I have a confession to make. My SO and I have not really been doing budget meetings. Long ago, we did a Your Money or Your Life course, and we are both fairly frugal. We switch off each year who pays the bills, to make sure each of us remains engaged and at least kind of knows the login and rough amounts. At this point, we save 30-40% of take-home though I think this could be higher (because it's my year to do bills so it's more front-and-center).
Because of this nagging feeling, I was roaming around on the YNAB site and came across the idea of budget meetings. I had vaguely heard of this before, but this brought it up again. At one point early on, we had made a big goal to have a paid-off house and no other debt, which we achieved in January 2014. Since then, I feel like we've been slacking and it's time to do something to get a little more on track.
So I'm looking for some advice and experiences from Mustachians. Do you do regular budget meetings with your SO? If you do, when and why did you start? How often do you do this? Do you think it's helped you? If you don't, have you tried it and it didn't work? Or considered it but didn't do it for some reason? Do you have joint finances or separate? And finally, how do you track/budget: specialized software/apps like Mint or YNAB, regular old spreadsheets like Excel, or something else?
I'll share our experience. We have shared finances, use YNAB for monthly tracking, and have a google spreadsheet for our yearly view (which also has columns for each month's income, taxes, 401k, checking account balances, etc). Having both a monthly and yearly picture is really helpful for us.
At the end of every month, we have a "budget date" where we:
- Reconcile our yearly spreadsheet with YNAB spending
- Update spreadsheet and verify actual account balances match "spreadsheet"
- Update above steps until they match
- Talk through next month's budget
- Make month-end transfers
- Talk about any questions we might have for each other
- Look at the goals we have on our spreadsheet
When we first started, reconciling was... surprisingly hard. We would frequently have to spend a fair bit of time trying to understand why our checking account was off from what it "should have been." Sometimes it's medical expenses, sometimes we forgot to put transactions, sometimes we get random money we forgot to add, sometimes we have cash somewhere we forgot, etc.
The first few months were maddening - why couldn't two mature, responsible adults figure out how to get numbers to line up? My wife is such a great detail person - she wants to know why if we're "off" by more than a few dollars :) Don't be surprised if you start doing this and you feel like it's really hard.
But after a while and now well over a year, the process is streamlined. It doesn't take very long anymore to do a budget date (maybe an hour? at most?).
I think it helps a lot. Especially because prior to meeting my wife I was WAY more interested in money related things. It is a good place for her to learn about my hobby as well as for us to be on the same team. It helps me feel my wife is onboard with money planning.
It also helps
me significantly because I am a big picture person and my wife is a detail person. She relentlessly wants to understand every aspect of our monthly spending and make it all reconcile - I have always been a lot more flexible on this and "ehhh close enough"ed away lots of saving potential prior to being married.