The spender and The Saver

well I haven\t been married in a dog's age we were very young when we were married, it was in the 1970's and we were charge crazy, I have paid for that mistake for the rest of my life. I haven't had a credit card in over 30 years and I still have debt. I haven't charged anything anywhere and I still can't even pay my utilities bills etc.

I am the saver and the one that worries about the bills. My husband is the one that works; but he also the one that spends. He spends without even thinking about it. He has been getting better about doing this in the past few months but I see that it is easy for him to fall back into that routine. When he was in charge of the bank account and bills it was all messed up. Bills were late or not paid at all. He had the account negative. It was terrible. Finally he would tell me about the mess after it was so bad that I couldn't help him dig out of it. Then there would be a fight. After two years of living this way he finally relinquished the reins to me. We now have money, are bills are paid and on time. The account is in good standing and old debt is being paid down. Not only that, we have a savings account for the first time ever!

I think I am more of spender. i am spendthrift from childhood. I earn and i spend most of it. may be i need to be a little frugal.

I have always been the spender in our marriage until over the past year my husband has been buying up large. He is usually the saver but since earning more than we have ever had in our lives together, we have somehow gotten ourselves in a financial bind so I have taken over our budget and am only spending what we need. We have his sister in laws wedding at the end of the month and it's costing us a lot to get there. We had a full year to plan for this but did poorly and now we are going to pay for it when we come back. We even contemplated in missing the wedding and she got very upset when he joked about it. It's our fault and we have no-one to blame but ourselves. I have managed to get all our finances out on paper and have a plan so we can get rid of the debt we have and start to save as well. Once the weddding is done away with, then it's all living within our means even frugally to get to where we want to be next year :) We are now on the same page and working on this together :) Less stressful too I must add.

I am the saver and my hubby is the spender, the way we get round it is that one of us (me) takes care of all the money that comes into the house and budgets it in order of importance and saving and then whatever is left, which is never much, is split between us as an allowance to spend on whatever we want, and although sometimes this can be hard it works for us. Some people do get themselves in a mess with money though, it is quite scary.

I have been in the financial services industry for 10+ years and have seen this over and over again. I did some research into it and found that it is a huge problem. I live in the US so I can only speak about this country but I would imagine that it is a fairly universal problem. In the US, 50% of divorces state that the reason for divorce is financial troubles. I believe that the percentage is much higher. It is probably somewhere around 75 - 80%. Let me tell you why I say this. The other top two reason sited for divorce is "Lack of communication" and "lack of intimacy". But if you dig down past those words you find that couples are not communicating because all they do is fight about money. So one or the other partner withdraws emotionally. And the reason they are not more intimate is because there is stress over money. One partner blames the other and intimacy is destroyed. It is a huge problem. One that myself and other financial professionals are dedicated to help resolve through free education and seminars.

My husband says he likes to save, but is a spender. Not because he buys stuff all the time, but he likes really nice stuff. So unless I watch the checkbook and say no, I know he will stop at the book store and pick up those 3 books he has been wanting @ $40/piece and not think a thing about it. Now we are getting out of debt and can afford to drop money like that, but I feel like there is other stuff to spend money on. I do save money every time he gets paid and we pay ourselves before the bills and fun money.

I am single too but when I was with my husband, he was the one who spent and over did on things. It was not good. I am actually pretty good with my money. We don't have a lot but I manage to get us what we need.

My husband and I stay on the same page. We are sure to pay our bills every month and make sure that we and our fur babies have enough to eat then we'll worry about the other things that need worrying about. If there's something that needs to be discussed, we'll do just that. We're never on opposite pages or we'd be fighting all the time and that's not a marriage when two are fighting all the time.