How to avoid those heated rows over family finances
FOR MOST people, if they met someone who disagreed with them on almost everything possible, they’d run a mile. It’s a very sensible response, but I went in a different direction: I married him.
We don’t agree on anything – from the big things like politics and money to the smaller ones – like whether a jumper should ever have the name of the designer on the front or whether your TV needs to be bigger than your dining room table.
As prices have risen, the opportunities to fall out spectacularly have grown exponentially, as everything from the supermarket shop to deciding how to spend a Saturday afternoon are potential flashpoints.
I don’t just tell you this so you can look smugly at your other half and thank goodness you didn’t sign up for a lifetime of drama: it’s also an effort to be helpful. Right now, my husband and I are far from alone in not seeing eye-to-eye about our finances.
A survey in February revealed that money is the main cause of arguments between couples at the moment. And as more of us are finding our money stretched desperately thin, those arguments are getting more heated. So as someone who has lived with this level of disagreement from day one, there are seven tips I can offer on how to deal with money rows.
1. Don’t shy away from talking about money
If you’re living together or sharing your finances in any way, neither of you can afford to let the other go off and plough their own furrow, because it could come back to bite you both.
You need to get into the habit of talking openly about money: how much you have, how much you need to save, whether you’re borrowing money, how you feel about your bills. And while money is tight, you need to be prepared to talk about how you’re going to make ends meet.
2. Be honest
I’m not talking about brutal honesty mid-row, but you do need to be open during these money conversations. If you have any problems with money it’s easier to come clean and face them together than spend a lifetime trying and failing to hide them.
3. Stay calm
If you’re both going to feel comfortable about opening up about money issues, you need to suspend judgment during these conversations. If you fly off the handle immediately when they admit to making a mistake, they may think twice about telling you next time. Instead, listen calmly, and focus on how you can solve the problem together. This doesn’t mean they have free reign to do what they like financially regardless of the consequences, it just means that solving the problem is the first priority.
4. Plan important discussions
If something is becoming a problem, whether it’s an overarching issue like rising prices, or something more personal like their refusal to cut their costs to help make ends meet, then think about how to have the conversation. Pick a time when you’re both calm and focused. You’ll want to get into it as soon as the issue blows up, but this is the worst possible time. Give yourselves time to remove the emotion from the issue.
Work out what you want to achieve before you start, but don’t specifically try to dictate the answer. So a reasonable aim would be to find a way to cut £50 from your spending – without deciding in advance that your partner needs to surrender their gym membership. Stay as calm as you can during the conversation, and bear in mind that the answer lies in finding a solution that suits you both.
5. Have respect for one another
For my husband and I, it helps enormously to know where our attitudes to money and our financial decisions have come from, so we spend time talking about it. When we make decisions that the other one doesn’t understand, it can be driven by all sorts of things they’re not seeing – from how we learned to treat money growing up, to formative experiences along the way, and even our emotions.
So while my husband thinks I spent far too much money on a sleeping bag for a teenage overnight hike a couple of weeks ago, he knows it was the best way for me to deal with the stress of leaving a teen to fend for themselves: by making sure they’d be warm at night.
6. Don’t try to agree every penny
Some couples manage to do this and operate a single joint account, and I’m in awe. We manage far better with a single account for essentials, specific things we’ve agreed to save towards each month, and separate accounts that we each have control of for any money left over.
As prices are rising, the things we’ve had to agree are how much extra goes into the essentials account and how much more we need to save. There’s far less left in the accounts we individually control, but we still don’t interfere in how we choose to spend it.
7. Choose not to have every row
I’m not saying let important things go, but if it’s not causing problems for your finances, there are all sorts of areas where you’ll have to agree to disagree. It’s why we have a TV that my husband thinks is a sensible size, and I’m pretty sure is big enough to see from space.