Hey OP! Any update on this situation? I'm wondering how things have been going with you and Donald Trump Jr. there.
Hey, mefla,
It's a work in progress! Lol. I have decided to let the overspend go. There are more important things to worry about, especially since he does perfectly well with our joint money. I've decided to start getting him more involved in the financials. When I told him this, he said something like "There's not that much to it, right?" Ha ha. That told me that I really need to do this and get him more involved so he knows what's happening day to day. We've been having weekly meetings, touching on a single aspect of the budget, and a financial goal that we can do to improve our lives each week.
Hey mlejw6 - "work in progress" is a good sign.
If you aren't in a bad hair-on-fire debt scenario, this will work to achieve frugalism while preserving holy matrimony (letting the overspend go). This is the approach I took with my DW.
What I did was rank our monthly spend from largest to smallest, and was surprised when I realized DW's spending wasn't even in the Top 10 Offenders Against Frugality. (OAF! :-) )
I started working on the Top 10 OAF by first working on the things I knew I could change soonest. Cellphones were a good example, by going to Republic Wireless.
Cars (We have two hybrids) and fuel were big offenders. I did a lot of work on that one and got some huge payback.
Mortgage: Principal Abatement (NOT "pre-payment") has been a huge success. I'd like to refi one more time to improve our cash flow position but she gets where I'm going with this and has fully bought into the idea of getting the house paid off as quickly as possible. This was a MUCH more acceptable strategy for her instead of me doing something like investing in real estate.
Savings - I talked DW into using her 401k for pre-tax savings and jacked both of them up to the max. We were only able to do this after reaping big savings from cellphones and cars. When she saw it wasn't a dollar-for-dollar cost to save in the 401k, that was a double-WIN for us!
And lastly, DW had a credit card and she'd incurred interest charges on that - worst case scenario. Rather than forbid her from using it, I acknowledged her own frugal superpower: she was getting insane discounts using that card to buy clothes we could not find at Goodwill. But I set down the rule that she must pay the card immediately whenever she uses it. That would make the money "visible" to me via the checking account, which I look at daily. She agreed to that and we've not paid interest charges in over a year. Plus, she's careful to use it only for something absolutely essential, so she's trimmed back her use of the card a lot.
DW is not mustachian...yet. She has made (and continues to make) great progress. She now comprehends the future problem I'm trying to prevent (losing our home because we can't make payments in retirement) and she now understands it's not just me going fruit loopy crazy.
All these changes took me about 6-12 months to complete. But DW saw my sustained, determined effort and she could tell, very easily, that this was not a loopy fly-by-night idea I'd had that I would soon forget. She saw that I had changed, very significantly, and that this was benefiting us tremendously.
Hell, getting rid of the stress of "unexpected expenses" and being able to handle things that pop up (yearly insurance, medical bills) was VERY worth it to her. She and I are far less stressed and far less bitchy to each other now.
IT IS WORTH IT. DW/DH doesn't HAVE to be strictly mustachian, they just need to improve from where they are today.