I’m sorry for your struggles and it’s painful for me to read this. It’s difficult for the wife to wrap her mind around the savings mentality because of the way our brains are wired. Our thinking is a relic of a past life when we had to find food, shelter and warmth on a daily basis. There wasn’t any need to plan a year out when you just needed to know where you next meal was coming from.

Along those same lines, retirement is a new phenomenon. 100 years ago, you toiled at the factory 6 or 7 days a week and then died when you were 50. Do not pass Go. Do not go to Florida. Go directly to the dirt farm.

I knew someone in a similar situation who said this to his wife: He told her that by saving, she was buying something; her time. You don’t have to spend money on physical stuff. Time is more important than anything else. Ask any 80 year-old!

And if that doesn’t work, bring her over! She can see how happy we are having freed ourselves from corporate life!

Now older, wiser and married to the right person, we’re pretty good about fiscal transparency and recognize each other’s strengths and weaknesses in those areas. We’re both savers, though she’s smarter than I am with her finances, even if I spend more time fixating on budgets. (And we smartly keep a joint account that gets “paid” first out of our respective paychecks so that our personal spending/saving habits never get in the way.)

I could very easily hide our money from PiC. And in practice it probably seems like I do. Ask him on any given day where his paycheck went, I don’t think he could give more than a rough outline of pointing to me. He knows that I’m saving and investing and researching more investing and that if we have more than a certain amount in cash, it’s getting invested. He trusts me implicitly even when I say out of the blue that I’m buying investment property and he hasn’t a clue what I’m talking about. As an example. :)

Oooh ooh ooh where you going?

Amen, sister.

Also, don’t have kids :)

I’m with you on this… Even when I’m 90 years old, I’ll still never use the phrase “I’m retired”. I’m a person, not a race horse. :)

Retire really is just a word made up by the corporations anyway to make people feel that it is worth it to work 40+ hours a week for 40 years in a soul sucking cubicle. haha. So, instead, I prefer to say something like “I left the corporate world; exited the rat race; jumped off the corporate ladder; etc…”

As far as marriage and finances, you know my story of my previous marriage. But what I’ve discovered as a minimalist is that there are very few things beyond food, water, shelter that need to be purchased to make me happy. I think ultimately with my first husband, it wasn’t so much the finances, but all the stuff… all the toys… all the hassles… all the maintenance. I just like to live incredibly simply and that just happens to have a side effect of super cheap living. :)

It felt amazing!!! I was shocked. I actually said, “is that really all it took?”

Oh damn… glad it’s all better now and he doesn’t have to touch that checkbooks still ;)

*tips hat*