Savers vs. Spenders - Does There Always Need to be a Fight?

This article is a guest blogger submission written by Dana of Not Made of Money. If you like what you see, why not subscribe to her RSS feed?

The classic money personalities, the saver and the spender, invariably wind up married to each other. My husband is the saver and I am the spender (reformed now). Now my husband is really smart and is great at negotiating. He understands the power of words. Nothing will get me to retreat and become unwilling to discuss financial matters if he approaches me with a “we need to get the budget in line” type of mentality. Instead, he suggests we re-evaluate our spending plan and adjust it accordingly to both maximize saving and spending! Now that I like to hear.

I have learned that saving is important and he has learned that spending can be fun too (when its planned). Here are some things that have worked for this saver and spender…

We agreed early on that we would make mutual decisions and not hide things from one another.

We agreed that sometimes we would disagree and that would be okay.

We learned to give and take. We set up a method for tracking our finances (using Quicken) and that we would pay bills and update our checkbook balance weekly. In the early years of our marriage we would do this together and it would only take an hour or so a week. Now we alternate weekly turns simply due to time constraints.

We worked up a plan that we both agreed we could live with including ATM use, method of paying bills, checkbook balancing, who controlled investment decisions and how they would be made.

Over the years the financial relationship has become stronger to where I am now perfectly comfortable letting him take the lead on the investment decisions. He is just better at it than me but he never makes an investment or a transfer without telling me before he does it, just in case I wanted to have a say. He knows that I trust him completely. From his side, he has learned that I can be trusted with spending, that I will hunt down the best price for items, and that my frugalness and talent for “finding a deal” has saved us lots of money.