Since we got married this year my wife and I have struggled merging our finances together. As you may notice from my net worth statements its really just my finances and not my wife’s as well. One of my goals this month is to hopefully start changing this.

We’ve talked about finances and our financial goals, however we do have some different financial ideologies that has until this point made it easier to keep our money separate. She is not as aggressive a saver as I am, likes to spend more freely, and has more debt. She also is not as far along in her career as I am - though she actually makes more money she went back to school for 3 years to get her masters just graduating this past year racking up some decent loan debt along the way while I have been working continuously since 2002.

Right now we’ve just been each pitching in 1/2 of the shared monthly household bills, then each responsible for our own bills from whatever is left over. We realize this is not the best way to continue long term so have to sit down and make a change.

Where To Start

For far I’ve put together a spreadsheet with our basic financial information broken down into a few categories. This should give us a good idea of where we are currently financially.

• Housing Expenses - This includes our mortgage, taxes, homeowners insurance, and utility bills in full amount owed, APR (if applicable), as well as monthly payment amount. I also included our estimated monthly grocery bill here.
• Monthly Bills - These include our student loans, furniture loan, auto insurance with amount owed, APR (if applicable), and monthly payment amount.
• Credit Cards - This includes any credit cards we have with balance, APR, and minimum monthly payment as well as when any promo periods may expire.
• Banking - This includes any bank accounts we have as well as current balances and APY (if applicable).
• Investments - This includes any brokerage accounts with non-retirement stock / mutual fund holdings.
• Retirement - This includes any retirement accounts we have such as 401ks, ROTHs, IRAs, etc.

Reviewing Assets

From there we should be able to come up with a plan of attack for any current accounts. Any credit cards with a balance and an APR higher than the savings rate, any loans with higher interest rates, consolidating accounts to make our finances easier.

I’m not a big fan of strict budgets, but hopefully from this information we can come up with a loose budget to follow.

Long and Short Term Goals

Once that is straightened out we can start figuring out our short term and long term financial goals. This includes home improvements (I would like to put a shed in, my wife wants to add some hardwood floors to the house, etc), big ticket purchases (cars, vacations, etc.) and savings (retirement, emergency, and regular).

From there we will at least have a starting place, and something to revisit every so often to make sure we are making progress towards these goals.