I’ll get right to it!
My (38m) wife (46f) and I both work and try to parent 2 kids, while living in LA. Life is expensive and despite my best efforts to understand and control our finances, as well as TRY to save for retirement, we never seem to get ahead.
Money out is pretty close to or slightly higher than money in every month. I’ve been budgeting, trying to see where to cut costs, and reduce our spending. Meanwhile we have 2 credit cards that each have about 4k balances. We are still paying off her car and her student loan, and we have a mortgage. A while back I set up an emergency fund and we have 60k in that. I don’t factor that money in to anything; as far as I’m concerned it is untouchable and off limits.
I’m having a hard time getting my wife to acknowledge what I see as a pretty shitty situation. She took a job that she loves, which is great, but she makes like 1/4 what she used to, and is unwilling to make many changes to her lifestyle. Obviously that’s a part of the problem. We essentially can’t afford anything other than day to day living, which is only getting more expensive as the kids get older). Any major purchases, or a vacation or anything would put us further in debt. When I bring this up, it’s always “it’s not that bad” or “other people are way worse” or “well we can just use some of the emergency fund”.
To me, those are not solutions. I feel a little crazy because I’m so worried and stressed out about money and she just isn’t at all. I think I am actually just discovering that she’s completely financially ignorant. So was I before I started trying to figure this all out.
We aren’t on the same page and it’s very difficult to do this on my own.
Am I overreacting and too stressed about this or is she not stressed enough about it? How can I make her understand that the graph trends downward every month just a little bit? A lot of it is the refusal to change lifestyle, I know. I’m trying to make changes without taking away stuff the family loves, but as an example, we spent over 20k on groceries last year because she wants them from Whole Foods and they need to be delivered. Writing this out, it seems obvious what most of our problems are, I just can’t get her to take me seriously and I’m starting to resent her attitude about it. I don’t want to die penniless. Assuming I’m gonna fix the budgeting, which I am, any advice for getting her to open her eyes?
Tl;dr how do I get my wife on the same page as me with finances?