Husband Vexations
Martha shakes her head at me a lot. I have a lot of endearing qualities that make her second guess living with me such as not being able to let dishes sit, putting things away when they are not being used anymore, and insisting that the lights be shut off when one leaves a room. Thankfully, my youngest daughter is beginning to display these traits as well and therefore I am developing an ally in my battle for OCD supremacy.
One of the more humorous vexations Martha has with me is my ability to come up with large sums of money to buy the high dollar items I want. For many years now, Martha and I have a line item in our budget called Walk Around Money (WAM). Every month, we each get $200 to spend on whatever we want without accountability. So for Martha, that is a lot of her coffees, lunches out, etc. For me, I tend to pull $20-40 in cash and let the rest sit in the account, allowing my WAM fund to grow. This is something I have done for years yet there is one point where I turned $200 into $2,000.
A few years back I bought 1 bitcoin on a whim with my WAM. I honestly did not expect anything to come of it. I simply bought it, and ignored it for a few years. Well one day I looked up and my $200 bitcoin had turned into $2,000! That's one heck of a return and so I cashed out. Had I held it for another year, my $200 would have turned into about $20,000 however hindsight is always the best at market analysis.
I did not tell Martha. Now it was not that I was hiding anything, I just have this disconnect on explaining what is going on with my WAM; it was not her concern what I spent my WAM on. So fast forward to the summer of 2017 and a supply trip to Billings, Montana. One of the stops I wanted to make was at Cabela's to look at buying a compound bow. So I am shopping and looking at all the bows and paraphernalia that goes along with a bow, when Martha starts seeing the prices. She stops me dead and asks, "How do you think you are going to pay for one of these?" To which I reply, "With my Walk Around Money". The response was a confused look and a question along the lines of "How do you have that much cash" and then I told her about my bitcoin sale.
Hence the husband vexations. I know deep down she admires my ability to save (for I am the nerd and natural saver) and I also suspect she is secretly plotting to smother me in my sleep over my smugness of having this ability.
The main thing I would like to pass along is that in your budgets, you need to set up a relief valve. Life sucks getting out of debt and it sucks even more when you can't partake in little pleasures like buying a coffee out or purchasing that one little item you have been wanting for a while. Our relief valve was the Walk Around Money. For some, it is planning milestone rewards such as a dinner out for every $10,000 paid off. Whatever your preference, be sure to make reasonable allotments of money for yourself in the budget so that you do not become overwhelmed by the lack of a life while paying off debt.
What is your pressure release while paying off debt? How do you handle balancing the wants and needs? We would love to hear what you have to say!
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