Are you making the right financial decisions while courting?
Our relationships with money are a very personal thing. We each grow up with preconceived notions and beliefs about money and through our own individual experiences, develop different feelings about money, including how it should be spent and whether it should be saved. Making decisions on money as an individual is hard and even harder when making the same decisions with a new partner.
For instance, you may want to invest in them so that they can know you are serious with them especially during courtship. For this reason, people often end up making bad financial decisions and if the relationship does not work out, you are left stressed out, lamenting, cursing and asking questions.
Therefore, when choosing someone to potentially spend our lives with, so many of us ignore one crucial component-money. If you want to ensure that you make the best financial decisions while in a relationship, then here are things you ought to understand:
Communication is key
As your relationship with that person kick starts, be sure to talk about different relationship factors like if you both want kids and how many kids you want as kids can be very expensive. As soon as you delve deeper into knowing each other, set aside time to talk about the financial decision at hand. Its never too early to talk about money.
Write it out
Before you set on engaging your partner in that talk, have a well-written financial plan. In your plan, include some background on how you were raised to think about money, your money stressors, and your financial goals. You can as well include the ways to raise cash and how you wish to spend.
Listen
To have a truly productive conversation, you must be committed to listening. If you both agree to have that talk be willing to listen. We all make this mistake of wanting to talk more and interrupting. When you give your ears to listen you will get to learn more. You will understand your partners point of view and also learn something new.
Involve numbers
Money is all about numbers. It’s one thing to have money goals and plans, it’s another thing to map them out Take the time to figure out exactly how each financial decision would play out over the short and long term. Writing down the goals into numbers will help you see what you can afford and what you cant. This will help you both roll out a plan for the future.
Once you are through with the planning, put the plans into action. You can start a saving account together. This will give you a nice platform to save for the future and also meet your financial targets.
