While our exchange students bid us farewell yesterday, this week, much of my east coast fam is visiting to celebrate a cousin’s wedding in Napa. It’s a nice season to get married. In fact, Yinh and I celebrated 16 years on October 2nd 🙂
I mentioned my wife’s pet project about money matters. As you can imagine, how couples deal with money, joint accounts, budgets is one of the main themes.
I’ll share a little about our approach to finance in no particular order.
Do we have a prenup?
Nope.
We both started with nothing but college debt. Neither of us is in line for a meaningful inheritance and in fact both provide financial support to at least some of our parents. We met on the day I turned 25 and she is a few years younger. We didn’t have an imbalance in career prospects like me being a trader and her being a teacher. We both had real upside. I say that as a backdrop for why we wouldn’t even have considered a prenup. We felt like we were in similar situations. But this left-brain explanation is secondary to just — being against the idea. Classic YMMV situation.
Do we have separate accounts?
No. There is literally no concept of mine vs hers. That even goes for spending. I ordered a $300 guitar pedal yesterday and told her because I feel compelled to tell her anytime I spend say more than $100 on something that is only for me. Her reaction every time I do that is, “If I told you every time I spent a few hundred bucks on something for myself, you’d be upset”.
Which brings me to…
Do we have a budget?
Wellllll…it’s more like guidelines.
7 or 8 years ago I did an exercise…I reviewed all our spending for a year. Yinh called it The Audit. I wanted to understand what it cost to wake up in the morning the way we were living. We looked at where we were spending to decide if it was in line with our priorities both in the consumption sense (was X dollars on travel acceptable) and in terms of our savings rate (or what I think of as giving our future selves a say in our current spending).
The value of the exercise was mostly understanding where our money was going so that in the future we can know if and how much creep we were allowing. The knowledge was useful because it was a chance to “sign off” on how things were going. We deemed the pressure it put on us acceptable with regard to our wider financial picture, prospects, and ambitions.
The exercise also had an unanticipated benefit. It stopped me from caring about any single transaction. If you don’t do the exercise it’s hard to put the splurge in context of how much it moves your annual nut. If Yinh’s self-care expenditures dwarf the cash that I spend on myself, but we’re already ok with the composition of our overall spending then why should I care? We’re on track.
It’s changed my entire neurosis about money. I quote Walter all the time: “I’m shomer shabbos…I don’t handle money”. As long as I feel like my spending habits are in line to what they’ve been, I don’t think about day-to-day money. Yinh is the one who looks at bank balances and credit cards regularly (part of this is admittedly good hygiene — catching errors etc, but part of it is to satisfy her money neuroses).
I only review everything during tax prep season. This gives me the chance to see if my “feeling that my spending habits” are constant is well-calibrated. Instead of giving money daily mindshare I give it a dedicated time for review.
Who manages our investment portfolio?
I handle the general portfolio allocation. I track the running portfolio vol and correlations for public/liquid investments. About 2 weeks after each quarter end, I update the marks on any private funds, and record all bank balances. It serves as a quarterly net worth check-in.
[For angel investments, I don’t update marks unless there’s a downward revision. Marks are at cost. Never up.]
“Taking the pulse” every quarter is more of a Yinh-requirement than mine. I’d be fine with every 6-months and very likely just every tax season. However, I think you can spot red flags in private funds if you look quarterly, so it’s easy to agree with her without feeling like I’m just patronizing her neurosis.
Investment ideas can come from either of us. I just manage the asset allocation around whatever we add/subtract.
For investments that represent less 1% of assets we don’t really need to discuss them, but we usually do anyway. We’re both curious about investing generally which is probably not going to be the case if 1 or zero partners is in finance.
Who is more spendy?
For ordinary matters, Yinh by far. With my family coming this week she wanted to rent a mechanical bull and tequila donkey or something for a backyard party. I’m the circuit breaker. I put the kabash on that. Instead, she bought Tornado foosball table off FB marketplace. Facepalm.
She’s definitely the minister of fun on regular life. The Japanese exchange program was even her idea.
My wiring is too ascetic. On an intellectual level, I think that wiring is faulty, so I appreciate that she’s this way. I push back, we land somewhere in the middle, both finding an acceptable mix of responsibility and joy.
When it comes to big-ticket items, I’m the spendier one. I was way more comfortable with budget for our new house. I pushed for a larger budget for the wedding. We are already going over budget on the ADU design and Yinh is the one imposing discipline.
I don’t have any convincing hypothesis for the difference in our biases.
(For mine, I’d guess there’s some sense that spending big on non-recurring items feels like less of a lifestyle-creep risk than frequent, smaller splurges. I’m not even convinced by that logic though.)
Microcosm of marriage
Differences abound. If your relationship is worth it, you make them manageable. Disagreeing on that fact is the only difference that cannot be managed.
Seeing your partnership from the facet of money is a reminder that you didn’t marry yourself. And that, my friends, is worth celebrating.
16 years from this day…
I get this…
That’s me and my 9-year-old playing on a stage together for the first time.
There’s no mystery about what I’m supposed to do in life. Resolve to deserve what I have. I’ll never be ever to get there, but that’s the type of goal that keeps me alive.