If you're not a "moderation" person, stop trying to be moderate. Some of us are happier with a mellow, predictable course, while others of us are happier with more dramatic swings.
So, I this might be one of the issues I'm having. I'm very much a "routine" kind of person, and I like to put day to day stuff on autopilot so it requires less brain energy to manage. For example, I've had oatmeal with frozen fruit and peanut butter just about every morning for the last ~14 years or so. Sometimes I get wild and switch up what frozen fruit I use, but the basic meal is the same. Its filling, tastes good and I don't have to think about it at all, I just do it. My wife is NOT this way though. She thinks my breakfast habit is insane and never has the same thing for more than a day or two in a row. She sees variety as the spice of life and my career in manufacturing has conditioned me to view this as "process variation".
Perhaps this is illustrative of our general lifestyle--my wife likes to plan big things, vacations, meals, parties, etc, while I tend to think that planning stuff like that is exhausting. And while I don't hate going to the actual party, vacation, or eating a special meal is unenjoyable, I rarely think it would be worth the effort if I were to be the one doing the planning. Its something I love about my wife, she takes me out of my comfort zone on this kind of thing and if I didn't have her around, I probably would be in a rut. I know I definitely was when we met--I was doing the same workouts, eating the same food and going to the same bar every Friday and Saturday because doing anything else was WAY too much work.
I've always realized that she was a planner, but I've never really framed it out the way you did @Laura33, that she's just NOT a moderation person and this might be something that we have to work on accommodating.
EDIT: Just thought about something, maybe I'm not a moderation person either...just an EXTREME ROUTINE-er! Gah.
Also: you are in a fairly new world with a young child. Littles tend to wreak havoc with both your finances and your lifestyle -- they require significant amounts of both time and money, but they don't arrive with a checking account, nor does their presence add any more hours to the day. So if you were already fully budgeted and busy with your lives before the kiddo came, that means you're going to have to take that time and money from somewhere else -- which means you're going to feel strapped a lot more.
FWIW, we have a 3 year old too in addition to the 9 month old so we're not THAT new to parenting. Kids (well, at least our kids) ARE moderation people though, so I wonder if they're feeling stressed when we try to mix it up to have a good time with them.
My wife went to 3x a week when our first was born, and stays home with the kids 2x a week. I know she feels bored to tears on the days when she's home with the kids, I wonder if the mindless shopping is a symptom of trying to be "productive" after "not getting anything done all day". I put those in quotes because keeping children alive and entertained IS doing something, even if the house is a wreck when I get home.
Anyways, it kinda sounds like we need to figure out a way to have an annual "fun budget" for my wife that we can draw down throughout the year. I'm not sure what we'll do if it gets depleted early, but I guess we'll figure that out when we get there.
We used to have a flat monthly budget. Not only did it make life difficult when life happened, but it also put unnecessary stress on Mrs G and I to 'comply' with the budget in those naturally high-spending months. Shorter fuses, more stress and more disagreements.
We now have the same annual budget, but month to month it varies depending on what we expect the ebbs and flows of life to be. For us, it's December and May that are the 'big' months. The difference is quite stark. For example, we budget to spend 85% more in December than we do in November (our lowest budget month). Importantly, we haven't increased our overall budget - we've just redistributed it across the year. Mrs G and I appreciated when we did it that it would make tracking our finances easier. I don't think we appreciated the other benefits it would have. The reduction in stress levels, how aligned we are on spending behaviours and our overall improvement in temperament is huge.
What's your actual methodology for this? Do you have a seperate bank account or something that you use to accomplish this?
Doubly so when you max out things like Roth IRAs in the first month or two and can free up that extra cash flow the rest of the months.
We have work 401k matches so this is a little tricky. Maybe I need to flex some engineering excel muscles and figure out the exact amount we can frontload before we lose our matches later in the year.
Also, not totally unrelated--I used to race bicycles in college and my early 20s, base training was my absolute favorite part of the year, I think I enjoyed it more than the actual racing. Calm 5 hour rides with my teammates both days on the weekend, coffee stop in the middle, a giant meal and beer at the end, it was so good.
