Are You A Past, Present, Or Future Thinker?

Good news: after six months of job searching, it looks like fiancé has gotten a job offer! “Looks like” because he still has to go through various background checks and bureaucratic hoop-jumping. But as far as we’ve been told, he can expect to start working at the new place at the beginning of May. Trying not to count our chickens before they hatch and all, but uh those sure do look like seven chickens over there, yup.

I say we are trying not to count our chickens but really what I mean is I am trying not to. Literally within ten seconds of fiancé telling me the news, the first thing that jumped into my mind was Oh boy, I should update the financial projection spreadsheets!

Here’s the thing: I’m a very future-oriented thinker. I have often joked (not really a joke) that my discount rate– for stress, satisfaction, whatever it may be– is negative. I feel future joys with as much or greater intensity than present ones. When things are actively falling apart around me, I’m as cool as a cucumber. But if I anticipate things falling apart in the distant future, then I’ll be a mess for days.

Because of this future-orientation, I really like to plan things. It is my coping strategy for anxiety, of which I have a lot. It is also my coping strategy for everything going just fine and my brain just having some spare capacity to throw around. And sometimes I can get a little intense.

I remember one time, when we were going through a financially tumultuous period after buying and remodeling the condo, breaking out for fiancé The Life Spreadsheet. As in, the spreadsheet that summarized our entire lives for the next ten years. Our jobs, our salaries, when we’d have kids, what daycare the kids would go to, when fiancé would become a stay at home parent and the tax implications thereof. We’d talked about most of these things more or less, but he was still understandably intimidated by this gesture. It doesn’t help that fiancé is 100% a present-oriented thinker.  I don’t know what I’m having for lunch today let alone what I want my career to look like in a decade! 

Because you see– and I didn’t come to understand this until much later– when present-thinker fiancé read this grand plan he understood it to mean Here is what YAPFB is ordering you to do for the rest of your life. Whereas I understood it to mean Here is what I think will happen based on our current model, which is flexible but we need a starting point. Oh look we’ll probably do okay, let’s not worry about it too much then.

Taking a step back, his interpretation and therefore his trepidation makes a lot of sense. But it definitely took him pointing out his perspective for my deep-in-the-Excel brain to even process that one could feel intimidated and even constrained by the concept of a plan. This has resulted in many a long, heartfelt, sometimes heated conversation that involves a lot of listening and empathy and maybe also some Let’s maybe not show fiancé my annual meal planning spreadsheet.

I need to tweak it anyway.

Are you a past, present, or future-thinker? Is your partner the same? How do your orientations commingle?

 

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Combining Finances Part One: Creating A Joint Budget

Fiancé and I are in the process of joining our finances. For the sake of my own record-keeping and for the benefit of others maybe going through the same thing, I plan to walk through the steps we are taking to meld our financial lives together.

As a reminder, we’ve decided to structure our accounts in a his-hers-ours fashion:

To begin the process of bringing our accounts together, I wanted us to start at the very beginning with the most basic building block of a financial plan.

Yes, that’s right: the dreaded budget.

Steps to create a joint budget

1. Draft list of current recurring expenses to personal credit cards and bank accounts.
2. Identify which expenses will be considered “joint.”
3. Outline a basic budget for the household.
4. Agree on rules for joint non-recurring spending and to add new line items to combined budget.
5. Check individual credit scores.

Joint versus individual expenses

The first thing we did was lay out all our common expenses and determine whether they would be considered “joint” or “individual.” We agreed that joint expenses would cover those things that are considered “needs” and that are used by us both or pivotal for our general welfare. That means covering the house, the car, health care, groceries, utilities, and basic household and personal care items.

Everything that’s not considered a “need” will be covered by our individual slush funds, which will each get $600/month. This money will not be monitored in our joint Mint account. It’s our own private money that we can do with as we please.

Items that will come out of individual expenses include:

• Shopping
• Entertainment (other than Netflix)
• Takeout/Restaurants
• Fancy gym memberships
• Fancy hair cuts, massages
• Fun individual travel, conferences
• Excessive amounts of eggs
• Pokemon
• Gold-plated waffle iron

The last three items were added by Fiancé. He’s a silly biscuit.

Our household budget

I didn’t realize how much we were spending as a couple until we drafted this combined budget. It was eye-opening and not in a good way.

