SevenBridgesRoad wrote: Fri Jan 31, 2025 2:58 pm
warner25 wrote: Fri Jan 31, 2025 12:12 pm
I don't disagree with your sentiments (as I think I've expressed throughout this thread), but I'd like to know if you have a better solution to the problem.
To my eye, the problem (even setting aside the "hit by a bus" problem) is that it's hard for spouses to work as a team if they're not on same page of a shared plan. It has long been my observation of this community, for example, that too many people (unilaterally handling the finances in their marriage) don't consider their spouse's risk tolerance, and that mistake could suddenly become clear at the worst possible time; e.g. finding out that your spouse is much less tolerant of stock market risk precisely when the market has crashed and it's all over their social media feed.
I don't think the suggestion to simply tell your spouse that "we have enough" solves anything. You at least need a shared understanding of what that means: enough for what?
How can spouses work as a team, you ask? I can speak to what has worked very well for us, coming up on 50 years of marriage. Over our years together we've had ongoing conversations about all important things, especially about goals and milestones and things that require money. Early marriage we talked a lot about how to make it through the month on our meager income. When to have our first child. When we could afford grad school. How much to spend on a house. When to have a second child. Later it was about moving across country for a career opportunity. Should we buy a vacation home? If so, how to pay for it? These days we talk about helping our aging parents, about how we can contribute to our grandkids' future education. So it goes.
Also important: there's always a division of labor within a marriage. We talked about this early on. Probably most couples begin to differentiate based on personality, likes and dislikes, and sometimes we just agreed to divide up the gross jobs (I got cleaning the toilet somehow! Still my job to this day).
So even though I'm our finance person in our marriage, I often go to her with a question or say, "Here's something I need your input on." We've had many discussions over the years about how we each think about risk. We've reached agreements/compromises on all important things.
None of this requires me to impose an EOY power point on her. If there are concerns we talk about stuff as needed in real time.
Just to be sure I wasn't some space alien on this, I did a quick Google search on the topic of couples getting on the same page with finances. Not one hit said, "Create a really detailed EOY Financial Report that your spouse says they don't want to hear".
(There may be typos...I jotted this down pretty fast.)
Let's start with anyone "imposing" or "forcing" a lengthy review of content the other spouse has zero interest in, well that isn't going to work well...
Similar to you, and I guess many, we've divided up duties in our relationship. I have finances... We do talk though all the big items, and make big decisions together, so I think there we are on the same page... (For what it's worth, I make all the important decisions in our relationship, my spouse's job is to tell me which ones are important...

)
Our end-of-year document is
primarily for me, keeping track of changes, status, progress, etc. But it has a
secondary purpose to ensue my spouse has an
up-to-date printed copy of pertinent information (which is part of my previously recommended Big Book of Everything).
It's also used to help us "talk through the big items". How did we do against budget this month, year? How are we tracking towards savings goals such as retirement, college savings, etc.? Any adjustments needed?
Of the 20+ pages in my document, 1 we actually look at monthly (overall summary), and historically 1 more (changes to annual budget) we look at annually. This year I added 1 more (VPW worksheet), as I want them to get comfortable with that to help manage withdrawals/spending when we transition into retirement so they don't end up being lost if I die first... The rest
are available to my spouse, to review, ask questions,
ignore, etc. as they see fit. No way would I force them to sit down and review all that content... But at the same time, I feel obligated that they have a right to know where our assets are at, amoung other info... Transparency works for us.