First, sounds like you've got a lot of insight into how you work and how your wife works, so you've got a lot to build on. That's a great start.
Second, I was struck by your characterization of your extreme-routine-ness. That right there is something to build on, yes? I mean, if that's your superpower, then figure out how to best deploy it to address your current problems. For example: if you adore having the same breakfast every day, why not do the same thing with lunch? Figure out the thing you want to eat, buy it every weekend, and then pack up 5 days' worth every Sunday so it's just grab-n-go. ITA that some routines can be very very helpful because they allow you to put that part of your life on autopilot, which leaves you more brain cells free to manage all the rest of the shit. So if you lean into that and figure out where else you can simplify your life that way, that can also help with the stress levels, because you've simply got more headspace to focus on everything else.
That extreme-routine-ness may also be part of why October tends to be particularly difficult. I know when my own routines get messed up, I feel somewhat out of sorts -- it's almost like I rely on those routines to keep myself in line, and when life interferes with those routines, all bets are off, because if you actually make me
think about whether I want oatmeal or pumpkin praline french toast and bacon for breakfast, I'm choosing the bad-for-me option every time (or using up some of my limited willpower by consciously turning that down, which then leaves me more susceptible to the next splurgey option). I don't have a solution for that (just ask my post-Covid waistline), but it might be helpful to at least pay attention to how you routines actually benefit you, and how your feelings and behavior change during times when you get pulled away from them for one way or another. Maybe one thing you can do is find other routines that you can implement even when you're out of your normal schedule; if you're traveling, you can't make your own oatmeal, but if you have a habit of going for a walk or meditating or whatever every afternoon, you can still do that. Again, I'm not exactly the poster child for success here, but it's something to mull over. I mean, if you have a superpower, why not use it as much as you can, right?*
Re: kids: sure, you're not new to parenting. But you're relatively new to parenting two vs. 1. And you're still new to parenting these specific kids and figuring out how to adjust your life to their needs (e.g., their need for routines -- we had one of those, too, so again, I know exactly what you're talking about). And if your wife is not a "routine" person, then this phase might be particularly difficult for her -- and that difficulty is exacerbated because she is the one home with the kids two days a week. So a little patience and kindness with yourselves is very much warranted as you crawl your way through figuring everything out.
Re: your wife's spending: I very much suspect you're on to something with linking it to the boredom of being at home with the kids. Maybe you can't fix that right away (BTDT, so I know how the daycare carousel goes), but you can develop a plan to work toward something better -- and sometimes, just knowing you are executing a plan to change things can make the present more tolerable. There are very specific, discrete steps you'd need to take, in series, to change this -- you laid them out above. So start on the first one: get on a list for 4- or 5-day daycare, or look around for other options with openings, or even look for an au pair or mother's helper who can cover those two days (or even one to start). Once you have more kid care coverage, then your wife can start to focus on what she wants to do with that extra time and what her options are. Maybe there's a path at her current job, maybe it requires a job change, maybe she wants to change careers, or maybe she just uses the extra time for a side hustle or personal projects she's interested in. The point is that if she's spending from boredom and unhappiness, the money is just the symptom. You don't want your wife to spend the next several years bored and unhappy, so talk to her and take what steps you can now to work toward something that suits her better.
On how to execute a lumpy budget: we just opened a money market account for those expenses. We figured out how much we wanted to save each year for vacations, car repair/replacement, and that kind of thing, divided that by 12, and then did a separate automatic deposit every month to that account. Then when we spent that money, we just wrote a check from that account. In the modern world, where we have miraculous things like online banking, you can have one CC that you use only for those kinds of expenses, and you can tie that CC to the money market fund so the bills are automatically paid from the "right" account without you having to use any of your remaining brain cells making sure that happens.
*At least if it's a useful superpower like yours. My superpower is apparently drunk navigation across unfamiliar cities (walking, not driving!). Good superpower to have in a pinch, not one I especially want to practice particularly often.
