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Want to Be Wealthy and Wise? Talk to Your Spouse
Lou Scatigna, a.k.a. The Financial Physician, has a message for married couples: pay your bills together.
Couples who can’t agree about money are doomed to divorce, says Scatigna, who has worked as a financial counselor since 1983. To save your pennies and your marriage, you need to have both partners involved in handling the family finances.
To ensure this, he advises that couples sit down one evening a month and pay all the household bills together. Even if, like me, you’ve automated most of your bills with an electronic bill pay system, you still want to look at each one every month. Doing it together helps you both know what’s up with your money.
Scatigna says families benefit from this approach because:
- It keeps both partners honest and accountable. When you’re doing all the bills together, it’s harder to hide credit card debt or justify spending a little extra on lattes this month. You have to face up to not only the bank but your sweetie.
- You become a team. Saving can become a fun game, instead of a tiresome chore.
- It protects both of you from being left in the dark should something happen to the financially savvy partner. You don’t want to be learning to pay bills (or even trying to figure out what bills you have to pay) while your spouse is terribly ill or worse.
How does your family handle finances? Is it a team effort, or does partner do all the work? Are you happy with the system you have?
Photo: Marya
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[...] striking to me that few of these skills are taught in school. Last week, when I interviewed the Financial Physician, he told me he thought every American kid should get two years of financial literacy courses before [...]
What Do We Really Need To Learn? | Strollerderby commented on Jan 29 10 at 2:34 pm[...] Want to Be Wealthy and Wise? Talk to Your Spouse: Lou Scatigna, a.k.a. The Financial Physician, has a message for married couples: pay your bills together. Couples who can’t agree about money are doomed to divorce, says Scatigna, who has worked as a financial counselor since 1983. To save your pennies and your marriage, you need to have both partners involved in handling the family finances. [...]
(Slightly More Than) Weekly Link Round-up — ChildWild commented on Jan 30 10 at 10:03 amLaure68 commented on Jan 26 10 at 11:58 amI think agreeing about money and actually paying the bills together are two different things. In our house, there are just some things that I am better at and some things that my husband is better at. I am the one who understands money, so I take care of our finances. We keep all of this on Quicken, and we both have access, but my husband really has no interest in looking at the details. He just trusts me to take care of this. (I do try and sit down with him once a year to show him the budget, but his eyes kind of glaze over and he just tells me to handle it.) We do have the same basic values about money and saving, so that helps.
There are plenty of things he is better at, and I let him take care of those.
I never understood the recommendation that couples share in every task. That seems like too much work for me. Plus, there has got to be a point where couples trust each other.
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