(x-post from /r/relationships)
I’ll cut straight to the chase. My wife and I decided before getting married that we wanted to keep our finances separate. We have a joint account that we each pay into and use for common expenses (e.g. rent, groceries, etc).
Anyway, she comes from a family that has lived on welfare for literally generations. She grew up in a trailer without electricity or plumbing (they used candles and an outhouse). She is the first person in her family to get her degree and a stable job. She’s incredibly proud of her success, and so am I. And, compared to the rest of her family or the community that she grew up in, she is very good with money.
But, she still has a long way to go. She earns $50K per year but still lives paycheck to paycheck, she literally only has a few hundred dollars in her bank account at any given time. She’ll rack up credit card debt and then spend the next six months scrimping to pay it off—only to immediately go back into CC debt again. She has student loans that she has been putting the minimum payment toward for the last 10 years, and still has another 10 years to go at this rate.
I’m not saying that I’m a financial genius, but on a similar salary and lifestyle I have been able to pay off the same amount of student loan debt in 6 years, put $7K into emergency savings, and started paying into a retirement account. We want to buy a house in the next year but she isn’t able to “get ahead” of her finances enough to save for her portion of the downpayment.
I love my wife and I’m not going to divorce her over this, so please don’t suggest anything along those lines. But I’m having trouble influencing her financial habits, and she gets offended whenever I bring it up. I need some specific, actionable advice that she can apply, rather than simply telling her that she shouldn’t use her CC as much or that she needs to spend less.
tl;dr: My wife has poor financial habits, and I’d like to help her improve her finances. What do?
Submitted August 07, 2017 at 11:36AM by Harry_Coolahan http://ift.tt/2vFQolz
