Marriage
Take Advantage of Financial Booms
There’s nothing better than a family financial boom. Flush with cash, you and your spouse breathe a little easier, you dream a little more, and the door of possibilities opens just a little wider. The great temptation is obviously to do something fun with the money… something a little reckless. The responsible thing is to use it to get ahead. How do you decide?
Income and the money that your family takes in from selling things, refunds, additional jobs, or anything else that generates revenue is never linear. Your income is either decreasing or, hopefully, increasing. Even as you move through the year, your budget will grow or shrink at times. There will be unexpected bumps in income and unexpected contractions. Despite the temptation, I’d encourage you to stay the course, stay responsible, and enjoy the security that getting ahead brings.
Alison and I have been having a great year. A number of things have caused our income to rise to new levels. We recently thought back on how things were when we were first married and how difficult the budget was. We’re now way better off than we were 3 years ago and it’s a great feeling. We’re making great progress on our goals and we’re staying in control.
Perhaps the biggest scheduled increase in our budget happens on a schedule. Alison is paid bi-weekly and so we get paid three times in a month twice a year. Since we live on two paychecks a month, that means we essentially have a third paycheck to use for discretionary purposes in those months. There are all sorts of fun ways we could spend the third paycheck, and we’ve certainly made a few fun purchases, but we largely have remained committed to getting ahead on our goals.
When I compare the feeling of buying something fun, which we have, to the security and stability that saving for a goal brings, which we also have done, I much prefer the latter. We could afford to upgrade our TV, but honestly, I’ll be over that in a few days. We could afford to do all sorts of things around the house, or go on a nice date night, but we know that reaching our goal is a much more satisfying pursuit.
We’re not perfect and not every dollar ends up where it’s supposed to, but we’ve pulled each other back from the edge of the cliff many times. Each time, I find it helpful to remind myself that there’s an infinite number of ways that we could spend that money. By recognizing that there will be something else that I’ll want after I buy that next “thing,” I’m better able to say no to myself.
Being an adult may be regarded by some to be boring, but I prefer the restful sleep of making the right choice than the nervous stress of a plan falling apart. The decision is yours, choose wisely.
Rethinking Together Time
Is residency over yet? With just under 18 months to go, I’m so done with all of this. Alison’s schedule, the shifting sands, and lack of predictability in future planning. It’s a part of the process, but that doesn’t mean that I have to like it. As a part of this whole experience, Alison and I have really had to spend time rethinking what we need when it comes to time together.
When you boil down our daily schedules, we have a paltry 1 to 2 hours together a day where we’re not eating, sleeping, or working. In that time Alison needs to unwind and I still need to read and finish up tasks from the day, meaning we really only have 60 minutes. Ouch. How do we meet our needs for togetherness when we can only find 60 minutes in a day?
Obviously, we had to rethink what we want out of together time. First, we spend more time together on days when she’s off. If she has a day off after a 24 hour shift, I’ll dial back the amount of work I’ll do during the day. As an example, I cancelled my day a few weeks back and we spent the day at IKEA and frustratingly assembling the things that we bought at IKEA. This together time strategy requires flexibility that thankfully we’ve been able to craft through my work.
Next, we keep weekends light and clear. When Alison has a day or two off on the weekends, we spend most of those days together. The time might be spent playing with Benedict or running errands. These are low intensity activities so that we can be together and she can still be resting after a series high intensity shifts. We might have someone over for dinner or take a quick weekend trip, but all of that scheduling is done with a eye on her overall workload.
Finally, we had to take a hard look at the ugly week night and admit that there was little to be done. We can watch something on TV, or she’s free to craft, work on a project, or do whatever. I place no expectation on her and I have plenty of my own non-work activities to work on. That’s taken a lot of stress off of us because she can make decisions based on how her day went.
When time is tight, you have to make tough choices. I’ve written about the complexity of time management many times on this blog. It’s important to remember that time management is dynamic and that when things get really tight, the best thing you can do is adjust expectations.
