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Dustin and Scott's Journey:
will that be cash or card?
We met about four years ago, and have been married for two and a half years now. Our story is pretty typical — boy meets boy, boy asks other boy to the dog park and takes him to Taco Bell afterward. The rest, as they say, is history. Inevitably, we had to talk about money and if/how we wanted to combine our finances. We struggled at first because of our differences in income and past debts, but we found our way. Now, we keep all our money together in a series of joint accounts, but we also like to have our separate, personal spending money. We call this “joyful spending.” We make the big decisions together, but we both have things we like to do and spend money on that the other isn’t as interested in, so if it gives you joy...buy it, but use your own money.
We used to keep track of this on a credit card, and we would “joyfully spend” and then transfer money from personal accounts to the joint account to cover the credit card bill each month. This was a little complicated and we often lost track of just how much joy we were adding to our lives. We had a lot of months where the statement balance on our card was a lot more than we thought it would be. We had to make a change, and to hold ourselves accountable, we switched to using cash, and it’s made a big difference. The same goes for our spending on eating out. We’re both often on-the-go for work, or we don’t plan ahead on what to take for lunch and end up grabbing something during the day. It became way too easy to just put it on the card. We had a budget, but we often blew it. We also made eating out a cash budget item, and it resulted in another huge change.
On the weekend, we take $200 out of our checking account, and we each get $50 for lunch money, and another $50 for joyful spending. Having that cash in hand makes all the difference when you see a twenty or ten dollar bill dwindle. At the end of the week, any lunch money that’s leftover is combined and goes into an envelope for a dinner out on the weekend or a future date night. And joyful spending? That is ours to keep and save, and it adds up fast! It has actually become a bit of game comparing our joyful spending balances. We deposit the extra cash into our accounts, and we can keep track of the balance using Summit’s Climbr®. It’s super easy to use, with the ability to create additional savings accounts online to keep track of our savings goals. We will talk more about this in an upcoming post, but it’s been a great tool so far.
And for the record, right now Scott is ahead, but he’s been eyeing up some new shoes and possibly another tattoo, so we will see if he can stay in the lead!