Last week, I scheduled an official family budget meeting with my significant other. Hubs does not seem to like all things relating to budgets. However, I find it helps if you have tea and cookies…maybe bake your significant other a special treat to entice them to the budgeting table. ALSO have a comfortable place to sit for both of you in front of a computer. Make it as APPEALING as possible!
The first family budget meeting went “OK”. My main goals were to 1) introduce the YNAB tool, and 2) identify spending priorities for the next 3 months. Although he liked the idea of YNAB, he felt overwhelmed by it and uninvolved in the birth of our YNAB budget (which he 100% was, I did it all myself in my extreme budgeting excitement). When I suggested we could use it together, he said “But I get the impression that you like to control it all”. Which is probably true, however not the right way to go about things. SO, I tried to dispell the myth and we moved on.
A great feature of YNAB is you can have more than one budget. I scheduled another budget meeting this week where we will build a budget in YNAB from scratch so he can hopefully get a better feel for the tool, and not feel overwhelmed. My plan is to have him physically do the work, and I will just sit there to answer questions. Hopefully I can keep my mouth shut 😛 Good luck out there, FIRE chasers!
Good Luck in your next budget meeting!
Thanks Meredith…I’m hoping the clean slate on YNAB will be more appealing to him. Thank goodness for multiple YNAB budgets!