The 11th Challenge to changing (and Celebrating!) your Marriage for Good

Day #11 – LOVE YOUR HONEY MORE THAN MONEY!!!

Of course!! We ALL LOVE our spouses more than MONEY!!!!!  Unheard of to think otherwise???

But do our actions SHOW this??

I recently read that fights about money are most likely to lead to divorce and that money is the #1 named cause of divorce in our country.  From the July 23rd, 2013 issue of the Deseret News:

The study, “Examining the Relationship Between Financial Issues and Divorce,” was published first several months ago online in Family Relations journal. It was based on long-term data from more than 4,500 couples as part of the National Survey of Families and Households.

For women, the hot-button arguments were about money and sex, said Dew, but money was the stronger predictor of marriage failure. For men, money was the only type of argument that predicted divorce.

Dew said he always controls his studies to eliminate the influence of race, education and income. In this study, the researchers also controlled for savings levels and debt as measures of a couple’s financial stability.

Fighting about money was a risk factor for divorce across economic situations.”

Easy to SAY we LOVE our SPOUSE more than money!  We HAVE to PUT that belief of the heart into ACTION!

So what does it look like to love your honey more than money??

We would LOVE to hear what it means for YOUR family?!!

As for our own family it is a daily decision, a choice each day about what we will make most important??

It is a choice to be aware of my husband’s needs, burden levels, wants, wishes, worries.  Even as I contemplate this I feel selfish realizing how much BETTER I could be at SHOWING him I love him through the way I SAVE his money!! 🙂 He LOVES saving money!!

For Mike and I, like most of you, we came from completely different backgrounds and a large part of that was what and how our families had spent and saved and dealt overall with money!  For Mike and I, loving one another more than money meant a lot of bending and understanding of our spouse’s system, what money means to each of us, and evaluating for ourselves, separate from the families we each came from what mattered most to us!

One of the best things we did in our marriage early was adhere to a monthly money meeting (it was always a difficult hour but got easier and easier the more we did it) AND keep a budget (we both really liked “Rich on Any Income” budget pamphlets back then!  I would still encourage ANYONE to use them!)

A little longer into our marriage we found out just how much money matters when you DON’T have ANY, or at least ENOUGH! The ‘belt’ was always too tight.  We realized then that having little money can make you more of a money monger than having plenty!! We CHOSE during that time to LOVE each other MORE than money! We were careful, tried all we could to avoid debt, but also realized that 14 years of our growing family life would be in this TIGHT money situation so we felt there were some things MORE important than money!

Some of the things I’m grateful we spent on despite being poor.  Family photos – though we would only have them taken when the deals were running and only purchase 1 photo we would get them each year, we even took each of our children’s pics at a great and pricey photographers at age 5 but just now purchased the prints!! Family vacations – we were creative and went to the least out-of-pocket vacations we could but we still went! Date nights – we would trade with friends for babysitting and think of inexpensive activities including browsing a posh bookshop, touring a museum that was free for students, star gazing – a free activity on campus, the dollar menu from Wendy’s (the chili and potatoes are great), hiking – one of our favorites, or a fun date on the back porch with kids asleep if we couldn’t fin-angle the babysitting arrangements!  It wasn’t worth saying we are ‘too poor’ to date – we knew it would COST a LOT more in the end NOT TO regularly invest in our relationship this way! Visits to Family – another necessary for mental and emotional health we were AMAZING at finding CHEAP tickets!! It used to be our standard $180 for a round trip out West.  OK, THAT can’t happen anymore but we still take our at least yearly trek out West to enjoy our families!! And of course, service.  We found every time we gave we were more blessed in return! One time we had saved all our change in a small bucket and said ‘when it’s full we will take a family vacation on it’.  Our neighbor and good friend started a ‘pennies for pencils’ cause as she would be traveling to a third world country soon and wanted to collect school supplies for the children! We had a big family council and then my tiny children carried the bucket down the street and presented it to her as she opened the door.  Seeing the looks on my children’s faces as they returned from such a deed was PRICELESS!!!!! When we were poorest and struggling even to pay our house payment our home-teacher from Church challenged us to double our fast offerings. It took great faith on our part but we did so and saw the blessings from heaven literally SHOWER DOWN! We have done this again from time to time since then and always feel our blessings multiply by much more than what we have ‘sacrificed’ to give.

