A concept that I’ve always really liked the idea of and that I’ve heard thrown around quite often lately on the financial podcasts that I listen to and financial blogs that I read is the “money meeting”, “money date”, or “money talk”, as some call it. No matter what you call it, I think it’s important to set aside time to have serious conversations about your finances with your spouse or significant other.
The idea of having a weekly or monthly “money date” is (obviously) awesome to me. It’s a time that you set aside each week with your spouse or significant other to make sure that you’re on the same page and that you’re taking actions that are helping you reach your goals, you’re refraining from things that push you farther away from reaching your goals, and that you’re reviewing the important things that happened in your financial life over the past week and what you need to plan for over the upcoming week.
As we’ve heard so many times before, money issues are a leading cause of divorce and open communication can go a long way in helping to eliminate those conflicts. I’ve heard many who have turned around their lives and become very successful financially contribute it to having a weekly monthly meeting with their spouse or significant other to make sure that they’re on the same page and working together towards common goals.
Set Goals
Before you begin implementing weekly money meetings, you need to know where you’re going. What are your financial goals? What do you want your money to do for you? Are you both on the same page, or do you have separate goals that need to be accounted for?
There are a lot of different goals that you can have for your money and you and your spouse may have very different ideas of what those are. It’s important to have an open dialogue about each other’s goals and what you want your money to do for you so that you can reconcile and compromise now instead of having those things buried in your mind for years to come and expecting the other person to have read your mind and known the whole time.
Having a clear understanding of what each person wants to accomplish not only can help smooth money issues along the journey, but will also help to direct the intention of your weekly money meetings.
Get Both People Involved
The Feutz Household will begin implementing a weekly finance meeting (that doesn’t sound as fun, does it?) where we will set aside time each week to specifically talk about our goals and what we need to do to make progress towards them, learn more about our overall financial situation, review what happened the week before and speak about what we need to do over the next week, and make sure that each other has a complete understanding of the household finances.
Yes, I’m the financial planner and the money nerd, but I want Amanda to feel as comfortable and confident with our financial situation and the actions that we’re taking as I am. I think it’s extremely important for both of us to be on board and have a complete understanding instead of just me running the finances because it creates synergy towards reaching our goals and helps to ensure that Amanda could carry on seamlessly if something were to happen to me.
Set The Agenda
It’s your life, your money, and your goals; you get to choose what you want to talk about each week. But, you need to make sure that you have a good structure for your meeting and a list of things that you want to review and discuss. I’m guessing that the “money person” in the relationship will be leading the meeting and they need to make it so the other person doesn’t feel intimidated, has an opportunity to learn, and has the opportunity to speak up, ask questions, and become more involved.
I’m probably not going to be very good at leading this meeting at first, but I think that our agenda will initially be structured with our goals (short-term and long-term) at the top as a constant reminder of why we’re taking the actions that we are, followed by our priority spending areas (these may be too similar and redundant, but we’ll see), our year-to-date net worth progress and year-to-date savings account increase since this is something that we largely have direct control over, a very high level overview of our spending for the month, and discussion topics/action items that we need to complete.
This is just an example of what we’ll start with and I know that this agenda will probably look completely different in a year. Maybe once we get into a good routine and have tweaked ours to our liking, then I’ll share an example that others can use as well.
Put It On The Calendar
I’m a firm believer that having something like this on the calendar is important. Schedule a time that will work for both of you on a consistent basis and that will allow you to both not be stressed or rushed. You owe it to yourselves to set aside at least 1 hour per week to make progress towards your financial goals and to develop a deeper understanding of each other’s thoughts and attitudes towards your financial life.
But, you can’t ignore the meeting.
Once you get into a habit of skipping it you’ll just get into a routine of ignoring things altogether and not thinking twice about swiping away the meeting notification when it pops up on your phone. It’s fine to skip every once in a while if there’s really nothing new to discuss from the last meeting, but there’s power in consistency.
All you need to do to have a successful money meeting is take 1 out of the 168 hours in your week to sit down and be intentional about your personal finances. (And you may even be able to get by with less time than that after a while).
But just imagine how impactful that could be after having that hour discussion each week for a year. Imagine how much you could learn about your personal finances, how much you could learn about how your spouse thinks about money and their goals and your financial situation, and how much progress you could make over that time. It seems like a small commitment for huge potential results.
