To me, this is an odd middle ground: good for them in the long term, bad that this is even necessary.

Always keep a dollar in your pocket.

LOVE LOVE LOVE the “allowance” idea – I recommend that allll the time to people too, and have also done it myself when first married – it helps a lot! And is more exciting to have than paychecks coming in which is already accounted for more or less, haha…

Glad you guys are on the same path now too – YNAB has changed the lives of so many people and a big fan.

He’ll get a nice surprise one day when he dips his hands into that jar to grab a cookie :)

Things have a funny way of changing. My husband got hurt permanently and became a stay at home dad/husband. I went back to school and earned my degree and have become a teacher. Around that time, I also found YNAB. We’ve been using it for a couple of years now and my husband is finally on board with using it (to be fair, when we first began using it, he let me take care of it all). One of the first Truths I discovered after using it for a year is that my husband and I approach money differently – and it’s not a bad thing! We balance each other out (we both tend to go extreme). Part of this solution was simply giving us each an allowance each month that we didn’t have to justify our purchases to the other.

This did a few things: 1) it gave my husband money he could spend (or save for bigger purchases), 2) it gave me “permission” to spend money without sacrificing the budget, and 3) it has us both talking about the future. I’ve opened up an additional savings account through work that will supplement my teacher retirement when the time comes. My husband is my beneficiary. I told him I was thinking about doing it. I told him when I did it. I told him why I did it. (As the primary breadwinner, I want to ensure that he and are taken care of in our retirement years. Also, if I go first, I want to ensure he’s taken care of since he has so many medical issues/expenses).

For us, YNAB has been the key that has opened the gates to talking about money. I’m glad the author came to conclusions she did. I have never lied to my husband about money, but I’ve made choices of which he had no opinion and it’s worked well for us.

Thanks so much!!

Haha you make a good point … I think keeping a secret from my husband would have caused me even more anxiety than any financial issue! It would have just made things worse all around haha.

We actually are both on medication and occasionally in therapy for our ADHD and anxiety, although it’s true that I didn’t get into that in this piece. So those issues can definitely have strong influences over our day-to-day lives. However, I like that you say we all have our demons. That’s true, and however severe they may be, we need to learn to handle them in a healthy manner. Especially if our decisions affect someone else, like our spouse!

Oooo yay, I never meet other people who have the same job(s) as I do!

I would think that it makes more sense for the non-anxiety-person to handle the finances. But for some reason, as someone with anxiety problems, I tend to put myself in situations that cause me more stress. Why do I do that?!

That’s actually a really interesting way of looking at it that I hadn’t thought about! A good perspective for the other side of the argument.

The only reason I would consider what I was going to do “lying” is that I had approached him about the matter beforehand and he said he didn’t want to change anything. So if I had changed something, it would have been intentionally going against what we agreed upon. But if I had never asked him about these financial actions and had simply taken them, I wonder how I would feel about it now. Interesting!!