Budgeting for Couples: A Guide

Let’s talk about marriage. The joining of two people, both of whom are imperfect, to hopefully form a union that is greater than the sum of it’s parts. One of the things that has been very helpful in my marriage is that we each play to our strengths and rely on the other for their strengths. We develop complementary skills so that between the two of us we’ve got everything handled. Admittedly there are still holes in the boat, like consistently remembering when it’s trash day or knowing where we put the scissors. We also have some areas where we both shine, like making ridiculous jokes that embarrass our children or assembling IKEA furniture.

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I want to take a look at laundry as an example. Laundry has to be gathered from the various places it ends up, run through the washer and dryer, folded and then put away. That’s a lot of steps and while none of them are particularly challenging there are different things about them that we can find more or less enjoyable. My husband finds satisfaction in getting machines to do things and in chores that really don’t take very long. Whereas the ability to remember that there’s wet laundry in the washing machine has long eluded me. I find folding laundry while watching a favorite show or listening to a podcast relaxing. My husband still doesn’t know which clothes belong to which child or where I keep my shirts. So in our home it’s easiest and happiest if he gets laundry through the first half of the process and I take care of the second half. In other families one partner might do all the laundry and the other takes on a different task from start to finish. 

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Thinking about laundry though, that division of labor doesn’t happen by accident, we had to communicate and make a plan that we both felt good about. Otherwise we might have spent years with musty smelling laundry put away in the wrong drawers. Even now that we have a system and the task is shared we still have to communicate from time to time. Like I might point out that the laundry baskets are getting quite full and I’m all out of shorts. He might ask me which of the growing mountain of clean laundry baskets is most likely to have his favorite shirt in it. 

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Personal finance works similarly and you can learn to manage money together just like you learned to do household chores together. The budgeting process also contains a few main parts. Each of those parts can be managed by one or more people. By dividing and conquering you’ll find both partners are aware of the budget and feel invested in it, plus no one is dropping the ball because they’re having to do something that doesn’t come easily to them.

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Tracking Income and Expenses

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The first part is tracking and maintaining. This consists of entering transactions or importing them from a bank. You might have a joint checking account, money market accounts, credit cards and savings accounts. Once the transactions are in the budget you have to spend some time categorizing. Decide which spending category that dog food purchase should come out of. Also you should be making sure that bills are coming in for the correct amount and you aren’t being over charged or you don’t have duplicate bills; that kind of thing. Reconciling accounts is a key step in this part. This partner is also responsible for things like knowing what bills are due when. I have a knack for this because my brain is pretty good at focusing on the details and keeping information in my memory in an accessible way so I notice when things aren’t as I expect. 

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When working on this part of budgeting with a client recently we discovered that they had been inadvertently paying for their home internet service twice per month for a long time. Just the act of actively tracking and categorizing all the transactions that came through their accounts helped them notice this problem and now they can take steps to fix it. 

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Budgeting

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The next part is the actual act of budgeting the dollars as they come in. This partner should generally know how much you tend to need in each category for various time frames. Making sure that the overall spending plan is in line with your monthly income. They should also be checking the budget as you’re spending or just after spending and making sure that things are on track. For a long time my husband paid all the house related bills because he’s sitting at a computer more often than I am so he could fit that into his day more easily. As a result of repetitively paying them for years he had a general sense of how much we typically paid and could even guess things like utility bills based on season and weather. On the other hand he rarely does the grocery shopping or other discretionary spending so my guesses on how much money we need for those things are more accurate than his. He does tend to want to spend money if there's extra and I prefer to save money. But let's be honest, there's rarely extra. 

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Adjusting As You Go

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A concurrent part is adjusting the budget as things happen and making decisions when things come up that cause the plan to change. We use zero based budgeting so any thing different from the plan means the money has to come from somewhere. This could be larger than normal expenses or larger than normal income. Often the partner who does the budgeting can manage this part as well but sometimes the other partner is better at analyzing the trade offs. Or maybe it’s a team effort.

When we get a tax return it can be a super fun opportunity to adjust the budget in good ways instead of always adjusting because of higher expenses. We start working on a wish list several weeks before even filing our taxes. Just listing out all the things we could do with the money. Then once we know the amount my husband uses his divergent thinking and mental math skills to pull together different combinations of our wishes and shares the options with me. So he might offer option A - invest $600 for kids college, use $300 to replace a broken ipad (with a refurbished one), save $500 towards a snowblower we want and $200 for a fancy date night. Or we could go with option B - The full $1600 for the snowblower. Or maybe option C - $700 for board games he wants, $700 for yarn and fabric for me and $200 for video games to share. 

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Overspending or underfunding can be a lot less fun to adjust to and we find that I do better with managing the disappointment of having to take money out of christmas savings to cover the unexpected vet bills. So I tend to do more of that and he ignores the savings lines of the budget for the most part until I tell him the money is ready to spend. That way he doesn’t see all the ups and downs. 

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Big Picture

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In addition to all the ongoing day to day tasks in the budget there’s also the big picture of your overall financial goals. In laundry the goal is for people to have the clean clothes they need available to them in their space. In budgeting the big goals can be much more complex and variable, and they can change over time or if life circumstances change. So it’s important to have ongoing communication to make sure both partners are working towards the same short or long term goals. Some common big goals you might have as a couple are tackling credit card debt, personal loans or student loans. You might want to bulk up your savings accounts or build an emergency fund. 

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I’ve seen a lot of couples work out budgeting plans that work for them. These plans vary quite a bit based on the skills, interests and habits of the people involved. But generally someone has to take responsibility for each of the main parts I discussed above. Sometimes both partners are actively involved in all the parts. Other times one partner takes the reins for all the day to day stuff and the other partner weighs in on the big picture. That can work well but requires some important things to be in place in my experience, more on that later.

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It’s also true that the distribution of tasks can change over the course of a relationship. With laundry, there have been times, like after I gave birth, when one partner (hint: not me) took on the full laundry task from start to finish. Or when one of us is starting a new job and the other picks up all the slack at home during that adjustment period. The same can happen with budgeting tasks. So it’s important that both partners are at least aware of what their teammate is doing and feel able to provide support as needed. But there’s no need to try to both be doing all the things all the time.

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What if there are parts of budgeting that neither partner has the skills for or wants to be involved with? That’s where maybe a coach can help. As a coach my goal is to help one or both partners develop skills in the areas of budgeting that they find challenging. Sometimes I also will be a safety net for them and pick up the slack on certain things as they’re learning. Like cleaning up a reconciliation mess or being a sounding board while they think about bigger long term goals.

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Once you're ready to get started, check out this article about the types of support a coach can offer.