Liz’s post made me think; if I had to put myself on the continum between tightwad and spendthrift, there’s no doubt that I’d fall on the spendthrift side.  My husband, on the other hand, would not.  I am grateful that neither of us is too far from the middle, yet our predilections have certainly led to some less than fun conversations over the years.

And we’re not alone.  Some sources say that money disagreements are a factor in 90% of breakups.  Of course, money alone is not usually the issue - underlying the disagreements are all kinds of personal baggage as well as concerns about how the partners treat one another.  M.P. Dunleavy wrote an article for the New York Times the other day where she disclosed that her husband had been throwing out catalogs addressed to her before she saw them.  It seems his rationale was that what she didn’t see, she couldn’t shop for.  Hnmmmm…. (more…)

TAGS: communication, financial freedom, personal finance, Women and Money

The Simple Dollar had a nice post about taking the training wheels off money management. Basically, after creating a plan to recover from a financial meltdown and after obsessively tracking every penny for awhile, the blogger realized he’d been spending less and less time managing his money–and that this was a good thing:

 In short, I began to trust myself. I had seen the results time and time again of my good financial behaviors - my account balances went up and my debts went down. Eventually, I began to trust these principles, and that trust led directly to a reduced need to keep running the numbers and micromanaging everything.

That’s the groove we want to be in when it comes to money–neither obsessive nor unconscious. If we’ve been unconscious and let things get into a mess, then a little obsession may be in order until we’re back on track. Once we’re on track, though, a good system should keep us there without excessive monitoring or worry.

TAGS: budgeting, financial planning, personal finance, simplifying