What’s with the envelopes?
When Chad and I made the decision to merge our finances, it quickly became clear that our different financial priorities would make it a difficult task. Chad needs to have a lot more fun money than I do, and I need to have a lot more savings than he does. We decided to try putting our monthly alloted money in envelopes each month. A lot of people use the envelope system as a way of making sure they only spend the cash they have on hand; Chad and I have never had the problem of overspending or living above our means. Rather, our use of the envelopes has helped me to ease up on my control issues about what we spend. Each month, our budget gets divided up between the envelopes (this doesn’t include the money we move into our various savings accounts). We have envelopes for: groceries, Target (oh, how we love you), Date Night, Chad’s Allowance, Sarah’s Allowance, and gasoline. We’ve budgeted carefully in terms of how much money goes into each envelope so (for the most part) I feel comfortable with whatever gets purchased because I know we can afford it.
Also critical to the success of our budget is the monthly allowance. This is money that we each get that we can do whatever we want with. I’ve come to realize that when you are trying to save money and be careful with your finances, you also need to be willing to have some no-strings-attached fun money - especially when you are making a budget with someone who likes to spend. Again, it’s an amount of money that I’m comfortable with (though I’ll admit that I’d much prefer our allowances be going into savings), but because it is important to Chad, I’ve really come to embrace it because of how it makes him feel.