How do I encourage DH to change his spending habits?

[Countyourchickens]

I need your help wise MN's. DH and I have a 20 year history of being crap with money. I finally decided to add up all our debts and am to see we are in £20k worth of debt. On a brighter note we have a very good household income and lots of equity in our house so onwards and upwards. I have sorted our joint account so we are on the best deals and cancelled any direct debits that were not needed etc. I am also a recent convert to YNAB (You Need a budget software) and now religiously log every penny spent.

However DH is not on side. He is happy for me to take responsibility for the joint account and use YNAB but has no interest in doing it. These are my main issues and I need constructive help on tackling them.

1. The way we organize our money is the first issue. Both paid into personal accounts - we then pay a proportion of our pay into the joint account where all household bills come from; food, mortgage etc. Then we keep a proportion of our salary for paying travel to work, lunches at work and general spending. The trouble is DH earns more than me and has more disposable such as meals out as a family or when we go out with our own friends I think all money should be in one account or at the very least any family spending money (we eat out as a family quite a bit) should be in the joint account so the only money in our account is purely for ourselves (I can see the sense to having some money where I am not accountable to DH and vice versa- after 20 years of working like this I would find it hard to justify every pair of shoes I buy etc).

1. Our disposable income is not equal (his is double mine). He gladly gives me money or pays more than halves when we go out together as a family but I hate the feeling of having to ask or not being able to pay halves on a bill when we are out. I have told him how I feel and his reply is that as he earns more than me (5 times as much but I work PT so therefore also do alot of the childcare which would otherwise cost money- this was partly his decision as he claims he cannot possibly help with the children in anyway with regards to going to school etc - a whole different thread) he feels he rightly should have more personal money . Yes I think he is a twonk for this.

1. He does not keep any sort of eye on his expenditure. He is constantly overdrawn and although he stays within his overdraft limit he doesn't budget in anyway.

1. He takes no responsibility for the joint account - I use YNAB and log every penny but he is oblivious.

All constructive advice welcome - no cocklodger or LTB please . I am aware he is being a knob on some points but I need advice on how to change his attitude to money as a whole.

DH and I have wildly different salaries. We both get paid into our own accounts and then transfer an amount into a joint acct every month to pay bills etc as you say above. However, we don't both pay in the same amount - the amount we are both LEFT with is the same i.e. we both get the same amount of spending money each month. I have no say over what DH spends his on, as he has no say on what I spend mine on. Everything important is paid for by the joint acct and the spending money is for books/CDs/clothes etc.

Ask him to keep a diary for two weeks. From that you can probably workout what his money's going on. Then unturned how much he could save in a year/decade etc

Just thinking about this again, you say that your DH feels he should have more money because he earns more.

Our attitude has always been that we each put equal amounts of effort into running our family - whether that is by going out and working full time for larger sums or working PT for less but doing a lot more of the (unpaid) housework/general stuff that keeps the family going. As we are a team, it doesn't make any sense to for one of us to have more money that the other, particularly not if the one earning less has to scrimp and save/go without.

I am quite cross on your behalf and DH would have no truck at all with your DH's attitude. Your DH needs to come and join the rest of us in the 21st century.

A good friend turned around her DH attitude to saving and budgeting by getting competitive. Boasting about how she could beat his saving targets, and setting joint spreadsheets ( he is a sucker for a spreadsheet)

He went from being pretty crap with money to a hardcore superscrimper.

OP your dh attitude to sharing disposable income is pretty rubbish. What would happen if he got ill or made redundant, would he expect you to keep all your disposable income and leave him struggling? Feed him bread and beans because he isn't earning? It happened to us. I went from being secondary earner to sole provider. Good job I'm not a selfish arse, because I could claim all the Money as mine I guess.

Oh and if you are saving, quit with the eating out. Do the fakeaway thing, or go out and take a picnic. Cost of eating out soon adds up.

I earn 5x what DH earns. All of our money is in a joint account & neither of us ever questions what the other spends. DH manages all the money and occasionally tells me to spend a bit less but that's it. We have a shared understanding of how much the family can spend each month, including discretionary spending, and we don't police each other. It's a partnership, it's our money not my money.

Also, DH does most of the childcare during the week, but I do most bedtimes and nights and also a lot of the weekend childcare (DD is still bf, I'm back at work full time). As for the money, we do this because it's a partnership.

