This is officially the most excited I’ve ever been for a new financial challenge!
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the complexity of our finances. It was partly intentional; I set up a bunch of small budgeting, banking and investing accounts so that I could be knowledgeable about financial software applications/websites that my clients may be using or could use for their finances.
But I might have gone a bit overboard because we now have over 30 financial accounts (between credit cards used for points, savings accounts, investing accounts on different platforms, bank accounts and aggregating apps).
Oops! 30+ accounts! My bad…
A couple years ago I put together a spreadsheet with all the accounts listed as well as a key and the passwords written in code (for example *=the number of times I have broken my right foot and @=the number of times I have broken my left foot, etc…). Considering I’m not great at password naming conventions or updating the spreadsheet, deciphering the keys I’ve coded for him would require a great feat. If I ever got hit by a Tesla cybertruck, (knock on wood) it would be incredibly difficult for Joe to both find and access all of the accounts. And that’s not good.
So I initially thought, “Maybe Joe can update our Net Worth Tracker one month so he can go through my lists, access each account and get a better understanding of where everything is”.
Then when I wrote the How to Get Your Spouse on Board with Budgeting post, I realized that if we fully swapped roles there would be tons of other benefits as well. Thus the 2020 Husband Finance Takeover was born!
My Current Role:
- Detail work. I do the detail work of categorizing expenses in Mint in preparation for our weekly household budget meetings.
- The creator of spreadsheets. Created and update a full set of financial reports for our personal finances (income and expenses, budget, cash flow, net worth etc..).
- Long term planning (for both Financial Independence and traditional retirement)
- The optimizer of our savings (always looking for better ways to grow our savings/invest better)
Joe’s Current Role:
- Weekly grocery shopping I used to do all our shopping but Joe took over this task in 2019 and we have both enjoyed this change.
- The comparison shopper. He is the king of reading online reviews and comparison shopping, he is way more thorough about this than I am.
- Tax man. Joe is the compiler of our tax documentation every year
- Champion of spending. Joe helps me feel less stressed out about spending money that we budgeted to spend.
Benefits of Swapping Roles:
- Joe can get familiar with the logistics of accessing our accounts
- Once he goes through the details we can work together to decide which to accounts to eliminate and can clean up our systems/trackers/spreadsheets.
- Create a shared system for password management- Since Joe is a software engineer he knows quite a bit about software and security. We are going to clean up passwords and sign up for a password manager.
- A nice way to switch things up and get reprieve from regular tasks and have a new challenge.
- It is giving me a new perspective on goal setting for our household finances.
What will remain the same?
There are a few tasks that we share responsibility for and a few things that don’t really make sense to change so some things will remain the same like:
- Decision making – We will both always be involved in decision making.
- Weekly Household Meetings – We both enjoy the weekly household meeting and believe it is beneficial so we will continue that routine.
- Keeping spending at $40,000 per year – We are both very satisfied with this level of spending so we plan to keep this the same except to break it down to a quarterly goal of $10,000.
- No Spend day tracking – Participating in “no spend” challenges helps us keep our spending in check. We will actually start a 4 week no spend challenge tomorrow, which if we can complete it, would be a new record for us!
- Joe will continue to do the weekly grocery shopping. I have some issues with food insecurity from when I was growing up so I tend to buy more food than we need which leads to a lot of food waste. Since he is just straight up better at shopping, he will keep that responsibility.
What will be different?
- Quarterly Goal Setting instead of Annual Goal Setting – Joe dislikes longer term goal setting because it is more difficult accurately predict circumstances the farther into the future you go. So we agreed to try out quarterly goals this year. Our Q1 goal summary is listed below.
- I’ll be the new “Yes” man in town. It pains me to say it but I’m regularly the “No” man of the relationship. Now mostly it is me saying “No” to myself about spending but I have on occasion asked Joe to wait on purchases or find cheaper alternatives. I have mentally prepared to say “Yes” to what Joe proposes as long as we can still hit the $10,000 spending goal for Q1. Joe brought up the idea to do monthly massages and it felt good to say “Heck Yes!”.
- Add an “Order food in” night. In addition to our current rule of “one restaurant trip together per month”, we will now have an “order food in” night. We hadn’t realized at the start of 2019 that the one restaurant rule would mean that we had to choose between ordering food in and going out. Our going out trips are usually fun date night nights and when we order in, it’s usually pizza and usually out of convenience. One of each per month seems reasonable.
- Joe will re-calculate one of my long term financial projections to see if we come up with the same numbers. I wanted to give him flexibility here, he might calculate our “Financial Independence Number”, our time to FI, amount needed for traditional retirement, taxes in retirement etc.. It would be good to get my math checked and to see if he comes up with any other information that I may have overlooked.
Q1 Financial Goals Summary:
- Husband Finance Takeover/Role Swap
- Account audit (of our 30+ freaking financial accounts!)
- Online security audit/Password Manager setup
- Clean up our financial trackers/spreadsheets
- Keep spending at $10,000 and save the rest
- Have 50 “No Spend” days
- Monthly couples massages
- One dine out and one dine in per month
- Continue to meet each Sunday for our “weekly household meeting”
- Validate/review one of our longer term calculations
- Generate side hustle income of $4000 (my personal goal, carried forward from 2019)
For discussion:
Do you prefer annual goal setting?
Have you tried quarterly goal setting? If so, did you like it?