The State Of Our Union

Sundays are State of the Union days in our house, when sweetie and I sit down to talk about how we're doing relationship-wise. Sometimes they're quick check-ins, sometimes we get into a little more depth, depending on what we've got going on. In this year leading up to our wedding, we've decided to make finances a central part of our State of the Union talks. Over the next couple of months, sweetie and I will be reading Smart Couples Finish Rich by David Bach and discussing the latest chapter at SOTU.

Sweetie and I have different approaches to money. Obviously, right? We're different people with different histories and different priorities. We have different incomes, different amounts and types of debt, different spending and tracking habits. We are still in the process of combining our finances, and we don't know yet what level of integration we expect to have after we get married, but even if we keep separate accounts and separate liabilities, we're hitched. For real, y'all! If his boat sinks, so does mine, and vice versa. It's kind of scary, actually, and would be more so if I didn't trust him so much!

Anyway, because money is so darn personal, we've never spent a lot of time thinking about how we might function together as a unit. I pay my bills, he pays his bills, we have a joint checking account out of which we pay utilities (split down the middle evenly), and each month he gives me a fixed contribution to put toward the mortgage, which is in my name. That contribution is a lot like rent, except we don't call it that since neither of us likes the implication that he's nothing but a boardinghouse tenant. It's been a good system for us.

But until we decided to get married, I didn't consider it my business how much money he was saving for retirement or how he was going about paying off his credit cards. That was his money, and therefore was his business. By the same token if he had ever suggested I might be better served putting the money I'd just spent on plane tickets toward paying down my home equity loan he may well have gotten an earful. It's my money. I earned it, I decide what to do with it. It's not that we never talked about retirement or debt or budgeting, just that we approached the topic like National Geographic narrators, neutrally gathering information, impartially observing, moving slowly so as not to scare off the one we were observing. That was a good process. It served its purpose. We were comfortable enough with one another's priorities and practices to decide that becoming permanently legally entangled (as opposed to permanently emotionally entangled, I suppose) makes sense to each of us.

Which is not to say that either of us actually likes the other's priorities and practices enough to adopt them ourselves, wholesale. Here's where the fun part begins.

On the agenda for this week's SOTU is Chapter 1 of Smart Couples Finish Rich, which addresses facts and myths about couples and money. Honestly, there's not a lot of content here, certainly nothing new or revolutionary to me--especially considering that I read Smart Women Finish Rich a couple of years ago, before I meet sweetie, and this is largely the same stuff. Compounding interest rivals the law of gravity in its power to control the universe, invest steadily if modestly over time and you'll come out ahead, maximize your tax advantaged vehicles, fiddle dee dee, fiddle dee da. You've heard it before, I hope.

The main takeaway from Chapter 1 is that couples who aren't on the same page about their finances are in for a rough ride, and couples who plan together and work as a team come out far ahead in the longterm. Point taken, David, that's why we're reading your book, and why I'm sitting through it for what feels like the second time. In fact, the true/false checklist exercise is nearly identical. However, where the Smart Women checklist left me feeling very self-satisfied indeed for knowing what my life insurance benefits were, and knowing precisely what my fixed monthly expenses are and how much the variable expenses vary, the Smart Couples checklist left me feeling like an underacheiver. I may know a lot about my financial state, but neither of us, as it turns out, knows very much about our financial state. OK, David, you've convinced me, maybe it's worth proceeding to Chapter 2 after all.