I’m not going to itemize all our line items, but the below summary by category will give you a good picture of our projected spending. Similar to my monthly updates, this budget does not include mortgage payments or charitable contributions, which are pegged at 10% of our net income.

Right now our joint spending is way higher than I’d like it to be. There are a few clear areas of improvement:

• Once fiancé finds a job that covers his expensive recurring medical costs (which are not being covered by his plan now), we’ll be able to reduce the “Health” category by $400-500.
• Due to a car accident a couple years ago and his new vehicle, fiancé’s car insurance payments are $285 per month, nearly half our monthly transportation budget. I wager we can shop around and knock off $100.
• I’ll also be working to combine our cell phone plans and hopefully cut costs by $25.

If we manage to make progress on these three items, we’ll be able to cut our joint non-mortgage spending down to $2250 per month (the number I’m going to focus on for “Barista FI”). That plus $600 each into our individual spending accounts means we’re expecting a monthly non-mortgage outlay of $3450/month or $41,400/year. Which… isn’t great. But it’s a start. Sigh.

Rules for joint spending

Establishing rules for joint spending will help us make sure we’re not silently inflating our expenses and that we feel comfortable with the level of mutual oversight of our joint money.

We’ve decided that we will:

• Check in with each other when adding new recurring line items, no matter the amount.
• Check in with each other for one-off purchases other than regular household maintenance items. 

We plan to set most of our recurring expenses on AutoPay and reconcile our budget quarterly-ish. But still there will be a couple dozen times a month we’ll make joint purchases manually. Since it’d be a hassle to text every time we buy anything jointly, the following items won’t require checking in:

• Auto: Gas, tickets, registration
• Consumable household items — paper towels, toilet paper, etc.
• Consumable personal care — shampoo, soap, lotion, etc.
• Groceries
• Healthcare expenses: minor

This list probably covers 95% of our manual joint spending. For everything else, we’ll give each other notice and have a brief discussion if needed.

Credit scores

Since the next step to combine our finances involves opening checking accounts and credit cards together, I thought we should make it a habit to check in on our joint credit. Luckily for me, in spite of all my churning, I’m still in the high-700s. Fiancé’s score is nearly identical, so we’re in a pretty good spot credit-wise.

Do you and your partner(s) have joint finances? How do you handle individual versus joint spending accounts?

Get Married For The Insurance?

Little known quirk about the ACA: you can only sign up for the exchange in the calendar month after your health plan terminates. For instance, if you quit your job January 1st and your employer ends your insurance the same day, you won’t be eligible to sign up for an ACA plan until February 1st (and, no, you cannot backdate). Bonus: If you try to sign up for COBRA to cover the gap, that will invalidate your qualifying event. Which means you’re either stuck with your employer’s $900+/month unsubsidized insurance plan through COBRA or have a gap in insurance for up to 30 days.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful for health exchange. Without it, it would be very difficult to get Fiancé health insurance at all due to his preexisting conditions. But this seems like a big policy oversight.

For now, our plan is to let him have a coverage gap and pay his recurring medical expenses in the gap out-of-pocket (which will be expensive, but less so than COBRA). If any emergency comes up, we can enroll him in COBRA which, unlike the ACA plan, can be backdated to his last day of work.

When I brought the issue up with my friend, she suggested to me, jokingly, “Well, you guys could just get married earlier so he can be on your work insurance!”

Which, no. But also maybe yes?

Fiancé and I have been together almost five years, living with each other around three. It’s not like getting married a few months earlier would make much of a difference to our relationship. It’d save us money, not just in health insurance premiums, but also in taxes. People get married all the time for administrative reasons: for health insurance, green cards, lower taxes, etc. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad an idea?

At the same time, there are some due diligence items I want us to go through as a couple before we get married. Getting a pre-nup in order, for one. Discussing how we’d set up our estate if one of dies, for another. Plus, all the little things from the thousand and two listicles about “What you should ask before you marry your partner?” You know, just in case we’ve missed anything. I’d rather not rush through those steps. Plus, my out-of-state family would probably be a bit dismayed if we got married and they weren’t present, even if there ends up being a wedding later.

After seeing his new health premiums, though, it sure is tempting…

Have you ever made a big relationship decision for financial reasons?