Husband Likes to Spend and Wife Is the One Cutting Coupons.

My mom gave me some advice when I first got married, I did not take it b/c I didn't need it (not sure I agreed with it, still not sure I do) but I think for you, it might come in handy...so I will pass it along to you:

My mom told me to start saving money on the side, without The Man knowing. Every payday start putting aside (in cash) whatever you think that you can. $20-$100 whatever. That way you will always have an emergency fund...just in case. Maybe this will work for you and give you some piece of mind? In the end, if you don't need it you could always bust out with the huge lump sum and have a wickedly awesome 50th Wedding anniversary present/trip or something? IDK?

My Mom said her Mom gave her this advice too. My Grandmother apparently did this, different generation different mindset, I guess?

If you have talked to him and he still doesn't get it, I am not sure what else you can do? Have you considered separate accounts? What are his thoughts on this? Have you tried each having a set monthly allowance? I do not think it is fair AT ALL that he spends willy-nilly while you are the only one saving and skimping!

~I am gonna be blunt and honest here...sorry in advance if this upsets you: Reading what you wrote about him accusing you of 'wasting money' on the kids straight pisses me off after reading he needs $90 golf shirts and massages?!?! What the Heck!!!??? Your husband sounds like a selfish man...and I am not sure there is any way to get your point across with someone who is THAT selfish. He might never 'get it'!

So...IMHO, if I were you I would be taking my Mom/Grandmother's advice...like ASAP!

Ok, well here is how my house works maybe this can stir up some brainstorms!
We have three bank accts (checking) and one money market savings acct (adding another).
His is the only income as well, he gets weekly pay checks.
Friday posts to the acct. I transfer 100/wk to his acct for his weekly allowance (this is for gas/lunch/fun for the week including weekends anything that he does w/out the family) and 50 to mine (I do not use as much gas so I take less for this reason).
Saturday I pay whatever bills need to be paid, either cut a check/or call in pmt depending on how that company works. I also transfer funds to savings, so long as we put in our min savings req (200/wk) into the acct, and pay all of the weekly bills, date night funds are kept in an envelope in the house and that is part of our household budget 150/month what is left over the FOLLOWING friday is allocated 20/20/30/30% ... 20% to him, 20% to me, 30% stays where it is 30% goes to savings. It's like a weekly bonus!
So Husband's acct should pay for HIS gas, food, golf, golf accessories, drinks after work and any other incidentals that come up. Clothing has a category in the household budget - and each family member has a month that is theirs. Should he choose to buy a new shirt and it's not his month to use the clothing budget it has to come from his allowance.
My acct pays for MY gas, food, make up, pedi/mani, hair cut/dye, etc. I do also use from my budget to buy a random toy for our son should I choose.
Main checking acct pays for groceries, utilities, housing, auto ins, car payments (we currently have two paid off cars :p), clothing budget, animal supplies, cell phones, date night budget. I am sure I missed something like kid's activities and other things that may be specific to your house.
This has worked for us for 6yrs, before we were both working but again things change ... who knows we may both be working again soon! You have to look at what is a logical amt to spend, how much does he spend on gas? How much does one or two rounds of golf cost? How much does eating out for lunch cost? Basicaly, if possible make it where he def has a full gas tank at all times, and can play at least one round of golf a week with two coctails after and a reasonable amt for lunches if he can not "brown bag it." One thing we also do is pick a "big ticket item" that we are shooting for like our 73" TV that we saved up for ... we were both more inclined to take less allowance and brown bag our lunches and came up with the 3000 to buy it faster (we actually only spent 2000 but walked in with 3000 cash - cash helped us get a better deal!) ... We then used the extra 1000 to start our next "big ticket item" ... took 500 and put that towards our general savings and the other 500 towards our "item fund," BONUS! We were so happy with our 'reduced' allowance we never went back to the original amt after buying the TV a year ago. It was 125/75/week.

