Ten Ways To Improve Financial Intimacy In Marriage – Part 3
Ten Ways To Improve Financial Intimacy In Marriage – Part 3
6. Budget Jointly and Meet Regularly:
When you have defined your goals you now have a broad or general direction that you would like to follow in your lives. In addition, you have figured out the financial implications of those goals. Now your job is to apply those long term goals to the short term – this month’s budget. If you have first agreed on your long term goals your dollars should more easily fall into a natural pattern for short term usage. The budget represents the small goals you meet along the way to achieving your ultimate goals.
Once the budget is set it is important that you track your progress. The best way is to meet together regularly. Imagine if Junior got sick and I bought a bunch of medication. My spouse needs to know that happened because we may need to adjust another budget item to make the budget work.
Here is what my wife and I do. Every Monday night is budget night. After the kids go to bed we sit down at the dinning room table together. We take all the receipts we collected from the previous week. She reads them and I type them into our budget program. One of us could do the job, but as she reads and I type, we are both aware of all the week’s expenditures. We then take a quick look over the budget to be sure the dollars we allocated to each category still seems sufficient. If we have overspent on a category we take the money from somewhere else in the budget. The meeting shouldn’t take any more than 15 – 20 min per week.
However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. (Ephesians 5:33 NIV)
- Work at Removing Financial pressure:
Too many money discussions in marriage happen in high-stress situations. Chuck Bentley at Crown Financial Ministries frequently talks about creating financial margin. Where there is margin, stress is removed from the situation. Imagine this scenario: you are on your way to work on a day that every second counts because you didn’t leave a spare moment anywhere on your agenda. Then you end up getting stuck in traffic. Every moment is torturous because you have no margin, no space to delay. I guarantee that if you made that same drive on a Saturday morning visit to see friends you would not be nearly as stressed. You need to take away the pressure that every financial decision could break you. This must be done by paying off debt and saving for emergencies. Once you have taken care of those financial pressures you will find that all your financial discussions are suddenly so much easier because there is now space to breathe and even room for error.
The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender. (Proverbs 22:7 NIV)
SOURCE:http://www.biblemoneymatters.com/