He's being a twat. Sorry, but he is. You don't need strategies to get him to equalise the spending, you need to call him on the underlying principle - it's not HIS money, he has a family and if he didn't want to share all of his money (and do childcare) he shouldn't have had babies.

How unfair that his disposable income is double yours. I am a SAHM, I manage the household money using a spreadsheet, like you, I log what we spend everyday and compare it using internet banking, I know exactly how much I am going to spend every month and how much I can save.

I'm afraid that after 20 years it will probably be impossible to change the way things are with regards to his spending habits.
Perhaps you should tackle it from the debt point of view, i.e.: this is how much we owe, this is how much we need to save every month to repay within x number of months, so you need to provide xxx more towards it.
Would that work?

I'm afraid the only way you stand a chance of changing someone's attitude to anything is to present consequences of not changing that are serious enough to be a motivation. Right now he has no motivation and there are no consequences to carrying on the same way. He feels reasonably secure in his selfish/lackadaisical behaviour pattern and - I'm making an assumption - he doesn't take anything you say on the subject very seriously. Fingers in the ears. Head in the sand.

I would suggest, therefore, you get in some kind of outside professional help to give him a vision of the future and send a chilly wind of financial doubt around his knackers. How far are you off retiring? How old are you both? £20k of debt is significant. Do you both have pensions? Savings? (guessing not) Children that need college funds? Mortgage? Life insurance?

The split of cash however is something that only the pair of you can fix. You should both have the same amount of disposable income for it to be fair.

It sounds like you both need a wake up call. You seem to see nothing wrong in eating out a lot of time yet could cook at home and get rid of the debt far quicker. Likewise he needs to realise the debt repayments need to be looked at.

If you both earn well, how on earth did you end up £20k in debt? Presumably it's been done by you both.

OP
As you may be aware I post on two types of thread
debt
and
weight loss
why?

because they are the same mindset

burger today / heart attack tomorrow

shoes today / no clothes tomorrow

AND
what I learned a long time ago (and I have a DH the size of a brick outhouse)
there is nothing you xan say or do to make him realise until he is ready to realise himself
same as you were before you found this bord

it all comes down to findingthe "hook" positive things to slowly, gently, gradually, turn the supertanker around

you will get there, it will take time

Amazed at the remark 'he pays halves when we go out' you are married right??What sort of financial basis is all this??All the income is for all of you and how on earth have you run op £20000 of debt??
Do you have his and her shopping accounts??
Just seems so odd to me

I earned 10x what he did but we had all joint accounts only and a very similar attitude to money (very good at saving, didn't eat out, paid off mortgages early etc etc). We were lucky we had the same attitude. I did both our tax returns.

In your case if you earn half what he does why not turn this round and get out there and earn double what he does as an aim - easier than penny pinching and I bet you are as clever as he is so no reason women cannot out earn men, plenty of us do it. That way when you earn double his income you will have your own money to save rather than worrying about how he spends his money.

20k of debt?! How are you repaying it? Isn't your Dh bothered at the size of your debt?

I would be focusing on repaying it and saving money each month - set up direct debits to take money out as soon as it comes in on pay day for savings and repayments then what ever is left at the end of the month is his/yours.

With respect Greengrow there might be all sorts of reasons why the OP can't or doesn't wish to go out and aim to earn double what her DH does. That really isn't the point. The point is this is a marriage, a partnership and it should therefore have moved on from "that's mine and I'm keeping it". I currently earn more than double what DH earns and previously he has earned a good £25k more than me. Whatever the contribution financially we have always put everything into one pot - the family pot. Before kids and when our relationship was younger we each then took out the same amount to send as we wished but now its about trust and we just spend what we spend (whilst always consulting about large purchases of more than about £200).

The OP wants to get to a different place where there is rather more equity in the financial relationship since contribution is not just about the cash put in. OP I think you need to sit down with your DH and say you appreciate that he earns more but you also make a valid contribution to the family and enable him to earn that salary by keeping the household running smoothly and if he is going to insist on keeping "his" money then he also needs to do half of everything else including school runs etc and also needs to appreciate that it will be damaging to your relationship. Legally of course it isn't his money at all, its a family asset.

In your position I would tell him this is non negotiable and from now on everything goes into a single pot, at least until the debt is cleared (and hopefully by then his mindset will have changed).