You Need a Budget: 5 Ways Budgeting Can Improve Your Relationship

Anxiety. Shame. Guilt.

That’s how I felt about money and our financial situation for years. YEARS! I wanted to hide from it. Stuff it away in the dark recesses of my brain because then maybe it would all go away.

Turns out that doesn’t work. As Zach and I discussed in our upcoming podcast (listen in on Monday!), not talking about finances is a terrible way to handle your financial relationship.

Finances are an unavoidable area of a partnership; you are going to have to deal with money at some point, and sweeping things under the rug only serves to make the mess you have clean up later a heck of a lot bigger.

Those feelings, it turns out, are pretty normal. The American Psychological Association did a study in 2014 that showed that “seventy-two percent of adults report feeling stressed about money at least some of the time and 22 percent say that they experience extreme stress about money (a rating of 8, 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale about their stress about money during the past month).”

And if you frequently fight about money, a study out of Utah State University showed that “couples who reported disagreeing about finance once a week were over 30 percent more likely to get divorced than couples who reported disagreeing about finances a few times a month.”

If you want to stay in your relationship for a long time, you need to get on the same page with your finances.

As Zach explained in part 1, budgeting has been instrumental for us. I am going to lay out how budgeting has helped us change our relationship and our perspective on finances in 5 big ways.

Our Communication Improved

With the help of regular partner business meetings and budgeting, our communication in regards to finances went from 1 to 10 in no time at all.

We currently use the program YNAB. If you haven’t read Zach’s breakdown of why we love YNAB, you can do so here.

What I love about it the most is that we can both access budget information and update it in real time. There is a web-based app you can access via computer, and then we each have an app on our phone.

With both of these, we can easily see a big picture snapshot of our overall financial health because the program tracks not only our income and spending but also our debt repayment and investments. There is also this neat little reports section that takes all that information and calculates your net worth.

But it also lets you view the nitty-gritty, such as how much you actually have to spend at the grocery store while you’re standing in line. Hard data can definitely make you motivated!

We Took Responsibility for our Financial Health

There’s nothing like starting a budget for the first time and staring reality in the face. And at that point, you have two choices. You can throw your hands up, say there’s nothing you can do, and play the victim and blame game. Or you can take responsibility for the mess you got yourself into, and start to take action on fixing it. As Dave Ramsey says, “ Where you are today is the sum of every choice you’ve ever made. If you don’t like where you are, start making different choices!”

It’s hard to do. In fact, I know I spent several years playing the victim. I felt like all of this unfairly happened to me, and I didn’t take any responsibility for the part I played in getting us there. But something funny happens when you start to face your reality, create a budget, and actually communicate with your partner about finances…

Let’s get Intentional

…we moved from reactive spending to intentional spending.

Seeing our financial health in black in white helped us to come face to face with our reality. While this is hard and made for some difficult conversations, it also helped us to be more intentional about the way that we interacted with our money. Communication is key, but pairing that with intentionality can really take off. We now give every dollar a job, and month after month, our budget reflects the values and priorities that Zach and I have identified. As Dave Ramsey says, “When you and your spouse agree on spending, you’ve agreed on dreams, fears, goals, and priorities.”

Budgets are flexible, and we can be too

I admit it — there are certain things that I am a serious control freak about. But when I first thought about budgeting, even I viewed it as this rigid thing that would box us in. But it’s actually freeing. I didn’t realize the mental space that not knowing the status of finances took up in my brain. When you have anxiety about whether or not you can actually afford to buy something, that creates mental clutter. Your budget (agreed upon with your partner), helps clear that all out.

Our budget looks very different than it did 6 years ago. We have 2 kids now, different expenses, and priorities. Our budget has evolved along with us and even can change month to month to adapt to seasons of life.

I also give myself permission to use other tools than YNAB to keep myself accountable. As I’ve mentioned before, I am mainly responsible for the meal planning and keeping us within the budget in regards to food and household goods. But I realized I needed a more immediate visual to keep me on track. I keep a handwritten running total on the fridge, which is a constant reminder to me where we are in terms of staying within our budget.

Wait a minute! We have more money than we thought!

The first few months of budgeting can be scary, with a whole lot of mess-ups. It’s trial and error! However, as the months go by there’s this neat little thing that happens. In particular, YNAB’s savings goals help even out the fluctuations in month-to-month spending. It helps you avoid the “Oh no! We have annual payments due this month and no money to pay for them” anxiety. Zach does a great job of explaining how these work in part 1.

When you even out these spikes in spending across all of the months, all of your months get some more breathing room for you to do with it as you wish. We put most of that towards debt repayment, and we’ll be so excited when we can move onto other Baby Steps when we are debt free!

Partner Perspective

Budgeting and our weekly meeting have been instrumental in helping Zach and me be intentional with our money. While we may still disagree on aspects of the budget, our communication about money is leaps and bounds from where it was when we first got together. Having the clarity to know where we’re headed together along with budgeting our dollars to reflect that feels like a very empowering position to be in. Together, we are in charge of our destination, and we’re creating the financial means to get us there.