The Four Types of Couples When it Comes to Money
Look. People are different. Your spouse will never likely be exactly like you and you should be thankful for that. I know it would be a pain to be married to myself, no idea how my wife does it.
When two people who come together and try to figure this money out, I noticed there are four different types of couples that exist.
Couple #1: The Perfect Couple
For some reason there are couples out there who will never fight about money. They are lucky.
This couple is a super rare minority. You probably have better luck seeing a unicorn than you do meeting this couple.
The reason they never fight is because they both like to keep budgets, they love to count every penny together, and be super frugal. If that is you, then this site probably is not for you.
The reason this couple is so rare is because almost nobody likes to keep a budget. I do not have hard numbers for this, but my experience has been that 99.9% of people hate to keep a budget. It is too time consuming and who wants to be restricted to what they can buy?
I know when I tried keeping a budget, I hated sitting down and having to track every expense into my excel sheet with these complex financial formulas that basically told me I was broke and my job is a joke.
How come nobody told me life would be this way? (Sorry, Friends reference).
Seriously, if you happen to see this couple, take a picture, post it to social media, caption it unicorns exist and tag my name in it.
Since this couple does not fight and they love tracking pennies, I am not going to spend too much time on this couple. If you love keeping the budget more power to you. For the vast majority of us, we fit into one of the three other couples.
Couple #2: The Apathetic Couple
My wife and I can be classified as this couple. Both of us hate spending anytime on money. We like to make money, but at the end of the day, money is just a byproduct and tool to get what we really care about. Neither of us have an overspending problem, so we hate keeping a budget. Why even bother?
We just simply do not care when it comes to our finances. Since the day we got married we have put away $100 per month into our investment accounts.
That’s not a lot, but that added up to about 5–10% of our total income our first year. For those who are not good at math, we only made bout $20,000 our first year of marriage.
The only reason I kept a budget when we first got married is because all the financial “gurus” said I should.I hated doing it though and my wife wanted no part in it. This situation caused conflict in our marriage because I felt like the one with the short end of the stick.
It made me feel as if she did not care about us. It aggravated me to spend hours on our budget.
If you are a couple that fits into this category of hating to keep a budget, but you do not spend too much, then set your finance up automatically.
Once we set up our finances to record our budget automatically using Learnvest, and we set-up a system to draw money out automatically, life was a lot more simple. You could also use tools like Mint.
The fighting in our marriage completely stopped after that.
Couple #3 : The Aggravators
This couple, whether it is both couples or one, overspends. They blow past their income and they are consistently finding themselves in debt.
These people need overspend for various reasons, but a lot of it has to do with their money mindset.
A vast majority of money problems stem from addictions such as drugs, porn, alcohol, etc. If you want to stand a chance a stopping your overspending then it is important to get your addicition in check.
The other reason we overspend is because we are accustomed to a certain lifestyle or we want to be perceived in a certain way. Seeking status is normal. It has helped us survive all of these years.
It use to be important to know the status because it could mean life or death in the days of cavemen. For this couple you need to think about and redefine what money means to you.
If you do not think you have any of these problems, then your last solution is to earn more money. Find a way to make more money. It could be another job, a salary raise, starting a business, etc.
Couple #4 The Allowancers
This type of couple is a broad couple and usually has some interesting dynamics going on in their relationships.
For some reason, there money is almost separte. This couple is set up where one spouse is give a weekly allowance, typically the woman, and she is to buy everything needed on this tiny amount of money while the other spouse has more financail freedom and will spend it on themselves.
This causes deep resentment for the other spouse. This is a tricky situation because more often than not the one who has the most money typically works and has the ideas that the money is theirs rather than it being together.
Of course, you could try talking to the spouse about the situation, but this almost always ensues into a fight. Unfortunately most people do not change and talking to them about how they should change will certainly not work.
So the best solution for this couple is for the one with the tiny budget to earn more money. This is typically stay-at-home-moms or other types of spouses.
With the increase of the internet it has become easier for anyone to work whereever and how ever they want. So there are plenty of opportunities to earn more.
Summary
If you are lucky to not fight about money in your marriage, then you are pretty rare. Most people fall into one of the three other categories.
Do not worry though. Rather than teaching you how to fight and communicate about money, I think it can be prevented by controlling the triggers. It comes down to two simple things: Simplifying your finances and earning more money.
