Having just read a post by A Gai Shan Life about how her and her husband have “Wine and Money Wednesdays” to sit down, sip some wine, and discuss their financial situation together, I was totally inspired and turned to my HB and said, “We need to do this too!”
I’ve been wanting to do something like this for ages, but because my HB and I have been unemployed nomads for the past few months, we thought it would be best to wait until we were settled in our new apartment and actually had some income rolling in.
Since we are pretty much done unpacking everything in our place, and my HB has been finding work and my job situation (or lack thereof) is about to change very soon (more on that later!), we don’t have any more excuses left and it’s time to start talking about our money!
Not wanting to completely rip-off Revanche’s “Wine and Money Wednesdays” idea, we started by playing around with names for our weekly get togethers. My HB’s first thought was “Thirsty Thursdays” but to me that implied us just getting drunk and either passing out before 9 pm or impulsively buying plane tickets to Costa Rica.
His second suggestion was “Finance Fridays” which initially I liked, but then thought it sounded as fun as sitting through a time-share presentation without the free snorkelling excursion afterwards. In the end I came up the name “For Love & Money Fridays” because the main purpose for these discussions is to bond and tackle our finances as a team.
So, after we pinned down the name, we started brainstorming what topics we should discuss each week. Although we’ve been together for 6 1/2 years and have lived together for 2, until we got married and moved to Toronto we’d kept all of our finances completely separate. Originally, I wanted to keep it that way after the wedding since I had the mentality of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Well, nothing’s exactly broken, but a hell of a lot has changed! It’s funny, right after we got married almost everyone I knew asked if I felt any different. I answered honestly “No,”but after our move my answer is undeniably “Yes!”.
Since starting a new life together in a new city, we’ve definitely been forced to lean on each other more than ever before, both emotionally and financially. At the beginning, my HB had a lot more freelance work than I did, so he was the main breadwinner for most of the summer.
But there were a few weeks in there where I was bringing in more freelance income and he was busy searching for work. All in all, we’ve come to the realization that keeping our finances completely separate just isn’t feasible. If we want to make smart money decisions and achieve our financial goals, then we need to start thinking of it as our money, not just his and mine.
As of right now, these are the topics we plan on delving into each Friday (financial topics every couple should discuss in my opinion). If any of you have any other suggestions to add, please let me know in the comments!
- What are our short-term and long-term financial goals?
- What joint credit card should we get, and how should we use it?
- When should we buy a place together? And what kind? And where?!
- What are our lifestyle expectations for the next 5, 10, 20 years?
- Should we pool all of our money together, or keep some of it separate, and how much?
- How much money do we need to save up for retirement and how can we achieve that?
- What are the different ways we can invest our money, and what makes the most sense for us?
- Should we hire an investment broker, or should we do it on our own?
What do you think is the most important money topic a couple should talk about?