Recently my husband showed me again that he loved me more than money!  As I said, my husband loves to SAVE money, NOT spend it!  We had both felt he needed a new, safer, maybe ‘more presentable’ even? car for all the miles he travels and the people he carries with him at times (including a Dr couple that had come to interview at our hospital and we wanted very much to come here – we realized painfully the car did not show in it’s old, dented, rusty, squealing, stick-shift shape how well the hospital really has treated us! Hee hee, quite funny actually!) It was his birthday and I knew what I WANTED to do – buy him a new car! My children and I knew what he would LEAST like for his bday – a new car. 🙂 So I started off to play a great joke on my husband.

My son and I arranged with friend’s who manage several car dealerships to ‘take the car home’, park it in driveway with a big bow on it for his bday morning! When the moment was right we would hand him the keys and he could drive it for the day to see if he liked it, believing all along we had really bought it! I couldn’t even wait! My kids were actually a little scared! What if Dad gets mad??  Hee hee! A great test for character anyway!

Bday morning came, I gave him a nice and needed suit – fully quipped with belt and shoes and shirt and tie.  Enough in his book by far.  We made him breakfast and then, all of us dressed nicely for church, Gracie brought him a darling little box she had made at school and when he opened it and saw keys sitting there I believe he went white.  A moment of silence, “You did not.” The look on his face showed how badly he hoped it wasn’t real.  He picked up the keys and hit the remote, “BEEP, BEEP, BEEP” the horn went off in the driveway.  He looked at me and all the kids in great anticipation and even fear I think, looked at him, “You did not.”

Hee HEE!! I LOOVED IT!!! His moment of great stress, I’m so sorry I’m just wicked enough to take delight in it! Hee hee!

But then he gained immediate composure and looked at all the children, “Should we go see my new car?”

The tense moment of silence broken and all the kids overjoyed (or maybe just relieved) they all went squealing joyfully to the door to see the new car in the driveway.

I DID have to tell Mike just before church that we indeed “DID NOT”, that I loved HIM more than that – ‘we had simply borrowed the car’ –  just so he could have the Holy Spirit with him as he presided as stake president at his meetings that day! LOL! But I did share with him how sincerely we felt a new (or at least less used) car would be great for him.  He was so good, he listened, and considered our words.  We went car shopping – squooze it into the schedule somehow a couple of times.  We found one we liked, could have bought, they gave us such a good deal, but in the end, my honey’s sense of money won out and we waited.  He wanted to pay off student debts first.  And I LOVED him more than the idea of a new car and let it all go.

In the end I found out Mike loved our family more than money not only by his self-control and willingness to consider our point of view but by NOT BUYING the car at that time.  We could not have predicted HOW MUCH MONEY we would NEED that upcoming spring and both of us heartily agreed a car payment would have been too much!!

I just came into the house from talking to a family friend who had been driving by.  He was glowing with happiness about his 2 baby boys, his wife’s devotion to raising them well, and about the sacrifices they had made as a family to LIVE WITHIN THEIR MEANS.  For them that had meant being determined to ‘get out of debt’ so she could stay home with their baby and his just bigger brother and care for and love them the way no one else EVER WOULD!!  He referred me to Dave Ramsey and said how motivating he was and how much applying what he talked about on his radio show about money management had helped them achieve their goals (in looking up the money arguments article I noticed the first article across the page was Dave Ramsey – worth looking into!!).  How happy they were!  How much time, energy and love his wife was putting into parenting.  She had time now, he said, to really read up and study,learn and apply some of the best parenting strategies they could have! He was learning from her and it was evident to me they were overjoyed in the love they felt as a family!  I was bursting with joy just hearing about it all!!

Money has a LOT to do with happiness in marriage, but the trick to it is putting your MARRIAGE, your LOVE and CARE, and spouse’s best interests FIRST!

Some recommended resources we have relied heavily on:

– One for the Money – Guide to Family Finance

– Provident Living – Finances

 

Share, please share how YOU SHOW YOU CARE with Money!! By saving or wisely spending!

 

*JOIN the 20 day challenge! Click here to learn more!