This year has been a really rough one and surely seemed to get tougher with one bad thing after the next. One of those “bad things” being the financial complications among people across the country. When we think of the financial strain from this year, we probably immediately think of small mom and pop businesses suffering the most. While it is true how the financial burdens impacted small businesses, we also could see these burdens on a smaller scale or more specifically, for everyday couples.
In the past, couples traditionally might have been bickering about how much to spend on their children’s tuition or where they could afford to go on vacation. Today, it’s more likely they will fight over how much to save for a rainy day or even the best time to move to a new house, especially with covid. According to some Financial advisers, they say they are hearing from more partners who aren’t seeing eye-to-eye about how much to save, invest, and spend especially when it comes to emergency funds.
We seen how chaotic things got with the toilet paper/ hand sanitizer situations earlier in the year when covid was getting more serious. So having money put away is really important and if there is anything we learned from this year it should be that anything can happen at anytime, especially when people start to panic. One way to help relieve some of the friction is to talk about how much activity your job is seeing then splitting the money up that way. This also goes a long way when it comes to buying homes during the pandemic, which was a common milestone most couples had this year.
For example, if a husband sees investment opportunities at his construction job through energy/ banking stocks while his wife is worried her job (as a specialized doctor) is no longer recession-proof he should tell her. Since the husband knows he can potentially make money, this is something he should tell her so they can prepare to save accordingly if the wife was to ever lose her job since many patients have elected to defer care to save money. Communicating finances and talking about potential opportunities and losses is probably the best way to avoid conflict, that way both parties know the expectations and amount to reach their financial goals.