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- For Love & Money is a biweekly column from Insider answering your relationship and money questions.
- This week, a reader handles her family's shopping, and her husband thinks she's wasting money.
- Our columnist suggests having him make some shopping trips and see how far the money really goes.
Dear For Love & Money,
I'm a stay-at-home mom, which means I do most of our family's day-to-day spending — groceries, school activities, birthday gifts, and new clothes for our four kids. My monthly spending has recently increased, and I've tried everything I can to get it back down to our pre-COVID budget. I've tried coupons, buying second-hand, shopping sales, even giving up meat a few nights a week.
I've saved our family money, but my husband doesn't seem to understand how hard our budget is being hit by inflation. Instead, we're fighting almost every week over the grocery bill. Last week, he accused me of being reckless with his money. I'm so hurt that he's making this a me-against-him fight instead of giving me the benefit of the doubt. How do we get on the same page about our expenses?
Sincerely,
Deflated by Inflation
Dear Deflated,
Many of us are struggling to wrap our heads around the everyday realities of inflation, and your situation underlines what I believe is the biggest reason for this. That's our cultural attitude toward spending and saving.
The personal finance narrative in the US is simple: Spending is bad, and saving is good. And I get it. No one is comfortable with an empty bank account, and it's hard to get off the hamster wheel of consumerism. That said, the guilt inherent in this mindset makes inflation difficult to truly believe.
We all have to spend money to survive. But when spending is always "bad", we tend to be hard on ourselves for doing it, especially when we have less money in our bank accounts than we think we should.
Of course, we tell ourselves that the exception to "spending is bad" are necessities like groceries and utility bills. But when inflation enters the chat, just like you, Deflated, we trim down our budgets to accommodate it, and our savings still don't look how we'd like. And so, we tend to blame the old enemy, "spending," without recognizing that the very nature of the concept has changed.
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Think of it like this. Every week, you spend $300 on groceries and $200 on eating out. You know you should cook at home more often and save that $200, but for one reason or another, you keep going out and spending that money at restaurants anyway. Then suddenly, life gets really expensive, and you find yourself spending $500 on groceries and $300 on eating out.
That's way more than you are comfortable spending, so you stop eating out full stop. Except groceries now cost you the same amount you were spending back when you indulged yourself with takeout regularly, so you're still spending about $200 more than you feel is responsible. And now your grocery spending feels irresponsible, even though groceries are a necessary expense.
Things get even more complicated when one person does all the day-to-day spending in a relationship, because now there is a person behind this vague idea of being spendy. Your husband is too far removed from the current cost of living. Even though you've stopped all frivolous spending, in his mind, if the grocery charge is too high, it's not evidence of inflation. It's, as always, your spending.
I explain all of this to say that many of us need to give ourselves and our partners a break and recognize that things cost significantly more than they did three years ago. And sure, maybe it's just a dollar an item, but those dollars add up.
To get your husband there, encourage him to become more familiar with the reality of inflation. Have him do the grocery shopping for a few weeks. I don't know who does most of the cooking, but if it's you, I suggest he take that over for a while to see exactly how far those groceries go.
Who knows? Maybe he will turn out to be way better at stretching pennies than you are, and you can learn strategies from him. Or, more likely, he will experience these new high prices and become less accusatory and more collaborative.
Speaking of accusatory, let's talk about that statement "his money." I have written about the work of being a stay-at-home mom before, but it seems to be a recurring theme in marriages where one person manages the household, and the other earns the money.
When you're sharing a life with someone, it often makes sense that one person would manage the day-to-day aspects of that life while the other person finances it. But if my time writing this column (and being a SAHM myself during some seasons) has taught me anything, it's this: This setup is emotionally fraught for the very same reasons.
Humans tend to be literal, so when a check is made out to one person, it is difficult to recognize that another person's work also went into earning that check. And when the other person's title is "stay-at-home," it's easy to imagine them doing just and only that.
This is why a cognitive-behavioral therapist once told me SAHMs in situations like yours who are told they aren't entitled to a share of the primary breadwinner's paycheck should write up an invoice for their labor and start drawing a salary. Because that's what it comes down to. If that's only "his money," then you're working for your husband for free, which, as we all know, is about as unethical as it gets.
Have your husband spend a month handling the spending for a while, and if he continues to be rude about "his money," maybe go on strike altogether. Empathy is the short route to understanding, and it sounds like your husband may need a nudge in that direction.
Rooting for you,
For Love & Money