Reply to Has anyone gotten their spouse to relax a little about spending?

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[quote=Anonymous]I used to be your DH.

Our HHI is $280K ish, and I used to freak about every expense my wife wanted, whether it was reasonable or not. I just got to a point where every major (>$200) expense caused me stress and put me in a bad mood.

I got comfortable with things by:

1) Cutting costs where I could, we actually had a lot of waste - im talking $1500 a month in savings I was able to identify/negotiate/etc

2) I started comparing myself to peers and realized I was actually doing quite well - our net worth is now almost $1.5M in our mid 30s.

3) Letting go of the day to day - my DW handles all the mortgage, taxes, grocery, etc. Not seeing EVERY bill come in helps me chillax about the ones I do see. It still boggles my mind when I do the math, but I try not to do it. Instead, I focus on our retirement investments and our asset growth strategy - thats something I can get excited (and happy) about because I see lots of way to keep in growing (i.e. two 401K matches that add up to 20K a year, plus what we contribute as employees, plus $5k to $10k a year in employee stock benefits, etc etc etc). I now track all of these accounts - 529, retirement liquid accounts, CD-ladders, emergency savings, etc every month. That scratches my itch to manage our financial future without requiring me to see some doctor bill for $390. I know it exists in the back of my mind, but as long as inflow > outflow, I'm not worried.

4) Focusing on net worth rather than just savings/assets. This helps because it "rewards" me for paying off debt equally to increasing my assets. In real terms, I know that the optimal financial decision probably isn't pari passu between those two, but tracking net worth enables you see improvements in two areas every month, and unless you are overspending (which it sounds like you arent), at an absolute minimum you'll see improvement in the debt column. It's cool (and rewarding) to see mortgage balances drop, even if its relatively slowly. Its stupid perhaps but in nominal terms, its also a bigger figure: if i pay off $1,000 a month in mortgage and save $1,000 a month - im going to see a net worth increase of $2,000 a month. That "feels" better than what I would have seen back before I changed even though perhaps nothing actually changed.[/quote]

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