Finding My Home (Part 4)

In Finding My Home (Part 3), I talked about how we both chose to find careers that made us happy before we could commit to home ownership.

Today, I’m going to discuss the third thing we did in order to strengthen that trust and communication.

Part 4. Talk About Bills

Now, I want you to notice that I didn’t say, “we fixed our finances” or “we stopped spending frivolously.” No. I didn’t say those things because we didn’t do those things. We’re still in debt (now more than ever with our mortgage), we still don’t have great spending habits, and we still haven’t prioritized the importance of planning for the future (like long-term 401K contributions or long-term investment plans).

But, learning to openly discuss just our monthly bills has done more to improve the trust in our marriage than anything else we did to improve communication.

Money was one of the most toxic topics between us. Money made him super demanding and me super defensive, and that was a terrible combination. It got so bad that I actively avoided discussing anything relating to our finances, and instead just paid the bills without worrying about silly things like a savings account.

This was a poor approach.

Avoiding the topic meant that the only time we did talk about money was when we were really suffering, which only made us argue about it more and reinforce the negative feelings I now associate with the topic of finances. (I still get nervous when we talk about it.)

But it’s so much better now. Not because we suddenly became financial savants, but because we stopped blaming each other about how we managed our money and instead started talking openly to each other about it.

And it was actually incredibly easy to do because it only took two, simple changes:

1. We both started paying an equal share of the bills.

When we first got married, I took on the responsibility of paying the bills. I trusted myself, I liked to know that they were done, and I was confident that it wouldn’t be a problem because—to me—paying bills was pretty cut and dry with little room for deviation. You have a bill, it has a due date, you pay it before the due date. Simple.

So, I was deeply offended whenever we fought about money because it felt like I was being personally attacked about something he wasn’t interested in being involved in.

I got so angry and bitter. He’d freak out when we were overdrawn and demand to know what happened. When I couldn’t answer right away, he’d get more upset and start looking into when I paid things and why. Then he’d conclude that the problem was with some bill I paid too soon and that I should have waited until such and such a day to pay it.

This mindset made me crazy.

To me, bills were black and white. You had a bill, it had a due date on it, you paid the bill before the due date. End of story.

To him, bills and due dates were fluid. They should be planned, assessed, confirmed, deliberated, paused (if necessary), investigated, and managed.

We were never on the same page about anything and it was exhausting. A few times, when things were going well, I suggested that we split bank accounts, but he didn’t want to. He said that splitting accounts felt too much like giving up on each other. So I let it go and kept on sinking into depression about our lives and the trajectory it was taking.

And I was stressed about it all the time and it was slowly eating me apart, and one day—after years of financial strain—I finally told him that I just couldn’t pay all the bills myself anymore, and that I needed him to start paying the bills in his name—the ones he was responsible for paying—which amounted to about half the bills.

And he said he would.

And he did.

And that helped a TON because I felt like we were on equal ground. I felt like—at least once a month—he had to invest just as much or as little time in our money situation as I was, and that felt fair. It felt even.

I also meant that he had to look at the bank account multiple times a month which means I wasn’t the only one tracking our spending power (or the lack thereof). He had to know how much he could pay based on how much we had. If he waited too long, he had to come to me and ask me what I had paid that month, so that he was covered when he paid his bills.

We had to learn to work together, and we did.

When I was the only person paying the bills, it felt like all the success and failure was on me, and he held no responsibility for our financial outcome. When he started paying half the bills, the onus of our financial situation became a thing we shared and were both responsible for. We stopped blaming and started coordinating. We stopped being enemies and started being partners. And it really built the trust back up in each of us.

2. Once a month, for at least five minutes, we talk about bills.

This next thing didn’t actually happen until after we bought our home (weird, right?) At some point before buying our house, we did eventually sit down and put together a strategy about what it would take for us to buy a home, but I’ll discuss that later. For now, just know that one huge concern I had about buying a home was that, after we started paying our mortgage, things would go back to how they used to be and that I would once again be all alone and miserable as I attempted to manage our bills.

This time, however, instead of going years without discussing it, I brought it up in like the first month of owning our home.

I explained my fears and asked him what we could do to ensure this horrible nightmare of mine didn’t come to fruition.

Though it took him a while to understand why this made me so nervous, he eventually realized that I was very stressed about this and agreed to a plan.

His feelings were that he didn’t want to sink hours of time into a budgeting program where he would be scrutinized each month about how much money he spent on things like fast food (I didn’t want that either).

So, we made the process as non-invasive as possible and listed out all our bills, their amounts, and due dates, on a simple note app we could easily access on our smartphones.

Once a month, we pow wow and discuss what bills we’ll pay before our mortgage and what bills we’ll pay after it. Then, we stick to the payment plan.

We don’t assess each other’s spending habits. We don’t grill each other on how often we eat out. We probably should get to a point where we’re more careful about those things, but—for us—that point is very flimsy and has a high chance of resulting in blame and anger.

So, we just do what we know works best for us and cross our fingers about the rest. Is this sort of like playing financial russian roulette with our retirement? Yes. Do we care? Not right now. Will we care a lot someday? Yes. Is that day today? Nope. We do what we both have the emotional capability to handle and hope that it all works out in the end. It’s a somewhat reckless approach that works just fine for us.

And that’s how it goes sometimes. We learned to pick and choose our battles. And in picking and choosing our battles, we grew closer together. And when things got hard, they were easier to manage together. And that felt really good. And it worked, and things got better. And we learned to communicate. And we learned to trust each other, and we got to a point where we could have discussions about owning a home.

In part five of Finding My Home, I'll talk about how we learned to articulate why we wanted to own our own home, which helped us start the process of actually obtaining one.