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Discussing your finances

Since I just happen to be the world’s bet communicator and financial guru package all thrown into one ( don’t worry, I am definitely joking), I think we should spend some time talking about discussing finances with your significant other.  This just happens to be one of the big things that couples do fight about and if you don’t work on your communicating and discussion skills, you just might make things  alot harder than they should be.

Now I’m not saying that you won’t have a hard time talking about finances with your other half, but even difficult conversations can be successful.  Let’s go over just a few of the basic points that will help you in talking to your significant other.

  1. Make clear what you want to talk about.  If you don’t put the main point of your conversation up in the first minute or two, then you’ve lost direction of what your wanting to achieve.
  2. Stay on topic.  If something else gets brought up, just write it down or make a note of it and go back to the original topic.
  3. Make sure that you and your other half say what your goals are for that topic (we’ll use saving for an emergency fund for this example).  Once you both have what you want out on the table you can start to meld your two sets of goals together.  You probably won’t meld things perfectly, but as long as each person knows that their thoughts and feelings are heard and considered, it will be much easier to reach common goals.
  4. Wrap up the conversation with a definite outcome.  Kind of like writing your conclusion to a paper, you want to make sure at the end of your conversation that you say what your goals are and what y’all have agreed to.  This closure to the conversation will make things much easier.

This is a basic conversation outline and will work for you when talking about your money.  If you need to write points out ahead of time or whatever helps you to have a focused discussion, then do it.

DO NOT start being negative and critical of each other.  This is really hard not to do when one of you is the spender and the other is the saver.  Yes your different and both of you will have to make some changes, but stick to the goals you have set together and it will be much easier to achieve when your both running in the same direction.

Consistency seems to be the most important thing for training my dogs.  In the same manner, consistency in your finances will help you to have much more peace of mind.  When one or both of you seem to stray from your goals, bring the goals back up and make sure that you both still agree on what your saving for.  Slip ups will happen, but you have to jump back on the horse and keep making progress.

You can achieve all sorts of great things with enough teamwork and dedication.  Working on good communication skills

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September 2nd, 2010 | Tags: , | Category: Financial Strength, Personal Development

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