What I do / use to solve some frustrations of a financially uninterested wife

Man, this is tough. My wife and I love each other without a doubt. However, we are very much the opposite when it comes to our attitudes towards finances. I’m very organized. My email inbox is always clean and old emails always archived. I have a system to help me remember my passwords for my different accounts and never forget these kinds of things. Lastly, I check and update the finances everyday. However she, on the other end of things, just lets spam sit in her inbox. She doesn’t check the finances at all except when we sync up on our quarterly reviews. She can’t remember a password that she doesn’t use everyday.

It was super frustrating to me when we started to make some real money because she doesn’t have any interest in keeping up with financial knowledge or our financial health. She has only ever known what it meant to live paycheck-to-paycheck and to have someone tell her what to do with her money (She was very sheltered by her parents and when she left the nest, I started to provide for her). The worry of something happening to me and her not knowing what to do financially was a real concern because we have two kids to provide for. For example, I ran this scenario and asked her “If I got hit by a bus? Do you know where our money is?” and she missed our ROTH-IRAs (worth about $50,000). I was so angry because I have two kids and she’s missing $50,000 without even knowing about it. Also, I remind her where all the money is at regularly, but it wasn’t enough her to care to remember. This remains true to this day, however, things are not nearly as bad as they used to be because of some of the tricks I put here.

But hey, I said “I do”, I have two kids with her, and I’ll love her until the day I die, flaws and all. She does the same, there is no way in hell I’m perfect and I realize that I’m DAMN LUCKY to have her. As a result of this, I needed to find a way to solve these issues and these have all been pretty amazing.

I will probably continue to update this as life happens, however, I just wanted to tell you guys some of the tricks I do now to help her understand and navigate the finances and to ease my frustration and worry if something dreadful were to happen to me.

1) Wife is uninterested in lower level finances so I Started a Finance Diary

Dear Journal, please save this entry for my wife in the future just in case something happens. I’M A 90s KID AND I LOVED DOUG MAN!!!!

To be honest, this blog has been a god send for my sanity when I’m trying to explain my financial goals to my wife and what we need to do to achieve them. I’m really good with math and can figure out if numbers make sense in terms of expenses and income rather quickly, fill in the blanks where I need to, etc. (It’s a hobby). Dave Ramsey keeps famously saying that “it only takes 6th grade math” to be able handle finances. However, my wife is the opposite when it comes to math. As a result, talking to her about our finances while hypothetical numbers are flying around is really a challenge.

Then I realized something, I was just going too fast for her. It was a point of self-reflection that it might not be her, but me. It’s not that she doesn’t WANT to understand these things, it’s just that I am impatient because I believe that this should be something that should be done quickly and learned easily. But it wasn’t her weakness in her math skills, it was my weakness as a teacher that was frustrating me. IT WAS OUR PROBLEM, BUT AS THE HUSBAND THAT SHE’S DEPENDING ON. IT’S ON ME TO FIND THE SOLUTION. I PUT MYSELF IN TEACHER SHOES AND FOUND THIS SAYING THAT TRIGGERED ME TO FIND A SOMETHING THAT WORKS: “IF YOU CAN’T TEACH IT SIMPLY, THEN YOU STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT.” (AKA TEACH THE “KISS” PRINCIPLE VERSION)

I took a step back and found that the solution to this would be to make it possible for her to find out what my thoughts on our finances are (even if I wasn't around), wasn’t just a budget, but a financial diary. You see that “Our Current Status” navigation button on the top of this page. That section is for her. The “FI/RE” section where I use us an examples, that’s for her to understand financial concepts. I write all of this to help her understand my train of thought and she’s free to read it whenever she feels like it (and I also write to try to help others LOL). For example, she read the blog post I put up, “How to calculate a general amount to achieve FI/RE status?“, and she looked at me and said that she loved learning it this way and that it was much better because she can always come back to it and digest it at her own pace. (Plus if she has questions, I can just update the blog to make it easier to consume haha)

It helps me because it covers the financial worry that if my death bed happens to come early, which was a major stressor of my life because I work really hard and I just want my family to be taken care of in the future even if I wasn’t around, at the very least I’ll know I did the best I could. Trust me, if you handle most of the finances in your household and you worry about things like this, this is a great way to relieve that pressure off of you. Please give it a try and give it to your better half and see how they respond.

