There is an old saying that money does not bring happiness, but to the best of my knowledge, there is not any single couple in my family and or my surroundings who is happy living in precarious conditions and extreme poverty. Without any shadow of a doubt financial stability contributes to the household balance, as well as communication and love do. Therefore money is definitely a necessary tool.
Money can create havoc in a relationship when the couple cannot meet ends, when it is poorly managed, and in some situations where one person throws money out of the windows. When you cannot afford spending money, you rapidly end up in debts.
Credit cards make it so easy to carry huge debt loads; before having credit cards if we do not have money, we have to borrow some, or get a bank loan. Now all we have to do is just grabbing our card to buy things, even if we cannot afford them.
The possibility of having multiple credit cards, also multiple our chance of buying stuff that we, usually, cannot buy out of our pocket. This makes our financial woes worse. As we got swamped with debts, happiness goes out of the windows while arguments enter the main door.
Quite often money issue begins long before living together under the same roof; before the marriage with the student’s loan. To have a profession that enables us to have a decent job, a career to take care of ourselves and our household we are obliged to get a loan to finance our studies.
In fact, not everybody is lucky enough to get their parents pay for their post secondary study or get a scholarship. As a consequence,the way to attend college and or university is to get a loan that will get repaid after graduation. For a bachelor degree some people get to repay 20.000 to 30.0000 dollars and those with a master degree or a PhD will have to repay even more.
That incurred liability is due to the fact that besides paying for the dormitory fees, we have to pay for the books, which are very expensive. Also every term comes with registration and tuition fees. As most full-time students work part time or do not work at all, the loan is the only solution. I, for example, at some point in time, had to get a loan to continue my studies, though I was working on a part time basis.
When living under the same roof with my husband I automatically have brought this debt in the household. This type of debt is understandable because it is for securing us a bright future; it is not like spending money on costly jewels, and designers’ shoes and bags.
On top of the student’s loan, for many, adds up the loan for the car, and with the passing of time, debts keep accumulating.
Each month comes with expenses to take care of: bills including the mortgage or rent, utilities, phone, and so on.
To get out of the debts dialogue comes in handy.
Different cases can be encountered. The fact that, usually, one of the spouses spends more than the other one leads to frequent disputes and arguments. In fact, even though they both want to be debt free, one person may not be totally committed to do everything possible and therefore keeps spending too much on non-essential expenditures. This is to fuel the non indebted partner’s anger and frustration; as the latter is doing even more to save to pay back debts. In case one partner is debt free, he or she can put more pressure on he/her significant other as he does not like not being indebted.
When we started to live together, nope it was even shortly before moving together , hubby and I got a serious talk about finances. During that talk there was the request to see my bank statement and in what I spent my money. This way he could see how much debt I had and why I had it. I told him why he wanted to see it, if thought that I had a gambling addiction for instance.
Several meeting to discuss about finances is recommended at least in the beginning this can be bone weekly or biweekly. This way we can identify our purchase pattern, see how much we spent and how to remediate the situation. Both partner can talk about those expenses, to see if they were necessary.
In addition, it is also good to draw up a budget which will help achieving our target that it reducing our debts considerably, or just paying it off altogether.
However, it is not that obvious, when getting married in our thirties, to report every purchase matter on a regular basis. That can appear to be funny and or insulting, but doing it for the sake of our financial well-being, the sake of peace and harmony in the household is important. It is not easy to do it in the beginning because we may think that as an adult we do not have to report to anybody, that is against our freedom.But we also sometimes have to put our pride , our ego aside to better our personal economic status and at the same time the one of the household.
Giving explanations on what we spend money on and for what reason can be beneficial to come with a plan not only in order to budget but also to pay off debts or simply reduce them. Once made, both people have to stick to that decision.
A couple who is swamped by debts is not in very good standing financially speaking as well as in other areas right? it has to do everything possible to reduce the sum of money owed; which can be harsh on them. For instance, when most of the money is directed towards paying the student loan, not much is left for grocery; do not even talk about going to the nail salon to get a manicure done.
Talking about manicure, when trying to pay off debts some healthy habits are necessary, and should be adopted as soon as possible, such as doing your hair yourself, as well as your manicure and pedicure. Do you imagine how much money you can save by doing your beauty care yourself every month instead of going to the salon and or the spa. A full manicure and pedicure is around 80 to 100 dollars if acrylic is included, in a month we spend in average 400 in beauty care that we could do ourselves.
Guys adopt healthy habits to pay off your debts!