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Im not quite sure of the age gap here between you and I but this sounds almost to a tee of what my life was about a few years ago. Maturity has a lot to do with it for the most part sometimes. MY husband and I were married at the ripe young age of 20 and 21. His favorite quote "I was always told to pay yourself first". My response was no you take care of your responsability's first then if there is anything extra you save it or do something for yourself. He thought because he worked he was just entitled to spend the money on whatever....golfing has been and will always be such an arguement for us for many reasons. I hate the game and I think its over-priced. Regardless over time this exact type of behavior is where it lead to where we are today-in total and absolute debt and eventually our decisions and behavior put us where we are. I say ours because I am guilty too-maybe not in the same sense of behavior as my husband and after we had the twins I had no choice but to become "thrifty". I don't think there is anything you can do or say at this point to make him understand or relaize but you can try. This is what I did or what happened with us: My husband withdrew $5000.00 of his 401(k). This was so that we could get rid of some major medical bills and some other things. Well things came crashing down because he gave up his management position which cut his check by $115.00 a week. We just couldn't come up with the difference anymore and it was causing arguements between us. He even had the balls to accuse me of spending the $5000.00 on whatever I wanted. I literally pulled him into the office after that comment and showed him penny for penny exactly where it went to and I proved to him that every dime went towards a "bill" or tires for the car and brakes. I also had joined up with mint.com and showed him line by line how much his little debit withdrawls were adding up to. I told him $2.00 here and there ends up adding up. I showed him line by line what he spent and showed him one week he had spent over $100.00 and on what?? Energy drinks, his chew, his going out to eat everyday for lunch. I told him we didn't have the funds for it. I work part-time therefore I never spent money on anything unless it was groceries or gas for my car. He then realized exactly what kind of a situation we were in. His response "well let us just go and file for bankruptsy then". I have always tried to have great credit-and want to keep it that way. IT wasn't the fact we were missing payments....we pay everything on time but we might pay a utility bill half one week then the other half another week. Then I was putting groceries on the credit card to which is maxed out only to pay the minimum payment to open enough room for me to turn back around and put more groceries back onto the dang credit card. He knew things were getting serious and it took me actually showing him EVERYTHING and mint.com helped me to show him what HE was doing ALL on his own. I also picked up Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover book at my local library because we couldn't afford the university's offered. We both sat down and read one chapter a night. I will say this about Dave...he is a very smart guy when it comes to money but everyone's situation is different and some of the things he suggest needs to be tweeked to your particular situation. So I don't agree with everything he says but he has some great pointers and I so wish we had picked up this book when we first got married because we were careless. It's the one thing they don't teach us in school is how to manage your money -my parents didn't teach me either -they tried to tell me certain things but of course as the child I thought I knew better than them ;()) I think if maybe perhaps I had been exposed to Dave Ramsey earlier on we wouldn't be in such a mess. Things are looking up though...we have our $1000.00 emergency fund set up (which we never ever had in the past) we are scheduled to pay off one of our credit cards in hopefully 6 more months if we stick to the plan-which we will because we are now both on the same page whereas before we weren't. All medical bills even the ones that came in AFTER the 401 (k) loan withdrawl has been paid off but I'm sure we will have more to come in as always but we have our emergency fund now to take care of those piddly medical bills. So things are looking up for us but its not going to happen overnite but when you pay something off even something as small as medical bills it is such the best feeling-you feel a little freer and I cannot wait for the day we send that one last check over to our mortgage company and we will be completely DEBT-FREE. If all else fails-cut up his credit cards-lol! If he wants to act like a child then treat him like one-lol!

I think you might need to keep track of where all the money is going for a couple of months. Write down everything you spend and at least list the amounts of money he is spending even if you do not know exactly what he is spending it on. Having the numbers in front of you will make it easier to lay out your thoughts on budgeting, saving,.....
Suze Ormen also has lots of great books about household budgeting and how to get spending under control.
And most important - you do not have to wait until you start working. A marriage is a partnership. You do your part, he does his and everything is shared. Do you restrict his access to the kids since you are the one taking care of them? That makes as much sense as his restricting your access to your family's income.

my husband is a total girl about clothes and shoes. but he doesn't make enough to afford it. the only thing that has worked for me was to assign him certain bills to pay (which eat up the majority of his income) and whatever is left he does what he wants and I ask no questions. We each have our responsibility to the household budget and we can spend or save the differance. It works when theres not much left anyway!

To me, it really sounds like you two would be better having separate accounts. My friend's wife is somewhat of a free hand with the money, and he likes to buy himself expensive "toys." So what they decided was that $X dollars would go into the household account (the majority of the money made each month; both of them work so both contribute; they negotiated what each one pitches in, since one of the makes a lot more than the other and that person contributes more per month).

The rest of the money is divided into their own separate accounts, and they can each spend whatever amount from their personal accounts on whatever they want.

All the money is automatically set up to be split, via automated bank transfer, so there is less temptation on either party's part.

Big ticket items, which neither can afford by his/herself like vacations or a large TV or motorcycle for the guy, they negotiate to contribute towards.

Unfortunately, with your DH's sense of entitlement, and his lack of support for you buying stuff for the family's needs, I think that this is going to be a really hard sell.... And in that case, I would say that unless you KNOW he will freak out if the credit card balance goes up (as a way of "bluffing" him into taking a step back), I wouldn't do it.

You might be able to appeal to his sense of entitlement by spinning it like "Honey, I know you work hard and deserve some of the money you work so hard to earn, to use whatever way you want. But we need to set aside money to make sure we can cover monthly expenses. How about we set aside an account that is yours alone, with a good amount deposited via automated deposit for you to use only?"

The drawback, of course, is if he's a control freak, he may hide money away from you, which could be a scary scenario if the marriage goes south...

If you can, I would really recommend marriage counseling, because frankly, he sounds like he needs it. Again, another hard sell.

My daughter says it sounds like us! LOL!

This is a tough one.

If he is making the kind of money that allows him to do that and you are saving for the future, then you need to modify what you do and spend more and worry less. He golfs. You bargain hunt. You both have your hobbies.

If he is one of those lucky people that makes $250,000+ a year and you have a year's worth of living expenses or more in investments, spend more and worry less.

If you think you husband would respond and curb his spending if you did what your friend said, then try it. If I was you, I would keep track of what he spends and put an equal amount in a bank account or a sock or a jar. Why a sock or a jar or a bank account? Because banks are paying such low interest rates, a jar or sock is roughly competative. Show him the bills are mounting up and that he needs to earn more to pay for his golf and golf toys.

Good luck to you and yours.

I read your post twice but I don't see you mention whether or not you (as a family) can afford all the things he's spending money on? Is he running your family into debt by charging all the golf stuff, massages, etc. or is it a matter of you just don't think he should be spending money on those kinds of things?
I'm a bit of a 50's housewife myself in that my husband earns, invests and otherwise "controls" most of our money but he is a financial professional, that is his job, so I let him do it. But if I want to buy something for myself, the house or kids, he doesn't try to "control" that, and I certainly don't get any grief if I want the occasional pedicure or nice dinner out with the girls.
If he is keeping you on a tight budget while he himself spends lavishly, then no, that is not fair and you need to seek some counseling NOW, it will only get worse.