Now since I can’t add where the financial accounts are held here and how much we have in them. I actually store all that information into my budget worksheet and she knows where that is. I also put in instructions of financial things that she needs to accomplish once a quarter / yearly, so that she knows where all the money is kept and how our overall financial health is going. (AKA update beneficiaries, update our real estate sheets, etc.). I go through the list with her so that she can familiarize herself with the different sites and accounts. She wants to know these things, but doesn’t care to know more than the minimum. There are also instructions for her if something happened to me, to make the finances as simple as possible for her and I make sure she understands them because they basically never change. So other than 4 times a year, she never even looks at the budget (LOL), but I’m ok with it for the most part because I wrote everything down for her.

2) I ALWAYS Engage My Better Half in Financial Decisions

I track the budget everyday. I start the bigger decisions in the finances to sell things and move big chunks of money around. However, I ALWAYS check with my wife on things like selling a condo or if we ever hit our limit on the fun budget, but I want the new console that came out (like in November 2020, that PS5 looks real good, been holding off of FF7 remake and Kingdom Hearts 3 until the PS5 comes out… and I’m DYING TO PLAY!!!!! I love my lore). Just because she doesn’t track the budget as carefully as I do, doesn’t mean that I have full say of how OUR money is spent. I always let her know about how the money is moving (if it’s not trivial like extra snacks from the market) because she has her own ideas of risk assessment (SUPER CONSERVATIVE) on investments and her own wants and needs too. For example, it’s very important to her that we help her parents out every month a little bit. We discussed what would be a fair amount before I felt like they needed to show me where this money was going and now my wife is happy and I’m good with it. It’s good to bounce the ideas off of each other so that both can check all of the boxes on their list because then we made a decision on money that we might lose or gain from together. “TOGETHER” being the key word here.

Lots of times my conversations go like this though because she knows I’m focused on retiring early, Her - “Are you sure we can afford it?” Me - “YES!!! we’ll just put a little less in the retirement account this month.” Her - “Fine, just remember you’re holding yourself back for this decision.” HAHA plus it’s like she’s gifting me something I want with OUR money which is also a plus. (LOL It’s the little things and how you view them)

3) PASSWORDS! ENOUGH SAID!

DUDE, this was a HUGE frustrating point for me when we were first married. My wife is probably one of the sweetest women you’ll ever meet in your life (it’s how she deals with a hard <***> like me), but she is very forgetful. Sometimes this helps us. For example, we can rewatch some of our favorite TV shows / movies with her and she’ll have the first time experience of some of the important scenes EVERY TIME if 6 months have passed since the last time we saw it.

I like to keep things organized to the point where I have redundant copies of important documentation (like a marriage certificate) in different external hard drives. So this problem came before we even started keeping a budget together (I always had one, she didn’t). I would give her copies because she would ask for them and I would obviously password protect the drives themselves with a password she made up. Six months later, when I need to update the files, she wouldn’t remember how to get into her own drive. It was frustrating, that she wanted the copies, but she didn’t take the time to remember the passwords.

Finally, we came up with a system that she could remember. (It’s tied to psychical objects she can decode). I spent 300 bucks to get this system running (totally worth it to have a system stick) and she can remember the passwords. But, there were only so many different combinations of the passwords I could make before the system got crazy and she would probably get overwhelmed. I needed more than 10 passwords every three months because I’m paranoid and I change all my financial passwords once a business quarter. Also, to be honest and if you can believe it, she’s even MORE PARANOID than I am about this stuff because she doesn’t understand the tech behind passwords.

I was pulling my hair out, then my buddies asked if I ever heard of a password manager and this solved this problem like a charm. The one we chose to use was 1Password. This has been amazing, we can now share our passwords together and I won’t have to remind her about how we changed them every few months. We just need to change our master password, so it becomes much easier for her. I can change the passwords to our accounts however many times I want and my wife will always have the updated password automatically has long as I keep the vaults organized, which is my speciality. I won’t go into how 1Password works, but I would say that I love it and it does it’s job to well.

So I would recommend you guys getting a password manager if you having trouble remember each others passwords. I know that it’s like 60 - 70 bucks a year for the family plan, but in all honesty, it’s well worth it to avoid the arguments and to keep you guys sane. (ESPECIALLY IF YOU OCD ABOUT YOUR FINANCES LIKE ME). The benefits FAR outweigh the price.

Real life story, I recently texted my wife that I was hungry and I wanted something to eat. She was at her parents house at the time and was just going to pick something up on the way home. However, rather than spending money she signed onto my Door Dash account using our password manager and ordered something to pick up on the way home. This saved us money because my company gives me gift cards to Door Dash once in a while and she just used the balance there because we hardly use it. It was great!!!

- M