Ever since I started getting money for my birthday and Christmas when I was a kid, I alone was in charge of my money. My parents always told me to use my money wisely, but it was up to me to choose how to spend it.
Since I also never got an allowance, I knew I needed to be really careful not to blow my savings on something frivolous. Fortunately, I started to bring in a bit of an income at 15 when I began working part-time after school, and even though I didn’t always track my spending or put my money to good use, I was always on a budget. I needed to save up enough to afford university tuition and books for 5 years, and somehow, I managed to do it.
Now, since I’ve always been in charge of my money, the idea of joining financial forces with my husband kind of scared me at first. However, after we got married and moved to Toronto, I realized that the best way to manage our money and make it grow was to do it together. Last Friday my HB and I sat down to discuss our expenses and to draft up a communal budget. Here’s what it looks like (all credit goes to my HB who did all the work in excel!):
All in all, our separate expenses are pretty much on par, but since my HB has his car, he does have to pay a bit more every month than I do. Nevertheless, after drafting this bad boy up it was as if a big weight had lifted off our shoulders. For the past few months, we’ve just been spending money without really tracking any of it, and since we weren’t bringing in much of an income throughout the summer, neither of us wanted to talk about budgets let alone check our bank statements.
But now that we’re both working and are more or less settled in our new place, having this budget to help us not overspend anymore and start saving again is one less thing for us to worry about. And since this is our first joint budget, we are going to actively track our spending to see if this budget makes sense for us or if it needs to be tweaked a bit.
I’m not sure what topic we’re going to discuss tonight. There are so many things we have yet to touch on such as making a will, getting life insurance, and really looking at our money to see how we can better invest it. If anyone has any topic suggestions, feel free to let me know in the comments! Have a great Friday everyone!
What does you and your partner’s budget look like? How much do you spend on average on the necessities?
