YNAB You Need A Budget

[Mudie]

More to the point, who is the geek that pours over the numbers and pays close attentions to the household finances and who just let's the other person have at it?

This is a completely non-scientific poll to satisfy my curiosity as well as perhaps foster some good discussions. If you're living alone then please answer the poll with your recollections of who paid the bills while you were growing up, Mom or Dad?

Please note: I'm not asking who brings in the cash, just who takes care of the bills in order to keep the lights on.

Thanks!

Steve

[Patzer]

I'm single.

Mom paid the bills when I was growing up.

When I was married, I paid the bills.

So there's an ambiguous non-vote for either the woman or the man being in charge of bills, depending on who is more suited to handling that task.

Patzer

[sarahspangles]

My parents were terrible with money - my father earned the money and delegated all the paperwork to my mother. But they never discussed what they could afford to spend so my father just kept spending and my mother felt guilty because she knew there was a big overdraft and she felt she must be responsible for it. Ironically my father had all the practical skills in IT and finance to do it far better, or at least to set up some better systems. But then they would have had to talk about it..... They must have spent tens of thousands in interest over the years and they're still in a mess now.

I've always been the one in a relationship who manages the budget. My ex-husband refused to take any interest in money, even though I printed out budgets and reports for him - funny how history repeats itself. Then I was in a relationship with someone whose ex-wife had been really controlling, she used to give him pocket money so it was a real shock for him when he had some say about our budget

Now I'm single and dating I'm always conscious about boyfriends' attitude to money. It tells you a lot about a person!

[virago317]

I (the woman) take care of most of the bills and am the one to geek out over the finances (and am also the primary income earner in our family). My husband is an artist (and part-time freelancer) and doesn't handle bills/paperwork very well, so luckily at least one of us does. When we first moved in together, I set up a file cabinet drawer for him and went through literally years of unopened statements and various paperwork that he had kept in boxes so as not to deal with it (at least most of it had been opened and put back in the envelope, to be fair, but some important things had not, and some money/decision time frames had been lost unfortunately). I do try my best to keep him informed about the budget, bills/statements, and income/expense planning, but basically he just wants me to tell him how to proceed... which is cute in some ways (like when he always asks me how to pay for something when we're out) and frustrating in others.

I believe my father paid all the bills and my mother took care of the shopping; they are a traditional nuclear family with a SAHM. I don't think my parents modeled healthy financial communication, so I am forging my own way without looking much to them for examples.

[katsjack]

When we first got married, my husband and I would sit down together and pay the bills. He would write the check and I would fill in the check register. When the children came and I no longer worked, it just automatically fell to be my responsibility since he was working and it kept me busy. I love doing it and he always says I could rob him blind with as much attention as he pays to the checking account!!

[rollercoaster]

I am the one how pays the bills. DH does know how to do it and takes care of it when I am out of town...for the most part. He did miss one payment last summer, and I'm not entirely sure how he managed it because I had all bills listed with a blank space to fill in the amount each month as it was being paid (online billpay) and he used my little pen/paper spreadsheet, but still managed to not pay one bill.

My mom is also the billpayer and paper filer at home.

[MIDAM5]

I pay the bills and in no way does DH want to be in charge of them!! He always tells me that if I didn't handle the finances we'd be in a worse situation than we are now. He's a smart man to recognize that.

[woodnboats]

My mom handled the finances and my dad "brought home the bacon" (sometimes literally) as a country doctor. Neither of them gave me any advice about money, or even shared with me what their financial status was. As a consequence, he died broke (no investments other than social security, since you can't start an IRA "nest egg" with real eggs!), and I never learned anything about how to handle money. It came in, I spent it, and sometimes a little more. So by the time my wife and I married (40 years ago), I was in a mess. She took over, got us out of debt and handled all the money from that point on until I met YNAB.

That and the approach of retirement forced me to look at our situation with a jaundiced eye. I realized that we had a huge credit card debt that we had amassed by "kicking the can down the road", (refinancing the mortgage, rolling over credit cards, etc.) The money came in, we spent it, and sometimes a little more. In short, she was paying the bills, we both were making money, and neither of us was "handling" our money.

