[FR] - Transitioning to captain of the house

One area that MRP has really helped me is in seeing myself as the captain of the household. Previous to this, I was running a co-equal partnership. Looking back, I can see just how much my wife hated this… especially with finances.

I do pretty well. I make low 6 figures, plus my wife has a job, plus a side job that I work on, we bring in around mid 100k. She is terrible at math and has always let me manage the money. I set a budget that pays the bills, then a weekly budget that we use for “everything else”.

Without fail, every week we’d end up exceeding our weekly budget by a few hundred dollars. Our income is such that we can absorb that, but I was getting nowhere in reducing debt and saving for retirement. As a drunk captain, I allowed this to happen. She followed my lead.

“It’s only $20” was my mantra. And let me tell you, it doesn’t take very many $20 before you’ve spent an extra $400. I was always saying, “Let’s go out dinner tonight!” Bam. $45 for a mediocre meal. “Let’s go to the movies tonight!” $50 for tickets, popcorn, drinks and a snack. And, she followed my lead.

In the past month, I’ve been working on making the hard decisions to lead the family. I’ve had to implement a new rule. We have $X in the weekly budget. Once that is gone, it’s fucking gone. To be honest, I was worst offender of this rule, and I need to own my shit and poor self control.

I have now modified our budget plan. Instead of saying “We have $X for the week” and then running out by Friday because we bought a shit ton of frivolous shit, I say, “We have $X for the week FOR ESSENTIALS”. IF we have money left over next week, we take that money out for frivolous spending. If it so happens (like this week with all the back to school fees, clothes, books and shit) that we spend the entire budget, well, fuck us. No frivolous spending next week.

As a captain, it is important to look at the plan and see what is and isn’t working. Our budget plan wasn’t working from a psychological standpoint, and needed tweaking.

I think it is also important to have a graceful transition period as well. I explained to my wife how we were constantly going over budget, and laid out the new plan. And for the first couple of weeks we had to decide what is frivolous vs necessity. Some of her expenses are what I would consider frivolous. We discussed them, and I took into consideration her point of view. A few times she was able to convince me that, yes, this was indeed a necessity. Other times, I had to override her and tell her that it was frivolous. (Ice cream is NOT a necessity!!) But at all times, the final decision was mine.

tl;dr: A man needs to lead his family. To successfully lead, you need to control your own impulses with self control. Your wife will follow what you do.