Diligent Budgeting
Diligent budgeting requires three distinct toolsets: allocating, tracking, and accounting. Although each toolset has its own challenges and difficulties, using all three in unison can prove a very powerful asset as you strive to reach your financial goals. By not employing all three, you’re likely to lose money somewhere in your budget.
Allocating is the proactive step in the budgeting process in which you take your income, and divide it among the categories for spending. Ideally, every dollar that you take in will be allocated somewhere in your budget to be saved or spent. Allocating happens before the month begins so that you’re ready to start spending on the first day of the month.
Tracking is how you measure what you allocated versus what you actually spent. This happens during the month. As you track your budget through the weeks, you may need to make adjustments. Some adjustments are required due to poor planning, and others are due to changing circumstances. Roll with the punches and stop bad purchase habits as soon as they’re detected.
Accounting tells you where your money went. Your accounting system, which may be as simple as a bank statement or a checkbook register, will show you how you spent your money. Accounting is where you balance your checkbook at least monthly to ensure that the numbers that you’re budgeting off of are solid. Although it’s the least glamorous, accounting is necessary because it ensures that your math is based in reality and not guesswork. All of this happens at the end of the month.
Diligent budgeting requires all three; allocating at the beginning of the month, tracking during the month, and then accounting at the end of the month. If you want to be successful at budgeting, first become an expert at allocating, then tracking, and finally accounting. When your budget follows these three methods over the course of the month, you’ll be surprised at how quickly you reach your financial goals.
Things Will Never Make You Happy
When there’s something that I want to buy, I tend to develop a laser-like focus on achieving that goal. I’ll work to find any way I can to be able to get that thing. This most often happens with technology. All of this focus builds suspense and excitement, which quickly dissipates just a few days after I make the purchase. The suspense and excitement are gone, and I just move on.
You’re probably a lot like me. We like stuff and honestly, there’s nothing wrong with that. Stuff is fun, it can allow you to do new things, and mostly, it’s cool. It’s only when we let stuff take up too much space in our lives that we get into trouble.
In the end, stuff is empty. It can’t meet your emotional needs and it won’t bring stability into your life. You need to invest in your wife, in your family, and in your faith. You need to be more focused and excited about your vocation, about spending time with your family, and about doing things together.
The excitement of whatever that thing inevitably comes to an end and then you just have stuff, in a closet somewhere gathering dust because it’s out of date. That’s the beauty of focusing on those whom you love. They’ll never be out of date, boring, or empty. Like a perennial flower, they’ll just keep blooming, year after year.
Enough About Sex Already
I have zero interest in your sexual preferences. Frankly, it’s none of my business. Yet, we’ve become so fixated on everyone’s sexual preferences that it’s spilled beyond relationships into jobs, culture, and every other facet of our shared community life. Sex is an intensely interpersonal act that has two aims: to emotionally bind spouses more closely and to create children. The only time I’m interested in hearing about your sexual preferences is in the context of a baby announcement.
I remember one time I met an accountant who told me, “I’m not an accountant, I account for things. My job does not define me.” He said it in jest, but he made a solid point. We are complex and dynamic beings. I’m a son, brother, husband, father, writer, web designer, business owner, Catholic, American, Virginian, pilot, stamp collector, reader, walker, lover of olives, jazz listener, and so many other things. To define myself by just one of those aspects to the detriment of the rest would not only be unfair to me, it’d define me as something other than who I truly am. I am all of these things together.
How did we let our sexuality become our defining characteristic? Sex has always been a fascination, but when we “liberated” our sexuality in the 1960s and 1970s, is when we really got out of balance. Honestly, do you feel liberated? Contraceptives have been a complete disaster. Women spend half of their reproductive lives using them to avoid pregnancy and the other half trying desperately to reverse the effects in order to achieve pregnancy. Rates of single parenting, the number one indicator of potential poverty are through the roof. Pornography is ridiculously accessible. Doesn’t sound like the fun liberation that was promised.
Our sexuality is important and it’s incredibly personal, but we’ve let ourselves become prisoners of our sexuality. We’ve forced ourselves to act in certain ways because people say that’s how we should act. High school students lose their virginity because they’re told that’s what you’re supposed to do. People with very real and serious emotional problems are counseled by medical and mental health professionals to masturbate instead of seeking avenues that will actually heal and correct the underlying issues.
