Setting your spouse up for success
In our household we refer to my wife as the “Chief Domestic Officer,” which means she is the keeper of passwords, pays the bills, monitors and tracks our insurance and, as you can imagine, anything in between. Although I am a financial advisor, I do not pay our household bills. Seems a contradiction of terms, given my profession, but in our house this is how it worked out.
Like most households we have our basic monthly bills – electricity, water, cable…you name it. We also have our scheduled and unscheduled bills. Take for example, our medical expenses: We know when our prescriptions need to be refilled and have a good idea of the cost; those are scheduled. 
And we have the unscheduled medical bills for those late-night trips to the ER with an illness or injury.
We run our home with a color-coded budget that fits on to a single page. We created it together with the goal that either one of us can use it with ease. The colors represent how the bills are paid, whether by check, internet or automatic debit. On a quarterly basis we sit down together and talk about our finances. We discuss upcoming events, vacations, bills, our goals and house projects. We try to plan for the next 3 to 6 months and during this time we also update the budget.
The second important element to running our household smoothly is the password spreadsheet. In this time of computers and smart phones, each person has to have a username and password for just about everything. On this spreadsheet we keep track of our username, password, website it belongs to, who it belongs to and the security questions that are asked. I have no idea what my wife’s high school mascot was. But I don’t have to because the answer is on our spreadsheet. The only password I have to remember is the one that gives me access to the spreadsheet. Then I can check the balance in our bank account or order flowers for my grandmother.
In the event that my wife is unavailable or if something should happen to her, I have the tools I need to keep our household running smoothly with minimal effort. Life is full of unknowns and I firmly believe that chance favors those who are prepared. Granted, bill paying is not the most exciting thing you probably have ever done, nor is it necessarily that complicated. Why make things any harder than they need to be? With just a little effort and time we have set each other up for success. The question is: Have you set your spouse up for success?
