My wife and I have been married for almost six years now and just like in other marriages, we each play our own designated roles. For instance, she mostly does the cooking and cleaning and I do the grocery shopping and taking out the garbage. We never actually talked about what we would each contribute but somehow we settled into doing our “assigned” tasks.
It turns out that I run the family’s financial department. I pay the bills, move money between accounts, manage our investments and file our income taxes. The downside to this arrangement, of course, is if I were to be run over by a truck, my wife would be clueless about our finances. I am fairly certain that she would say “huh?” if I were to say that I purchased an ETF for our account. I am not implying that she is not smart, because she is, after all, an engineer too. She just isn’t very interested in financial topics and would much rather read literature than pick up a book on personal finance.
One idea I’ve picked up from Free Money Finance is to create a PowerPoint presentation with information about our assets and liabilities, our income and spending and our portfolio holdings that I would update and share with my wife periodically. I bounced the idea off my wife and she is very enthusiastic about it, so I’ll start working on my slides pretty soon. I am hoping that in a few years time, she will have enough understanding of our finances and would be capable of managing things on her own.
PS: I would like to thank frequent commenter Mike for suggesting this post topic. I would also like to take this chance to ask you, dear reader, what financial topics you would like to see discussed in future posts. Feel free to post a comment here or you are also welcome to contact me via email.
PPS: Finance Minister Jim Flaherty will table the Federal Budget in Parliament tomorrow. The budget is rumoured to contain a reduction to the capital gains tax and a grab bag of other tax cuts. Tomorrow’s post will deal with how the budget will affect our pocket books.
