A Great Family Meeting About Money
Thu, Aug 27, 2009
This week I had what I consider a great family meeting about money with my wife. To provide some background, my wife isn’t interested in all the financial details about our money management. I’m just the opposite. From past discussions, I’ve learned she loses interest quickly when I go into the finite details about our spending plan and expense tracking.
Prepare for the money meeting
Therefore, I’ve found it much more helpful and beneficial to keep things at a high level. As the family money manager, this means I need to spend the time on my own to work through the details before we have the meeting. In doing this, we can have a discussion about the important things, such as how we can make adjustments to meet an upcoming expense or how much money is left for groceries for the last two weeks of the month.
For this particular meeting, I knew we needed to talk about some important matters. Therefore, I made a list of these items and I took steps beforehand to prepare for the discussion.
Remaining expenses for the month
I made sure all of our current transactions had been allocated to an expense category so that I could discuss remaining balances for food, gas, etc.
Create a spending plan for the next month
We are trying to be more diligent about revising our spending plan each month. We have “X” number of dollars in which we can use each month. There are choices to make based on priorities, so every dollar gets named to some expense which often change from month to month. For this meeting, I asked questions in advance of what upcoming expenses she knew about. I then made the initial cut at our plan and spent part of the meeting reviewing it with her to seek her input.
Christmas savings (note: it’s 4 months away)
I looked at our Christmas savings for the year and determined how much we needed to save over the course of the next few months to meet our goal. We’re a little bit behind so the new spending plan reflects how much we need to make up in the next few months to have our Christmas savings funded.
Update spending plan because of new expenses
We have some new expenses starting next month because our daughter is going to take dance lessons. Where do we get this money? Well, we have to make some adjustments in our spending priorities. We previously discussed some of these changes so I updated our spending plan accordingly and had it ready for the meeting.
Final thoughts
As I mentioned, the result was a great meeting. It was efficient and effective. Because of the preparation (which was maybe 30 minutes), we were able to reduce our meeting time to around 20 minutes. This was a small investment of time, but a large return because we were able to communicate about money and make sure we were operating on the same page.
My wife’s needs were met and mine were too. She has the information she needs to move forward into the week with her spending and can now make confident decisions on her own that are in-line with our overall plan.
In your experience, what has helped you facilitate a discussion about money in your family? Do you have a weekly meeting in which you discuss family finance?
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