Are you and your spouse on the same page? Sometimes I feel like my husband and I are total opposites. He’s an early riser and I’m a night owl. He runs every single day and goes to the gym multiple times a week, whereas I consider running upstairs to grab something out of my room a workout in itself. I get carried away and he keeps me grounded. He can get spun up easily and I stay calm, cool, and collected… most of the time. But as different as we can be when it comes to the little things, I don’t know how we would make things work if we weren’t on the same page in terms of the big things. I’m talking about our goals, values, big life decisions. We’ve luckily been in agreement about most of those things and have found ways to compromise on the rare instances when we’re not.
But sometimes getting to a place where you’re on the same page with your spouse is a battle in itself. You have trouble understanding each other’s emotions or line of reasoning when it comes to a desire or potential decision (such as making sacrifices in order to change your financial situation for the better), and it can become a problem if you’re each digging your heels in and refusing to see the other side. Fortunately there is a way to work around this and it starts with working together to focus on the things you can agree on.
Talking about the future with your spouse
To get your spouse on board with a financial plan, you shouldn’t start out with a talk about finances. Remember the importance of discovering your motivation – the way to do that is to think about the future. If you’ve never sat down with your spouse and had a talk about what you want your future to look like, now is the perfect time! Sit down over a cup of coffee (or bowl of ice cream, or glass of wine – whatever puts you both in a good mood!) preferably at a time when the house is quiet and you can have an uninterrupted conversation.
Talk about every aspect of your future – where you want to live, what kind of work you’d like to be doing, when you’d like to retire, what you’d like to do after you retire, what kinds of things you’d like to be able to do for and with your children and grandchildren someday (pay for college, go on family vacations together, etc). As you discuss the possibilities, make sure you write them all down. Having all of these thoughts and ideas down on paper will help keep you inspired moving forward.
You can agree to disagree
There may be some goals and dreams that you don’t agree on. That’s okay, this is just an exercise to get you talking so that you’re each at least aware of what the other one wants, even if it’s different from what you want. Perhaps as you’re writing things down you can make 3 separate columns – one for things you want, one for things your spouse wants, and one for things you both want. No one goal or dream is more important than another and no decisions have to be made today.
Talk with your spouse about your future until you’re both fired up and excited and can’t wait for it to get here already! If you’ve had any tense moments or disagreements during your conversation, it may be best to wrap it up and save the finance talk for a different day. But don’t wait too long (not more than a week) or by the time you bring it up again your spouse may have forgotten some of the details of your previous conversation. If the talk about your future has gone well and you’re both on the same page about a lot of things, then perhaps now is as good a time as any to bring a conversation about finances into the mix.
What to say when you do have the finance talk
Whether you discuss it now or wait until later, you will want to keep the tone positive and, as often as possible, refer back to the goals and dreams your spouse discussed. You can use the paragraph below as a model for how to phrase things.
[Term of endearment], you know how you were saying you want to [big dream] and that you’d also really like to [goal]. Well, I was just thinking about how we can make that happen. If we started [financial action] now, in [x] years we could start looking into [whatever needs to be done in order to make the dream a reality].
Let’s look at an example of how this would sound in a real life situation:
“Hey babe, you know how you were saying you want to eventually leave your job and start your own consulting business and that you’d also really love to move to Hawaii? Well, I was just thinking about how we can make that happen. If we started paying off all our debt and building up our savings now, I think in 5 years we could start looking at places in Hawaii and maybe you could start your business there once we’ve moved.”
Talk with your spouse about your future until you’re both fired up and excited and can’t wait for it to get here already! Click To TweetThis starts the conversation off in a positive manner. It shows them that you’re thinking about their hopes and dreams and you want to make those dreams come true just as much as they do. They will immediately be more receptive to getting on board with a financial plan than they would be if you just sat them down, told them your finances are out of control and that they have to give up everything they enjoy in order to get it on track. Do you see the difference?
Not convinced yet?
If your spouse is still not convinced at this point, pull out your debt tracker and kindly show them your debt total, what your total monthly payments are, how much you’re paying in interest each month, and how much income would be freed up to be invested in the future if all that debt was gone. Seeing those numbers may be just the thing they need to finally get on board.
Try it out and please let me know how it goes! I’d love to hear your story!