Every couple has one. The spender and the saver.
Here's the question most couples never actually ask each other. Does your spouse know which one you are? Not which one you think you are. Which one you actually are, based on how you behave when nobody's watching your bank account.
In our marriage, I lean toward saving. Jennifer leans toward spending on experiences and things she wants. For years we both just assumed the other one already knew this about us, so we never said it out loud. We just got frustrated when the other person's spending didn't match what we expected.
Here's the thing though. It was never one big purchase that gave it away. It was death by a thousand cuts.
Chipotle one day. In-N-Out another. A Target run that started as "just a few things" and turned into a cart. Smoothies as an afternoon snack a couple times a week. None of it felt like a big deal in the moment. Our bills were on autopay. We always filled up the gas tank all the way. We figured we were probably fine.
We knew, somewhere in the back of our minds, that we should be saving more. But we told ourselves eh, no big deal, we're probably still on track. Money wasn't a problem. Until it was.
Quick question before you keep reading. Which one of us sounds more like you, me or Jennifer? Hold that thought, it'll matter in a second.
If you'd asked us back then why we handled money so differently, we couldn't have told you. It took a while to actually figure out where it came from.
I grew up without much. My parents worked hard for everything we had, and with four kids in the house, there wasn't room for allowance or extra spending money. We had just enough for what we needed. Our clothes and toys came from thrift stores, and honestly, that was fine by me. I didn't know any different. What that did teach me, without anyone sitting me down to explain it, was how to hold onto money once I had it. Parting with it came with a real, physical feeling, almost like dread.
Jennifer grew up differently. She usually got what she wanted at the store. New clothes when she wanted them. Her parents worked hard too, but saving wasn't something anyone sat her down and taught her. She loves experiences, trying new things, making memories, and spending on those things has always come easy and natural to her.
Neither one of us was taught to see money the way the other one did. So when we got married and started sharing a bank account, we weren't just combining money. We were combining two completely different relationships with it, and neither of us realized that's what was happening.
That's where the real tension started. Not in one fight about one purchase. In two people quietly operating by two different rulebooks nobody had ever written down.
So what changed?
Honestly, the same thing that's changed in every other hard area of our marriage. We learned to compromise. There's a line from a show we like, where a dad tells his daughter that compromise means being halfway happy. That's stuck with us more than we expected it to. Neither of us gets it exactly our way. Both of us get most of what matters.
Practically, that's looked like sitting down and talking about our budget every single month, no matter what season we were in or how much or little we had. It's not a perfect system. We still get it wrong sometimes. But talking about it consistently has been the single biggest win in how we handle money together.
We learned that the hard way too. Every time we drifted away from talking about the budget, every time one of us just assumed we both knew what was coming up that month, it ended in an argument. Almost every time. The fighting was never really about the money itself. It was about the silence around it.
A lot of this, for us, came down to learning how to actually steward what God had given us, instead of just reacting to it. We still spend money. We still enjoy things. But we've also learned to save and invest along the way, on purpose, instead of by accident.
This is actually part of why we built the conversation starters you got when you signed up for this newsletter. Those questions weren't hypothetical for us. They're the same ones we had to ask each other early in our marriage, and answering them honestly is what revealed the tension we'd been sitting in without naming it. Once we could both say out loud where we actually stood, that's when we finally started communicating instead of just coexisting around money.
So here's your homework this week, if you want it.
Think back to your own house growing up. What did you watch your parents do with money? Were they savers or spenders, relaxed about it or stressed about it? Write down one specific memory. Have your spouse do the same.
Then trade. You might be surprised how much of your money habits today trace straight back to a house you grew up in twenty or thirty years ago, and how much that explains about the two of you now.
Reply and tell us in one word. Are you the spender or the saver? We read every single one.
Michael and Jennifer
P.S. Send this to the couple you know who fights about this exact thing.
Every week we like to share a song that's meant something to us. This week's pick is on our Cents of Faith playlist, give it a listen this week.
New here, or want the fuller story behind why we started Cents of Faith? You can read it here.