Negotiating our Joint Budgets

James & I have spent lots of time discussing financial matters, but we had never actually sat down and done a joint budget. Yesterday we spent some time during our Saturday morning money chat session and hammered out a joint budget.

We did this in a way that is similar the manner we did our joint networth. For each exercise we worked in three tabs of an excel spreadsheet. This means that we each have our own individual page to track better and maintain our autonomy, as well as having a joint budget/networth to look at the big picture.

Aside from the factor of getting married in just over a month, our finances have already become more intertwined with our return to grad school. James started towards his Ph.D. back in the fall and Miel began her Masters in the winter. Managing this within our budget has been compounded by James making the wise choice to resign from his day job and pursue grad school full time. While this has been a great choice for his academic career and our overall sanity levels, it has obviously factored in to our finances.

So, here’s how we budgeted; a simple exercise, but it brought up some important issues.

1) We plugged in all the obvious bills that are recurring.

2) We factored in expenses that come about time to time (clothes, shoes, medical, etc.)

3) We debated about the importance of various areas of the budget.

Number three was where all the fun and debate came into play. While James might see it has matter of self-control to limit movie consumption to $100 a month (including going out and rentals), Miel was quick to remind James that if she spent $100 shopping on clothes or going to the spa, this would be viewed as frivolous by James. This illustrates the different values that we both place on discretionary spending. We believe jointly that for the overall well being of our relationship, it is best to express autonomy in allowing freedom in discretionary spending, but to practice self-control as well.

To give you a better idea, here is what our budgets look like:

Our Joint Budget:

Miel’s Budget:

James’s Budget:

Happy Blogging!

-Miel