"Do you tell your spouse how much you spend?"
I thought it best to reply in the affirmative to that question. I suspect that the woman asking me is self-medicating with retail therapy.
I realized as I began to write that 'how much did you spend' is different than 'what did you buy'. Retail therapy(shopping) can be as harmful to financial health as a gambling addiction. It's about money, it's about control.
I have been under-employed since I closed the consignment clothing business I owned. The bulk of the money in this marriage is what MySpouse earns, 97% I think. I have had a paper route on Wednesday delivering the weekly shopper, pays a whacking $20.00/week, for about a year. There has been no question of my controlling the finances here. I'm okay with that.
I told the asking woman that we've been too broke the past three years for either of us to do much spending, beyond paying bills. Since the bulk of our income is his earnings, we tend to shop together. Every three months or so we'd be ahead $50 or $100 and we would go to a bookstore and each of us buy what we like to read. Sometimes we would need to go to Wal-Mart for a specific item and I would ask if I could buy $5.00 worth of yarn or beads. I used to just assume, but now I ask.
People don't always communicate as well as they should. There's some news, huh? Especially married people. Especially married people who don't want to acknowledge how deep the financial doo-doo is. Or what their part in the mess is. It's not that we lied to each other. It's that we didn't talk about it at all. We didn't talk about the mess, or how to clean it up; we didn't talk about our fears or desires or the future. Becuz, I admit, this is some scary shit.
If we wanted a future we had to talk about finances. Talking about money, dealing with control issues... difficult at the best of times. Damn difficult at the worst of times. We have a history of honesty, however, and that helped us tackle a thorny mess of wants and needs. Being honest with each other was how we started our relationship and being honest is what would
allow us to continue.
We decided that getting out of debt is a priority. MySpouse is 55, I'm 48...retirement isn't so far off. Well, these many months of denial of the pleasure of spending has resulted in a couple of the bigger bills being paid off. For the first time in three years we are current with our bills, on time with the mortgage payment. Three or four months of paying the bills on time isn't going to repair our credit record, but that is not actually our purpose.
There are a great many websites that deal with financial planning, debt reduction, and frugal living. Here are a couple of sites whose advice we've used: Simple Dollar and Debt-Proof Living.
