By: Revanche

Wine and Money Wednesdays

September 24, 2013

Tomorrow is our inaugural session of the alcohol and finance meeting wherein PiC and I sit down once a week with a glass of wine or beer to discuss the state of our union as regards money, financial accounts, and things to do going forward.

He likes wine (alcohol) and I love money (a lot) so it made sense to combine the two to dull blunt rein in my overwhelming enthusiasm while making it less onerous for him.

You wouldn’t think that we’d need to schedule time to manage our finances after this many years together (nearly a decade of togetherness, a couple years of being married) but we do. Or we need something like it that works well for us.

We managed a marathon session creating our 2013 budget last Super Bowl Sunday, and without drawing blood on either side!, but I’d much rather get our affairs in healthy working order without falling back on such a dramatically exhausting effort.

This is an experiment to see if we can meet on a good middle ground from which we best manage our money without driving us both crazy. It’s my passion, not his, and while we generally share common goals, our ideas of how and when to reach them diverge sharply.

Even as we plan our “wedding”/reception, I’m reminded that marriage is not an opportunity to change the other person. We influence each other, we rub off on each other, but equally, we bounce off each other. It might be for better or for worse, but how it feels is a whole other ballgame.

A saner person might question whether starting this weekly meeting while we are planning a major event and running like hamsters with work. To that I say, what better time to start a good habit? If we work at this in bite-sized chunks, it’ll be more likely to take root.

And this is the point of all of that. There’s little to no point spending time and money on the wedding day if we’re not spending time and energy nurturing important aspects of the marriage itself.

I don’t know how this will go but I’m hoping for the best and looking forward to making inroads into clearing up our money landscape. It’s been one of the things in marriage that makes me feel complicated: finding a balance between respecting each other’s autonomy while charting a roadmap that works for our family.  As I said on Twitter chatting w/@nofearingthemon and @singlema, it’s very much like a waltz. We take steps forward, backward, forward, backward, all the while learning to listen and communicate to the other.  Toes have been stepped on in the making of this marriage.

Tomorrow’s agenda
An Overview: identify and log all our existing financial accounts (banking, investing, credit cards, shared/individual).
Log the accounts, amounts, and beneficiaries.

Next week’s agenda
We’ll decide from the overview sheet which accounts still need beneficiaries, need changing, closing or combining.
Our finances may be combined but we don’t intend to shut down all our individual accounts.

I’ll be recording our progress, of course.

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