Handling Finances

I keep summarizing our finances to my wife. I let her know where our money is kept and how much money we have. We discuss our plans and goals regularly.

Still, when I asked my wife where she would find our emergency fund if I was incapacitated in an emergency, she had no clue. It turns out that while my wife is interested in our finances and in our financial future, she really couldn’t care less about the details. Before we got married, she was generally good with finances — spending less than she earned while occasionally paying a bill late due to disorganization. Now that I take care of money and keep her updated as to our general progress toward goals, she just doesn’t bother to pay further attention.

I don’t think that’s a problem — as long as we continue to communicate and align our goals, we won’t run into serious problems if just one of us takes care of financial details. Still, she does need to be able to access our money in an emergency, so I’ve begun working on my alien abduction package. It will include instructions and important account numbers for all our accounts including which accounts she owns and which (like retirement accounts) will need to be transfered to her if I’m abducted (we don’t like to talk about me dying).

We don’t yet have a safety deposit box, so I will likely be encrypting a copy I can keep in a reasonably secure online file-saving account.

It’s taking me a bit of time to get this together, but I’ll post a reasonably scrubbed version as Mrs. Micah did at the link above. It should make reasonably interesting reading as it will include both the location of my money as well as the reasoning for this location and special instructions on how accessing it may be complicated.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 6:38 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.