In a month and a day, my wife and I will celebrate 5 years of marriage. We’ve been on quite a journey together. From high school sweethearts to really old married couple, is what we desire our story to be.
Both of us come from families who have struggled in the area of marriage. We are striving to begin a new legacy in our family tree by sticking together through anything and everything.
It’s no secret that many marriages end in divorce for a variety of reasons. And one of the top reasons is money. Many studies show this and point to more income as providing a higher likelihood of a marriage that lasts. But does more income really provide a better basis for a long-lasting marriage? Meh. Maybe, maybe not.
We, though, have found a better option. One that will improve your marriage whether you make a lot of money or not. In fact, we believe this is absolutely vital to improving your marriage.
How an Excel Spreadsheet Will Improve Your Marriage
I know some things about your marriage whether or not I personally know you:
- Either you or your spouse is a spender.
- Either you or your spouse is a saver.
- These differences cause each of you headaches at times.
- You have moments of being stressed about your financial reality.
I know these things about you because these are realities for most, if not all, marriages (including mine). The age old adage that opposites attract is so freakishly true. And this can easily cause problems within a marriage if you let it.
But you don’t have to just settle with being passive victims of the spender/saver dynamic in your relationship. You can begin proactively improving your marriage while improving your financial reality. It is possible and here’s a simple way to do so:
Use Excel to start your weekly/monthly budget.
If you and your spouse are not seeing eye-to-eye in the area of your finances, allow me to ask you a question. Do you work through your finances together?
What I mean by that is, do you both sit down every week, every other week, or whatever the frequency of your payroll is, and work through putting together a zero based budget? If you don’t, you are missing out on a HUGE blessing in your marriage.
An Excel Spreadsheet Improves Your Marriage in 2 Primary Ways
1. Your financial reality improves.
If you have never done an actual zero based budget, you’ll feel like you got a raise the first time you do so. Really. I’m not kidding.
How many times have you gone through a week, checked your bank account balance, and wondered, where did all of our money go? Here’s a truth I have learned: if you don’t tell your money what to do, it’ll disappear. I know this from experience, unfortunately.
Sara, my wife, and I are a single income family and we never go without our needs. We are working through getting out of debt and are on the same page each and every week with what our finances are going towards. This saves a lot of headaches throughout the week when it comes down to urges to spend outside of what we budgeted – we have a basis on which to say no, for we agreed to what we would spend ahead of time.
When you do a zero based budget, you’ll be able to prioritize your spending in a way that moves you and your family forward. We are able to tithe (give 10% of our income) to our church first and foremost, give above and beyond that to our church in addition to our tithe, and support a child through Compassion International. We wouldn’t be able to be as generous as we are if we were not on a budget.
2. Communication with your spouse improves.
When you sit down with a common goal in mind, and put your heads together to come up with a plan, you learn very quickly how to communicate in a deeper way. One of the best things you can do as a married couple is to make goals together and work alongside each other to accomplish those goals. We have goals on when we are shooting to get out of debt. This informs our semi-monthly budgeting decisions.
When we need to change something that we budgeted, we have to communicate together in order to decide what to do. Just yesterday we were deciding what to do for dinner and hadn’t gone to the grocery store yet so our options at home were small. We both wanted to get some pizza, it sounded good, and our daughter was very much for this as she kept repeating herself that she wanted pizza, but before we decided that we would go and get some Little Caesar’s, we worked through our budget as payroll for us comes through on the 15th of the month, which is the day of this article’s publication.
Before we began working through a zero based budget, we would just go make a purchase if there was money in the account. Now, we communicate through our goals, priorities, and tell each dollar what to do. Sometimes we spend money on things like pizza, and sometimes we don’t. It all depends what our budget looks like once we are done working through our priorities.
Open Excel and Get Going!
So, what are you waiting for? Get budgeting and improve your marriage. If you’re not sure how to get going on this, just go here.
Do you and your spouse already work through a budget together? Let me know the benefits you have found by doing so in the comments below!
