... introducint YNAB. There are few budgeting apps out there; two that come to mind are YNAB and MINT. My financial education was and is rudimentary. My parents did not teach us money they way Kiyosaki does in his "Rich Dad Poor Dad" book, rather - we either had money, or we didn't and had to borrow it, and if you wanted more - you just go work more.
However, this post is not about my journey to financial literacy, but rather my relationship with one aspect of it - budgeting. Sounds sexy, right! But hear me out.
Up until graduating dental school, I rarely even had money. Sure I had odd jobs here and there, nothing that at the time paid more then $3k/mo, nor I even held in my hands more then $10k at any given time in my life. I did not own anything worth more then $10k and my net worth was maybe in the $5k range if I sold all the bootleg CDs and my couch... 🙂 So going into graduation and seeing the pot of gold at the end - honestly, made me a bit cautious. I did not want to become victim of lifestyle creep and become slave of money, so I decided to start learning how to budget properly.
YNAB came with handful of useful tutorials, which I recommend to anyone starting new, and there I was off to the races. Not going to bore you with the nitty gritty details about it, but let's see what hapenned next.
One day I was with my future wife and she asks me : " what do you think a good gift would be to your future wife " - a strange way of girls testing if potential husband is going to spend money on them, I guess... My answer : " well, it depends... ", her : " on what ? ", me : "on the amount of money we have in our gift budget " :o) So that started a conversation at how I manage my money and how I see our soon to be family managing the money going forward. Estranged at first, she came to it and fast forward to today we now each have a personal spend budget, gift budget, vacation budget, etc... Every dollar from every paycheck has a "job".
So we rarely now have conversations about spending money on things we can't afford - we just pull out the app and try to find together where the money is going to come from?
- So you are saying you want to go to France this summer?
- Yes.
- So shall we go to Chipotle for our date nights for few months or stay at hostels to have enough money to afford it?
or
- So your cousin needs that overpriced vase for her housewarming?
- Yes.
- Is that at the cost of our massage this month or we both chip in from our personal spend.
The conversations about money are so much easier then I hear my married friends describing it. Everything is transparent, goals are clear, we know where we stand with our personal finances at every point of time.
AND to top it all off, what do they say are three causes of all relationship problems? Communication, sex, and money. Don't quote me on that.
... later my dental assassins.
C-Bug, DDS
