorn16 7y ago
  Personally, I feel like trying to keep track of every last expenditure would just cause more and more strife between us. As long as all our long term financial goals are being met, I'm content with what we're doing. And since they are, I am very much so content.
skrebbel 7y ago
The case #4 missed is "yay we have so much disposable income that really it doesn't matter, and this entire article is academic". That might be common on Bay Area-dominated HN, but not in most of the world, where I suppose this article is targeted at. I guess wealthy people don't need advice on how to combine finances :-) Personally I find "she spends $4000 a year on stuff I don't see the value of but I'm fine with that" nearly unimaginable. I could only see myself have that attitude if we really had thousands of dollars (or euros, in our case) of net disposable income every month, after retirement savings and everything.
- kelnos 7y ago
  I don't think that's particularly fair; I think you just have to scale it to your own situation to see how you feel about it. For you, jointly spending $4600 a year on fun stuff sounds ridiculous. That's totally fine, but it's missing the point. (The parent might be ok with $4k a year but not $8k a year. Everyone has limits, and it could be a source of conflict if his spouse wants to expand her spending.) $4000/$600 is 6.67. Let's say you spend $50 a year on your own fun purchases. Would you be ok (both financially and emotionally) with your spouse spending $333 a year on their own fun purchases? I'm of course making up the $50 number, so set that to whatever's reality for you, do the math, and see how you feel. Maybe it works out that you're only comfortable with your spouse spending 4x what you do, or 3x, or 2x. Or maybe it's the reverse, and you're the bigger spender, and you need to find out what your spouse is comfortable with That's fine. The point of this is to negotiate with your spouse to get to a point where you're not anxious or constantly arguing about spending levels.
  - skrebbel 7y ago
    No, my whole argument is that that factor (your 4x, 3x, 2x) example becomes irrelevant once you're wealthy enough. Other stuff starts to matter more. My theory is that the GGP is in this position. But when her buying 2000 euros worth of shoes means I can't get a new pair of jeans anymore then we have a problem.
    - isbjorn16 7y ago

cm2012 7y ago

Pretty much every sentence of your comment is true for my wife and I. What's "fair" is whatever everyone is happy with. I can't imagine being upset because my wife spent more money than me in the abstract.

isbjorn16 7y ago
Personally, I feel like trying to keep track of every last expenditure would just cause more and more strife between us. As long as all our long term financial goals are being met, I'm content with what we're doing. And since they are, I am very much so content.

skrebbel 7y ago

The case #4 missed is "yay we have so much disposable income that really it doesn't matter, and this entire article is academic". That might be common on Bay Area-dominated HN, but not in most of the world, where I suppose this article is targeted at. I guess wealthy people don't need advice on how to combine finances :-) Personally I find "she spends $4000 a year on stuff I don't see the value of but I'm fine with that" nearly unimaginable. I could only see myself have that attitude if we really had thousands of dollars (or euros, in our case) of net disposable income every month, after retirement savings and everything.

kelnos 7y ago
I don't think that's particularly fair; I think you just have to scale it to your own situation to see how you feel about it. For you, jointly spending $4600 a year on fun stuff sounds ridiculous. That's totally fine, but it's missing the point. (The parent might be ok with $4k a year but not $8k a year. Everyone has limits, and it could be a source of conflict if his spouse wants to expand her spending.) $4000/$600 is 6.67. Let's say you spend $50 a year on your own fun purchases. Would you be ok (both financially and emotionally) with your spouse spending $333 a year on their own fun purchases? I'm of course making up the $50 number, so set that to whatever's reality for you, do the math, and see how you feel. Maybe it works out that you're only comfortable with your spouse spending 4x what you do, or 3x, or 2x. Or maybe it's the reverse, and you're the bigger spender, and you need to find out what your spouse is comfortable with That's fine. The point of this is to negotiate with your spouse to get to a point where you're not anxious or constantly arguing about spending levels.
- skrebbel 7y ago
  No, my whole argument is that that factor (your 4x, 3x, 2x) example becomes irrelevant once you're wealthy enough. Other stuff starts to matter more. My theory is that the GGP is in this position. But when her buying 2000 euros worth of shoes means I can't get a new pair of jeans anymore then we have a problem.
  - isbjorn16 7y ago