Feature: Managing Marriage & Money
By Brooke Strickland
You’ve walked down the aisle, said your vows, and now comes the exciting part of living out your dreams together as a married couple. Life with your spouse is full of adventure and surprises, but when it comes to marriage and money, many couples struggle finding common ground. Merging marriage and money can be difficult, but there are some practical tools that can help couples succeed in the realm of finance management, all while keeping the relationship healthy. When Danny and Monica Danciu of the Vancouver area were first married, they didn’t realize how much the topic of money would impact their relationship. They married at a young age and with the cost of living steadily on the rise, they quickly realized that they needed to come up with a plan on how to manage their money together without disagreement and stress. Danny shares, “We were incredibly happy newlyweds, but were very poor. There was not much we could do besides facing the facts and realizing that raising two children together on one salary was not sustainable. Dual-income households are a necessity for our generation, not a luxury as it has been in the past. Monica went back to work part-time, and I started doing freelance work on top of my full-
time job while working construction on the weekends on the side. This helped us stop the bleeding in our financial situation and gave us a clear vision that if we are going to do this right, we are going to have to make some big sacrifices.” But having conversations about finances, especially when it comes time to talk about expenditures and setting limits on spending, can be frustrating and stressful. In fact, according to a 2015 survey from SunTrust Bank, finances are the leading cause of stress in a relationship, with 35 percent of all respondents saying that money was their main cause of relationship friction. Monica Danciu shares that communicating about money took some time. She also had to come to terms with how she and her husband’s personalities came into play and how his habits sometimes clashed with hers. “Our personalities are so different. I’m more of an on-a-whim dreamer while my husband is all about security and calculating success. Those uncomfortable conversations about money made us grow together and learn about each other through our spending,” she says. It was through hard work and marriage counseling that the Dancius found a way to work alongside each other to manage continued on page 22
20
Vancouver Family Magazine • www.vancouverfamilymagazine.com • February 2018