financial management for couples

4/28/2016




T says:

I used to pull my mom's white hair while we spend some quality chit-chat together. Upon knowing I am good with Math, she often shares to me the family's expenses. Starting from her monthly income, breaking down to the expenses and what is left is negative.


Kie says: 

The other one thing that you will be sharing after you get married, aside from the pillows and a few colds, are the finances. Now you have to forget thinking "this is all mine! (plus an evil laugh)" but instead, "this is ours (without a sad tone please)".


T says:

So at a young age I was already exposed to money management. We even have bank accounts (thanks to mom and dad) and we would personally go to the banks with our tiny hands depositing our savings and signing with our kiddy signature. 

Kie says: 

Money is (most of the time) the culprit of arguments between couples, whether there is not enough, or there is more than enough. I really appreciate it that my husband is in the financial management industry, and is in fact a financial adviser, so money management is not a new concept for us. 


T says:

So with all the values learnt about saving money, I pursued a career in the financial industry. And having applied to my married life, I proudly say I couldn't remember a day that my wife and I fought about money. I earn through variable business income and my wife earns through a steady paycheck and this is how we do it:


We say:

When income comes in (regardless of amount), it is pooled. Then we both take personal allowances (to be agreed by both), then the rest are divided into different percentages as follows:

10% - Financial Freedom Fund
10% - Tithes or Give Fund
10% - Longterm Savings for Spending (LTSS) Fund
10% - Play Fund
10% - Education or Learning Fund 
50% - Expenses

The above guide is highly recommended as it complies to certain universal laws (more on this on our upcoming posts), however, the percentages can be adjusted depending on your situation. As of writing, we have not included the education or learning fund and our current expenses is still on 60% while we have play fund at 5% and LTSS fund is 15% as we divided it into 5% buffer fund (for emergency), 5% for house fund and another 5% for baby fund.

Financial planning and strategies depend on what works for you. For us, we chose pooling our funds together and dividing it to our financial goals and expenses, by percentage. This way, we cannot point fingers to each other, saying "you spend more and put less in our savings" or "the expense assigned to me is larger that yours, it's unfair.So we resorted into this scheme. whatever comes in, whether from income, earnings from business or even cash gifts, we put it into our money jar system. This is an idea from T. Harv Eker.

I'm sure some of you would say, "We can't live on 50% expenses!" It's like, 99% expenses!"  Then as T Harv Eker would say: 
"We are all creatures of habit. If we want to be good with money, we must have good money habits. The habit is more important than the amount." 

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