What do you deserve? You work hard for your money

I couldn’t deny my hubby anything - especially since he was the hard worker (paid work outside the house) and I was a working mum, who managed the kids, day care and school drop offs, food and paying the bills, but was contributing less $$ to the household finances. Who was I to tell him "no" when a good deal for a fishing rod came up?

It always seemed to be at a time where I thought we were going ok. And then out of the blue, we got a delivery of a new fishing rod plus an unexpected bill. 

Ok then. Regret, shame, damn.  Maybe we should have waited.  But why wait?  We work hard - we deserve this!

But we don’t deserve the stress. We don’t deserve the feelings of not being good enough to manage our wages (especially as an accountant - you would think this is natural to know this!).

This was the final straw for me. I read the Barefoot Investor (book by Scott Pape) and unlocked a couple of key pieces:

1. Using a credit card to live off and then pay it all back on pay day is an old fashioned concept that only works for people who have a good handle on budgeting already.  It’s not for most people.
2. Multiple bank accounts can help you separate and group your spending.
3. Having a splurge account (I call this a play account) means that you can buy the things you want with the money that’s allocated to you for spending on whatever you want.  You can’t touch the money already set aside for bills.
4. Having debts and paying interest is money that you won’t have later - so if you can afford to pay for something straight away, do it and keep more money later.  

Now we have a help of bank accounts that all have a reason and a purpose.  Some things we have discussions about and the purpose changes.  He still gets what he wants, but now there’s some delayed gratification- he’s happy to wait for sales or deals and make sure there’s money before he buys, which means I’m not stressing because we have our emergency fund ready for that unexpected bill and we won’t be caught short.

We have taken some of the initiatives from what we have learned in the Barefoot Investor book and made it our own. For example:

We don't follow the barefoot names of bank accounts (we use our own definitions) and nor do we use the percentages as outlined in the book.  These are unrealistic for us as we earn more than an average family.

We don't do a date night as we go to bed early and wake up early - so when we need to discuss finances it's either on a quiet Sunday afternoon enjoying the sunshine, or over breakfast.  We eat and chat - and then revisit the plan to make sure nothing's missing based on where we are now, and what we want for ourselves and our family for the future.

Money Management - and how you deal with your household finances, is uniquely yours.  However feeling like a failure because you made a mistake once (or a couple of times) is not worth dwelling on.  Is it time for you to step up and be more responsible for your finances?  

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