All of this is absurd. Sex is the vehicle by which the fruits of the married life, namely children, are achieved. It’s the method by which spouses are emotionally and biologically unified. It’s the complete gift of self, of vulnerability, shared in the context of an indissoluble bound, that is meant to be shared by spouses and with no one else.
Sex is for you to share with your spouse, not the world. You’re so much more than a sexual being, you’re an integrated person. It’s only by living an integrated life, with each component of your personhood in proper balance, that you’ll achieve the lasting happiness and deep sense of peace that you desire. Everything else falls to nothing.
The Two Most Important Times of Day
There are two critical times of interaction with your wife each day. They are the times are when you say goodbye in the morning and hello in the evening. While both take only moments, I consider them to be real tone-setters for the day.
Mornings are typically characterized by frantic preparations. We wake up from a dead sleep, rush to shower, shave, eat, and get out the door on time. During the school year, our morning routine includes herding our children through the same process, often while facing resistance.
I find it to be incredibly important to take even just a few moments before Alison leaves the house to stop what I’m doing and say goodbye for the day. While we’re awake for 15 or even 18 hours, most of those hours are spent apart. In order to keep my day moving in the right direction, I want to press pause, and make sure Alison and I have a proper goodbye.
I read an article once about the importance of a parent stopping everything to greet their spouse when they come home. The article wanted parents to show their children, through this simple act, that nothing was more important or valued than one’s spouse. I think the premise is a good one. Just as taking a moment or two in the morning is important, greeting each other at the end of the day can be just as precious. It’s a nice reminder of the importance of one another. We are made for work, but more importantly, we’re made for each other. Now that Benedict’s walking, sometimes I even open the safety gate and let him toddle over to greet Alison when she comes in the door.
Schedules shift and we all have deadlines for getting out the door and on our way. I hope that you’ll make time at the beginning and end of each day to properly say goodbye and hello, and in that way, reaffirm your importance to one another.
Vacations Without Your Kids
Our children’s dependance on us is both proper and something that needs to be managed. It’s a wonderful thing that our children rely on us for their basic needs, for guidance, and for instruction. At the same time, this 24 hour job we call parenting is incredibly exhausting. What parent doesn’t enjoy the peace and quiet that only the post-bedtime hours can bring? If we’re not careful, the exhaustion of raising children can adversely impact the most important relationship in our lives: our marriage.
One of the best ways to steal some downtime in order to strengthen your marriage is by taking small trips. Vacationing with your kids is lots of fun, yet it’s also important for you to take trips alone with your wife. After all, while your relationship with your children is important, the core relationship upon which your family is built is your martial relationship. Alison and I took a three day work related trip earlier this summer and we left Benedict with my parents. We missed him terribly, but it was good for us all the same.
Your marriage needs constant attention and maintenance. Marriages don’t fail overnight; it’s through years of neglect that they suffer catastrophic failures. Just as a regular date night is important, so too are these mini-vacations; they’re a time to focus on one another. It doesn’t even need to be an expensive or exhaustive trip, either. A quick tune-up in the form of a simple night or weekend away is all that’s required.
A question may be rising in the back of your mind: how often should we have these marriage trips? There’s no clear answer, but certainly more infrequently than your family vacations. Your marriage is sustained and nurtured through your daily lives. The intimacy that you share as you both experience the safety of sharing your thoughts, hopes, dreams, and desires is one way your marriage is nurtured. It’s also sustained through kind words and acts of service. Additionally, your marriage is sustained through your shared parenting, raising the children that you lovingly brought into this world. A parents-only vacation is simply another outlet for you both to continue to grow your marriage.
I encourage you and your wife to find some time before the end of the year, if at all possible, to have a parents-only vacation. Your marriage deserves it and, above all, your children deserve to be raised in a home grounded in a strong marital bond.
