Having “The Talk” with a Current or Potential Mate
My wife actually invented this post and I think it’s a great concept to write about.
You see, Mrs. Money Mustache* is an indispensable part of our shared empire of frugality. Believe it or not, she was generally just as excited as I was about making an extra payment on the mortgage. Or buying and selling stuff on Craigslist whenever possible instead of resorting to retail. And she’ll tend to cough just as loudly as I will when she hears about someone borrowing money to buy a new car, or driving somewhere that could easily biked comes up.
“Where can I find such a dream mate, for myself” you ask? You may already have one – read on!
When we were just a young couple, we carried along the financial habits from our earlier lives. I was pretty much the way I am now, but young Miss M. was more of a normal person. When we moved to Colorado and she landed a good job, she celebrated the new lifestyle by acquiring a taste for stylish outdoor active clothing. And a latte and snack each workday at the coffee shop near work. And the odd book from Amazon.com when interesting titles came along. Even I got into the spirit of things, celebrating a job upgrade of my own with a gleaming new motorcycle in 2001. We felt separate financially – each of us felt we were doing well, but we didn’t really have any joint goals.
The problem was, those packages from Athleta and Amazon kept coming, even when she already had every season covered with sharp gear options. So did the books. The lattes and snacks weren’t going anywhere since you need one each day. And the $10,000 motorcycle soon depreciated to $5000 even though it only had a few thousand miles on it.
So one day we had the Talk. It was a talk about our future, how we both seemed so busy with work, yet we hoped to have children in a few years. I was already into the idea of living off of investments someday, so I threw out the idea of retiring early.. as in BEFORE starting a family. Was it possible? Some simple math showed that it definitely was (see the later post called “The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement“ for some of the numbers).
Then we dug out the last year worth of credit card statements. This woman has a thing for spreadsheets, so every category of expenses was totaled in various ways. What we learned is something that probably applies to most people: we were spending way more than expected on seemingly very small things. Like $700 per year on fancy coffee, and over a grand on clothing despite the fact that our closets were already full when we started. Books were several hundred per year too.
But it’s hard to give up fun and reading is great – the key was that we noticed ways to get the same enjoyment with drastically less spending. We could get the same books from the LIBRARY. We probably didn’t actually need more clothing, especially if we would be quitting the jobs soon. We still liked restaurants, but maybe they could be a special occasion rather than a daily habit.
Now here’s the golden nugget of this post: At that moment, a switch flipped in my future wife’s mind and she was suddenly very excited about becoming a Mrs. Money Mustache herself. “Who wouldn’t give up a few books and clothes and lattes if it meant getting to work less while you have kids!?“, she asked.
The second neat cash catalyst was showing her how to set up her own investment accounts on Vanguard.com. I had already been stashing money away in my account there for a year or two, but once she had her own and was able to start transferring in paychecks, everything took off. I started getting nightly reports of the deposits and stock performance, and we’d compare our “net worth” summaries on the website.
Ever since the magic switch, our agreement on family finances has been golden. There are no arguments over money if you both share the same philosophy and goals. And now as parents of a young child, things are much less stressful when there are no worries over budget or lack of available time to spend with him.
It’s also nice to have such a complicated common interest. We can talk for hours about future plans, how to be able to afford them by being even more frugal or shuffling money this way or that, and about how incredibly bright things are looking in general. It would probably sound pretty mundane and self-congratulatory to an outsider, but it beats arguing about who didn’t do the dishes.
So if you want to move quickly with your own wealth plans, you’ll need buy-in from your own little Mister or Missus.
If you’re single, you also have lots going for you too – low expenses, free time to put in overtime for extra earnings if you enjoy your job, and the potential to go to Hardcore Black Belt frugality modes that married people could only dream of, like keeping the furnace off until December or having back-to-back Buy-Nothing months.
But unless you remain single forever, you too might want to prepare for The Talk eventually, and think about how any potential mates would respond if you do whip out the big Money Mustache on them at some point in the relationship.
*(it is a sign of ultimate respect that she earns this title).
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Mr. Money Mustache is a family man living in the United States who retired from work, relatively wealthy, at about age 30. After several years of retirement, he noticed that his still-working peers were envious of his lifestyle. They were making more money than he ever had, yet they were somehow still broke. So he decided to write this blog to educate the world on how it is done.
I enjoyed reading this article. My problem(being the Mrs. and the Chief Financial Officer of this family) is consistency. I will be very frugal for awhile and then lose my momentum. My dh and I have finally decided to hold a weekly couples’ night at a certain time to discuss finances so we can both be on the same page.
I am curious about your statement “children”. You only have one after retirement. Did you chose to only have one child? We have five so there is a higher expense now but I tell my children that I am a five time millionaire because children have made our lives richer on many levels.
Yup, just one kid here at MMM Headquarters.. and all of Mom, Dad, and Boy wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m glad you are enjoying your bigger family as well!
If we had wanted more kids, we would have planned out the money side of it in advance, since they do cost a certain amount to raise. For me, it would have meant working an extra year.. for some people, having more kids will add decades to their working years. It’s all good if people are happy with their choices. But sometimes, when people end up working two overtime careers just to afford a huge number of children, I am amazed at how different our choices can be. But, hooray for freedom nonetheless.
You mention Vanguard quite a bit. Excuse me if I’ve missed this somewhere else on your blog, but can you explain why you use that particular service vs. others, why that type of investment, etc? Do you work for them? :)
Regarding this particular post, my husband and I are generally very much on the same page. I am by turns excited and proud of our frugality and frustrated that so much sacrifice and responsibility don’t leave us with more spending money. So many expenses *seem* unavoidable.
Perhaps you have a post for the people who have already canceled cable, share a car, buy used, and want to stretch their dollar further without giving up ALL of the little luxuries in life like the occasional night out?
Thanks! Love the blog!
by the time our daughter was born my wife and I had been married 10 years. We both worked and enjoyed our jobs.
When we decided Jane’d be a stay at home mom it was tough on her. She felt that not working she wasn’t “pulling her weight.’ we talked about this a long time. finally it was this that helped her get fully comfortable with the idea:
What could we possibly buy with the money she’d ear working that had more value than her being a full time mom to Jessica?
Nothing.
Underrated post.
To the MMM fam- the posting is over a year old as I write this- so I guess I am late reading it now… but better late than never! My wife and I are on the path you present in this posting- she is farther along than my crotchity mindset and holding on to old habits… but they are slowly coming ’round… Thanks for the frankness and the open forum! I may be “LATE” to the party that is the MMM life- being older (40) and a bit more blue-collared than your stereotypical poster or yourself (hourly wage-slave and service industry fellow) but I am working on the independance- thanks for the community!
How do you beat the fancy coffee habit? I wouldn’t even call good coffee my weakness because I love it so freaking much. I’d love to cut the cost though. I almost never buy coffee out (besides being ridiculously expensive it’s almost never as good as at home), but I still probably spend a couple or three hundred a year on beans.
You’re optimizing the value you get by making the good stuff at home-there’s a world of difference between an $8 bag of good beans, and a $4 latte. As a fellow coffee lover, I say don’t worry about it :) Enjoy the indulgence and look for another expense to squash.