How to Achieve your Financial Goals in Marriage

Reaching financial goals in marriage is vital to financial security and success.

Prior to getting married, I was already on a financial goal setting trajectory. I had saved half of my yearly income in two years, while paying off debt and working to increase my credit score. I wanted to make sure that I carried this same lifestyle into my marriage.

While still engaged, I sat down with my husband to discuss what we wanted to accomplish in year one of marriage. We got to work on creating our goals and determining what strategies we would use to reach our financial goals in marriage.

We coined our time period our “family fiscal year” because it doesn’t run by a calendar year.

As a result of this, we managed to meet all of our goals.

Below are our key strategies to conquering your financial goals.

Know your numbers

Knowing your numbers will help you to be practical, prepared and in a position to achieve your financial goals in marriage. Take a half day to comb through your finances. Organize and list out your bills, debt, savings and assets. Calculate your Net Worth (assets – liabilities) using this information.

Bills

List your bills in order of due date. Include the due date, payment and frequency of payment schedule. You can also include method of payment such as direct deposit or whether it is automatic or self pay.

Be sure to discuss pay dates and create a plan for paying bills based on these dates.

Debt

While collecting your financial records, make sure you collect the detailed information related to your debt. Collect the creditor name, minimum payment, total debt owed, interest rate, and due dates.

If you are unsure about some of your debt, review your credit report. You can access a free annual credit report from here.

CREDIT SCORE

Record your credit score from all the credit bureaus. Discuss tactics on increasing them through debt payment or settlement, low utilization, making full monthly payments and more.

Check out my blog post on How I Increased my Credit Score to 800

Expenses

Review your total monthly expenses and compare it to your income. Upon reviewing your expenses create a budget and devise a way to track future expenses.

Be Intentional

Setting goals has been the number one success factor to my husband and I meeting our financial goals in marriage. Being intentional, writing down our goals, discussing it and working as a team to achieve them made each goal more exciting to work towards.

If we never discussed paying my husband’s car off, we probably would have continued to just make the monthly payment and we wouldn’t have paid it off early.

Discuss what you want to accomplish, determine your priorities as a couple and get on the same page. This helps with accountability and encourages an open dialogue about money.

Discuss Strategy

It’s impossible to talk about goal setting without discussing strategy. The goal is the destination, the strategy is the route. You cannot get to the destination without a route.

When you set your goal it’s important to break down how you plan to achieve it. Will you be saving or paying debt in increments? If so, how long will it take? What is the contribution amount? How many payments will you make? Time frame, amount, methods of payment, number of installments are things to consider when determining your goal.

Being specific will not only help guide you, it will help you be deliberate.

Customize your strategy based on personality

Understanding you and your significant others money personality type is important to conquering your goals. You can establish roles and a strategy based on your personalities to maximize your efforts.

For example, if one person is a saver, you may want to discuss how this person can oversee updating the budget to help keep you guys on track. If someone is a spender, you can implement a strategy such as cash envelopes to help that person curb their spending.

Discuss the most effective strategy for each individual and discuss how each person can help contribute to the goals. It’s better to play to everyone’s strengths and weaknesses versus treating everything and everyone the same, which can end up being a recipe for disaster.

These 4 tips have really shaped our ability to achieve all of our financial goals in marriage so far.

Take some time to sit down and strategize your next financial wins!

What’s one thing you really want to hear about money and marriage that wasn’t mentioned in this post? Oh, and I want to hear some of your tips too!