How to Recession-Proof Your Marriage

My husband and I are both self employed, and, in 2008, we both had our best business years ever. His business—a 4-year-old start up—was finally turning a decent profit. I was at the height of my career as a freelance writer. I decided that we were done investing in HIS career. Now it was my turn.

I bought a new computer. I paid a designer and various tech people to help me start this blog. I hired a virtual assistant. I advertised.

When Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy last September, I was not worried. I was feeling confident. Surely the recession was not going to affect me. It was only going to affect other people.

As stocks fell that day, I called our broker and asked him to take nearly all of our emergency funds—you know the funds you are always supposed to keep liquid in case one of you loses your job—and use them to buy as many shares of Apple as he could.

I bought Apple at $120 a share.

Flash forward a few months to early 2009. My 401-K has lost nearly half its value. Apple is selling for $80 a share. All of the shares of GM that we’d inherited from my husband’s grandmother? Worthless.
My husband’s business? No longer turning a profit. The project that I’d thought would cover us financially during the first 6 months of the year? It was put on hold as that company restructured and laid people off. Soon our expenses exceeded our income.

In February I told my husband that we had a problem. We were spending too much. I could not pay off our credit card. “Can you help me find a way to cut back? I don’t know where to start,” I said.

We worked together to do it. At first, it was easy to find ways to save money. The cleaning lady? She had to go. That saved us more than $5000 a year right there. Eating out nearly every single night because I was too tired to cook? Had to end. That probably saved us more than $200 a week. Gone also were massages, any medical appointments that insurance did not cover, impulse purchases, and clothes that we did not absolutely need.

But, then, the next credit card bill came. I still couldn’t pay it off.

“We’re falling into debt,” I told my husband.

I wanted to blame him. Of course I did. After all, at least I HAD an income. But I knew it wasn’t his fault. I also knew there was nothing he could do. This was a recession, the worst since the 70s. It was what it was, but it was nobody’s fault.

So we cut back some more. Every decision we made took “can we save money?” and “do we really need this?” into account. If I could walk or ride a bike, I didn’t drive. That saved money. If we didn’t need the air conditioner? We opened the windows. My husband stopped buying craft beer and opted for the cheaper PBRs instead. I started grocery shopping alone—without our daughter—so I would have more time to compare prices and shop for bargains. We switched from organic items to bo-bo brands in bulk. I even started buying cheap toilet paper. I only bought fresh items that I absolutely knew I could use. Food stopped rotting in our fridge. I managed to cut our bill by about $50-$100 a week.

It was a new existence, one that I, frankly, didn’t like at first. Then, over time, it grew on me. I realized that, in all of this cost cutting, there were many silver linings. They included:

•    A healthier diet. A home-cooked meal generally has much less butter and refined starch than any restaurant meal.

•    More family time. My husband and daughter sometimes gather in the kitchen as I cook. We actually have conversations. My daughter sometimes helps. These meals have brought us closer as a family in a way that eating out never could.

•    More appreciation of the finer things in life. On the rare occasions when we do eat out, the food tastes so much better. When we’d eaten out all the time, we’d gotten used to the richness of it all. We’d actually gone to gourmet restaurants and had been disappointed with our meals, saying, “Ah, it’s nothing special.” Now that we rarely eat anything with butter? Restaurant meals taste out-of-this-world delicious.

•    An appreciation of the art of cleaning. I realized that cleaning the house is therapeutic for me. The act of making order out of chaos allows me to feel productive and in control.

•    I feel closer to my husband. We’d taken a problem and we’d faced it together. This created a sense of solidarity that I would never have felt had our life continued to be so easy.

•    Our daughter, an only child, has finally learned the value of money. Yes, of course, we want to give our kids everything their little hearts desire, but this probably does more harm than good. It’s our jobs as parents to teach children how to be responsible—and that includes being responsible with money. Our daughter quickly learned the phrase, “We can’t afford it.” She learned to ask, “Is this too expensive?” She has accepted that some toys can only be acquired on her birthday or Christmas or by asking grandma and grandpa for them. And she’s now doing chores around the house so she can earn money to buy things that she wants.

•    I have more time. I started coloring my own hair (a savings of nearly $200), a process that takes about 10 minutes to complete. When I’d done it at the salon? I’d had a 20-minute drive in both directions, plus about 2 hours of salon time.

When I admitted to myself that our new scaled down lifestyle wasn’t all bad, I was able to stop fighting against it. And once I stopped fighting against it, I stopped looking for someone to blame. I accepted that this was our life, for better or worse. We’d get through this, and it would make us all stronger and closer as a result.

Tomorrow: How to Recession Proof Your Marriage Part 2: Tips that will help you talk about money without losing your temper.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.