Thoughts On Finance

The expression is opposites attract, and this is very much the case when it comes to spending plans in a marriage.  If you are a careful spender than being married to someone who is a spender can be trying and challenging especially in difficult economic times.  Whether your spouse is a person who spends to get a good feeling from it, or they overspend due to carelessness, the results are still the same, leaving you with too much debt and little savings to pay it down with.

If you attempt to solve this problem using the lecture method, then you may just drive your spouse to spend more, thus resulting in more problems.

A more effective strategy to combat this problem is to keep track of household expenses.  Accountability for household expenses may be just enough to show your spouse the areas that need work, without really saying anything.

If this doesn’t work? Then the time has come to get separate bank accounts.  And if your spouse’s spending is causing extreme stress on your household finances, then you may have to consider stronger measures.

Finally, you might consider lightening up a little. Marriage is one of life’s great blessings. If you think the occasional iToy is expensive, wait until you see how much a divorce costs.

Our government is in high panic mode trying to fix the current financial crunch that we are in.  I am just wondering why no one saw this coming.  It only makes sense that we have been pouring out Trillions of dollars on fighting terrorism and the war and we have been doing this for the past 7 years.  It only stands to reason that over time we are slowly but surely going broke.  Honestly, if you look at things however, this really was coming to this point before September 11, 2001.  If you look at the trends in banking and in the economy, you can honestly see that interest on bank accounts took a nose dive around the mid 90’s.  Back in 1989, your interest on an average checking account was 5.14% and an average savings account was 5.5%.  Money markets and CD’s went up to on the average about 8-9% depending of course on the term.  Now you are lucky if you are getting about 1% interest on your savings.  This decline started before all this terrorism stuff came to a head.  Didn’t they see this was happening? Didn’t we? I guess I just think that better financial planning could have gone into this.  It is like our government has bounced a million checks in the past week and they are scrambling to figure out where they are going to get the money from quickly.  I just would like to think that our government had a better handle on their finances than this.  It really just seems to me that they could have planned ahead and seen this coming.  I guess with credit card companies charging exorbitant fees and banks charging equally exorbitant fees and interest rates, it seems to me that they would be doing well, but I guess not, which in essence means that the money that we think we have in the banks is really gone.  I am sure in this financial whirlwind that we are in, if we all went to the banks and tried to get our money out, our government would be in quite a pickle.  In any case, I really think that someone ought to be held accountable as this problem didn’t just happen over night, and it probably won’t be fixed over night either.