Now, I'm a geek, so I loved playing with YNAB, watching where money went, and planning how to afford the things we wanted to spend on, and how to pay off that debt. She's bored by the whole computer thing, so she just rubber-stamps my budget each month, but does stay within it. Most of the actual purchasing, she does. I'm the one who pays the bills, largely because I have converted most of them to on-line payments, which she hasn't figured out how to do. But I still wait for her to tell me when to pay a bill. She's still locked into the paycheck-to-paycheck thinking, even though we've long had a buffer and then some. I only just recently convinced her that it isn't necessary to have a paper statement to pay a bill, or reconcile the checking account, since it's all on line, and updated on YNAB daily.

In forty years, we have hardly ever had a money argument. I pretty much have let her have her way regarding spending, with only an occasional veto, which she has never contested. Likewise, I have never felt my spending to be in any way constrained by her. In the case of those rare life-altering expenses or decisions, we've waited until there was a concensus to go ahead before proceeding; we both have veto power. That's why we drive a 16 year old car, and have had only 2 houses, the current one for 32 years. The bulk of our savings/investments are technically in my name, but we think of them jointly, just as we have always considered our incomes as being jointly owned. The only exception is our Fun Money budget, $50/month each.

Kirk

[MALMomma]

My husband is an artist (and part-time freelancer) and doesn't handle bills/paperwork very well

Funny that roles are reversed in my house. My husband works full time outside the home & I stay home and take care of the kids, the house, and, yes, the bills. I also happen to be an artist who doesn't handle paperwork well, but I "geek out" over the budget & numbers.

[DadOfTwins]

Over the 10 years my wife & I have been together, we have traded off the bill paying between the two of us. I did it for awhile, back when I was using MS Money, got frustrated, so she took over, doing it all manually, and now it's back to me doing most of the paying of bills, but her managing the spending other than bills (groceries, etc.). I do the YNAB budget, move things around as best I can, update our payment schedule that I currently keep in Excel (since we're not buffered, this works well for me), then we discuss all of it before the month starts and make sure we're ok with where everything is scheduled. Once that's done, I go and schedule all the bills for the month at our bank website, put them in the scheduler on YNAB, and I'm done!

[maryea]

I (wife) have always managed our money even though my dh has always earned most of it and for several years all of it. I do talk about it with him but he usually just tells me to do what I think best. Now that he is retired he is a little more involved in making money decisions but he still prefers I do all the budgeting and paying of bills. I can he is proud of our being debt-free though as I hear him tell his friends.

[jjsouth]

I have always been in charge of budgeting and bill paying. I don't know how I'd function if I wasn't taking care of every little detail. DH is more of an abstract thinker... big dreams, wants to save the world kind of person. I'm a very down to earth, focused on what is directly in front of me kind of person. So it works well for us.

[dorothyc]

Most of them are automatic. A couple of ours are direct debited from the checking account, natural gas bill and life insurance, or I have the company charge my credit card and I pay it off in full every month. For others like the mortgage and my regular church contribution, I have those set up to go out by online bill pay from my checking account. The only one I actually have to look up and schedule separately is for LA Dept of Water and Power who bill every two months and don't offer any kind of auto pay. Theirs is for water, electric, sewer services and trash services.
This thread got me thinking that I should make a document that lists everything we pay, how it is paid and how often, in case I am ever incapacitated and my husband has to take over.

[Mudie]

This thread got me thinking that I should make a document that lists everything we pay, how it is paid and how often, in case I am ever incapacitated and my husband has to take over.

I agree completely.

Dave Ramsey often pushes that very subject and refers to the file that he keeps for his wife as his "Love drawer". In the midst of their grief there's hardly a better gift that you can leave them than instructions covering the things that you do to make the new life without you easier.

Although that wasn't in my mind when I composed the post I thank you for bringing it up!

[ishtar]

Hmmm, in my grandparent's house, my maternal grandmother usually made the most money and took care of the bills.

My mom tells a story about when my grandmother was laid up in the hospital for back surgery, my mom, then 13, had to pay the bills, because my grandfather didn't even know how to write a check, much less balance a checkbook.

Growing up, my step-father is the one who liked things organized and balanced, and my mom was . . . a free spirit. But I recall that they often sat down and went through the bills together.

When I was married, it was all me. But if I ever get married again (small chance, teeny-tiny chance), I'd prefer to keep finances separate.

Ishtar