Fighting Financial Fatigue
Perhaps the most difficult struggle that any of us face in reaching our financial goals is the inevitable long journey it takes to reach them. Most of us have goals that are far in the future, like buying our own home, getting out of debt, or retiring in comfort. When we strive to reach a goal that we’ve never before experienced, it can be easy to fatigue on the goal, and to start losing ground. It’s in those moments that your resolve is truly tested.
I’ve found that I start to slip in my determination when I stop dreaming. Financial goals require a lot of dreaming because of their long-range nature. I have to dream about what life will be like when I’m debt free, when I play with my kids in a real yard, and how glorious traveling the world without a schedule or obligations will be. It’s only in the moments that I lose focus, when I stop dreaming about tomorrow and only worry about today, that I slip.
When you find yourself in the danger zone of budget fatigue, ask yourself these four questions:
Why am I working towards this goal?
How different will my life be when I reach it?
What’s broken in my system?
How can I move past today’s problem and get back on track?
When you take a moment to answer these questions you can remember why you’re sacrificing today and better guarantee a happier tomorrow.
How to Move Past the Worst Mistakes
Perhaps the most painful mistakes you or I will ever make will involve money. Bad buying decisions, late payments, or even bouncing a check are all extremely embarrassing life events. We all struggle to let go of dumb money mistakes that we’ve made in the past. Yet, your mistake might not even be an external money mistake. Sometimes money mistakes involve only your family, like going over budget on something. Even though it only involves your family, it’s still embarrassing. It’s incredibly important that you be able to forgive yourself and to forgive your wife for money errors.
We’re all sensitive about money mistakes. Money is like a scoreboard, so when you mistakenly blow some, you feel dumb. Paying fees, fines, or penalties stings because there are so many other great things that you could’ve used that money for. Not saving enough for your child’s college may cause them to miss out on their dream school, running that red light could set you back a month on your goal, and forgetting to pay a bill could cost you late fees. Whenever we have a negative money event, it hurts us on a personal level.
Money mistakes will happen. If you’re working, generating income, and making transactions, you’re going to make a mistake somewhere. It’s a statistical reality. Consider the sheer number of transactions that go through your bank account every month! Learn your lesson and move on; don’t let it be a drag on your life.
If your wife is the one who committed the mistake, be exceedingly patient with her. Empathize with her. After all, you know exactly how she feels. Help her work through the issue by showing her that it’s not a catastrophe, just a bump in the road. This can be a moment that either devolves into a fight or brings you closer together. Support her and build up your relationship.
The most important reason for you to move on from money mistakes is that if you obsess over it, you make money your god. You lost some, ok, go out and get some more. Work a little harder, sell something, do whatever you need to in order to get things going in the right direction again. But don’t let this become the headline that dominates your days.
You’re bound to make money mistakes. When you do, fix the problem and move on. Your family will be glad you did.
How to Help Your Wife Live Her Dreams
Alison has been accepted into a medical Natural Family Planning course later this year. I’m not sure how long this has been a dream of hers, but a year into her medical career, I know that she’s eager to live this dream. It’s important that while you’re chasing your dreams, you ensure that you’re doing all that you can to support your wife’s. After all, she supports you in everything that you do.
Depending on your wife’s particular dream, your role will vary. If she’s training for an athletic event, you can help with menu planning, food prep, or child care during her training time. If she’s trying to launch a business, you can adjust your demands on her time. No matter what she’s doing, you can’t do it for her, but you can do other things around her that will allow her to pursue her dream. Be tenacious and willing to sacrifice some of your time so that she can do something that she’s really passionate about.
Your full commitment is required in order for her to be successful. None of us can accomplish anything on our own as we rely heavily on our spouses for support. If you’re half-hearted in supporting her dream, she may never fully accomplish it. That’s the worst case scenario. Give her everything that you’ve got. Find new ways of helping, cheer her on, and do all that you can to help make her a success.
As a married couple, you’re a team. Your wins are shared, as are your losses. By helping your wife live her dreams, you not only help her to have a better life, but you help your family have a better life. You all get to share in the glory of a win.
Chase your dreams, pursue your passions, and do everything you can to help your wife do the same.