by Maggie Lee

Created on: February 28, 2010

You may be deeply in love with your wife, but her spending habits do make you worried a lot. You wonder if there are some ways possibly to improve or change her spending habits without hurting your marriage. If you are concerning this, you may get some amazing ideas from the following tips:

   

Tip 1 - Spend some time analysing her spending habits and frequency.

Before you bring your wife into your discussion about how to improve her spending habits, you’d better do some preparation work. You may take two whole months to collect the bills paid by her credit cards or debit cards and figure out how she has spent those amounts on the bills.

After collecting all the necessary information, you should take time to analyze these data and you may figure out some unnecessary payment among these bills. For example, your wife may use the ATM machines too frequently to take out small amounts of money and each time he has to pay extra processing fee to the bank. In this case, you can think about asking your wife to do her withdrawal less often but within a reasonable bigger amount each time instead of paying a lot of extra fees to the bank.

  

Tip 2 - Find a compromise solution.

After analyzing the spending data of your spouse, you can list out the unnecessary spending that she has done and explain to her that it’s important to get her contribution into the family saving as to build a healthy family finances. Tell her that you can’t finish all the work by yourself and you do need her help and support.

If your wife thinks some of spending might look unnecessary in your eyes, but quite necessary for her, you should listen to her explanation and try to figure out a way to save part of this spending, even if your wife can’t avoid this spending completely. For example, if your wife feel it’s very important for her to bring some new items into her wardrobe every month, you might ask her to reduce the frequency of purchasing or reduce the number of pieces. In this way, your wife may feel thankful to your effort to understand her needs and she will be more willing to offer her part of contributions to build a healthy family saving.  

   

Tip 3 - Act as an example for your wife.

When two people live together, their personal habits can influence each other day by day unconsciously. When you do something to save money, you should show that in front of your wife and tell her clearly that she may consider trying the same way to reduce her spending.

Your wife may not be interested in learning from your good spending habits at the beginning. However, after some months, you can do a calculation and tell your wife how much you have saved for the family thanks to your good spending habits. Sooner or later, your wife will start to try your spending habits.

    

Tip 4 - Share your goals with your spouse.

You may choose a romantic and relaxing moment to make your spouse sit down and share your family goals with her. For example, you two may plan to make some children and get your small family bigger; you want to plan a meaningful family trip this summer; you may want to save money for purchasing a new house for your family. You should tell your wife what are your goals and tell her frankly that you need her help to save money together to achieve these family goals. If your wife agrees with you, she will feel happy to change her spending habits to achieve the meaningful family goals with you.

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