How do I begin to involve my spouse in financial planning

There are many advantages that can happen when you start involving your spouse as part of your financial planning and investment planning.

The main benefit is that you will see more financial transparency between husband and wife.

Your spouse will understand where the money is coming from, where it is being spent, and how much money is being saved and invested. As a family, you can start having an open conversation about where to cut the unnecessary expenses and start saving towards buying your first home, kids’ education, or retirement. It will help you to plan for your long-term financial objectives and you will make sure that you are spending less than what you earn.

I see very poor work-life balance in our families, most people working in the IT industry. The majority of husbands do not allocate enough time to manage their finances and investments. By involving your spouse, you can share the workload and review the finances and investments periodically to make the right decisions before it is too late.

By involving your spouse as part of IRS tax filing, you will help them to understand how taxes are eating their hard-earned money and work on a strategy to reduce tax liabilities in advance.

I have a few tips to involve your spouse as part of the family's financial planning and investments.

Always start the conversation on the positive side with your spouse and explain all the benefits that they can gain over the long run and how it benefits the whole family. Never use any scare tactics such as what will happen to you if something happens to me, who is going to manage family finance and investments. 

Start to involve them very gradually and guide them to handle bank checking accounts, credit card accounts, and transferring funds between bank accounts and transfer funds to an external bank account.

Train them to pay a few bills using check payment or electronic payment, handle house mortgage payments, and request them to go to a bank and deposit the checks or withdraw the money from the ATM.

Request them to join you when you file your taxes and review your annual employer benefits enrollment.

Encourage them to buy their term life insurance, medical insurance, auto insurance, and home insurance, open their own traditional IRA or ROTH IRA accounts, HSA accounts, or Rollover IRA, and manage their fund's rollover from 401k from their previous employer to their current employer and educate them to change the fund allocation under 401k for future contributions vs transfer the funds between existing funds and rebalance the allocations if necessary.

Do not define any quick deadlines for them during the learning process and constantly encourage them to learn and allow them to do it by themselves even if it takes longer. Be patient and they will learn and manage their finances very well down the road.

Research shows that financially educated women are doing better than men when it comes down to the financial planning and investment planning decision-making processes.

Per AARP, retired single women are targeted by financial scammers and they are losing millions of dollars every year to bad financial players due to their lack of knowledge in finance and investments. This can happen to your spouses if they are not educated or involved in the financial and investment planning decisions.

I hope this post helps you and your family.

Our Expert Jeyamariappan Ganapathy, CFA from Samatva Wealth Management LLC, Registered Investment Advisor will hold a webinar. If you are interested, please provide your email below to receive details.