For a newly married couple, it is important to get down to some serious financial planning. If you don’t want to bother yourself with all these unromantic money matters and are likely to give it a thought after coming back from honeymoon, you will be late. I don’t want to intimidate you but the fact is inefficiency in money management is often cited as the root cause of troubles in married life and leads to legal separation.
I do think that you should start planning much before tying the knot. It will give you a lot of time to think about how to manage your new household. And it does not matter whether your spouse is the sole earner of bread and butter or if you too are a working professional. When you have started a new journey, it is the responsibility of both of you to adopt a joint approach to every aspect of finance management.
Consider the following tips for financial sanity in your married life and enjoy happy going.
Create a Budget
Budget is the basic tool to create a listing about monthly expenses on priority basis. The prioritized items should appear first on the list. Creating a budget in married life is really difficult. It is quite common that preference and priority of a man is different from those of a woman and vice versa. What you need is to reach a consensus. That is only possible if you have good mutual understanding with your partner and realize the importance of sacrifice and adjustment in your conjugal life. A budget should be such that it serves the most important purposes, common causes and individual interests. Both of you should be deeply involved in budget implementation.
Monitoring
Monitoring of budget is equally important as making of the same. Generally a budget is developed on monthly basis. Keep track of actual expenses of previous three or four months, you will realize whether you are making some good saving or overspending. You may need to reconstruct the budget to gain more control over your spending habit.
At first, you will find it boring to monitor your expenditure pattern and make correction if needed. However, after a few months, everything will be easier as you will get habituated to doing these sorts of things. Also make it sure that you have taken into consideration as many details as possible for implementation of expenditure control and monitoring.
Key Factors
Key to good financial management in married life is mutual understanding with your spouse and how serious you two are in making the right plan and its implementation. Remember it is a joint planning and if the plan does not work out, you should not pass off the responsibility to your partner. Many of us like to live a carefree life without adjusting to any sort of monotonous spending structure and getting entwined into recurring responsibilities. I do hope that you won’t lead a bohemian lifestyle that may result into debt scoop.
