Managing Our Money and Family Alone Almost Broke Me. Here’s What I Changed

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The second I became a married woman, I made managing our money and family my sole responsibility. I surmised it was my duty as a wife to ensure that our little family was financially responsible.

My husband and I married young and had a baby young. My husband was still in college and I was the only one working to support our new family. While he focused on finishing school and caring for our new baby girl, I focused on getting our new family up and running.

How I managed our family’s finances.

As soon as possible, I got to work organizing our finances. I made a budget and decided to tackle paying off our student loans. My husband had taken out a private loan to help pay for my engagement ring and start our life together, so I targeted that one first since it had the highest interest rate.

I did all the shopping for our new little family and fortunately, our bills were fairly low. I breastfed exclusively, we didn’t pay for child care because I worked nights as a nurse, and we hooked up rabbit ears to our old college-era TV for entertainment.

My efforts paid off: We paid down all our student loans within a year. By the time I was pregnant again with our second child, I convinced my husband it was time to start looking for our first house. (The nesting was real!)

So, at the ripe old age of 23, we became homeowners. I prided myself on how “well” I had done with our finances. We felt like we were finally real adults who had proven that getting married and having a baby in college hadn’t held us back in any way.

I continued managing our money and family for many years, adding more kids along the way. Everything was going fine, until suddenly, it wasn’t.

Money and family: Why I couldn’t do it all.

As we grew older and our family expanded to a total of five children, our lives became much more complicated. The bills quickly added up, new expenses cropped up seemingly daily, and our finances became more complex.

We started businesses and bought a farm and needed more things, like life insurance and farm insurance. Before I knew it, I was drowning under the weight of trying to manage our money and our family all on my own.

My stress came to a head one day when I asked my husband to pay the credit card bill — and we both realized he had no idea how to even log into the account.

Somehow, we had both become guilty of letting me take the financial reins. At that moment, it was obvious something needed to change. I wasn’t alone in being the sole person in charge of our family’s finances. Surveys show that it’s common for one spouse or partner to take the financial lead. Often, that’s women since we’re usually in charge of managing household expenses.

It may have been easier in some regards to let one person take care of the finances, but it wasn’t the best thing for our family or for our marriage.

What if something happened to me? It wasn’t healthy or safe for him to not even know how to access our bank accounts or credit card. While I had been happy taking care of things for a long time, it was time to get help managing our money and family.

Not only was it becoming too much for one person to handle, but it just wasn’t a good idea for one spouse to bear the full financial burden for our family.

What I changed in our family’s finances.

That day, we changed things immediately. I did a full financial crash course with my husband, guiding him on how to manage our family’s money.

We devised a system for managing and updating passwords, divided out who pays what bills, and set up autopay for payments that we could. Most importantly, we started talking about our finances with each other. While I had once set lofty financial goals for our family on my own, sharing those goals was a game-changer.

I immediately felt a weight off my shoulders that managing money and our family wasn’t my sole responsibility. My husband felt better knowing we were in this together, too.

Once we started tackling our money and family together, we wondered why on earth we hadn’t been doing it all along. And honestly, I’m not even sure I have an answer. It was just one of those things that happened early on in our marriage that we had both gotten comfortable with and hadn’t changed.

Today, we are in a much better spot. Our bills and finances have become even more complicated and I’m so glad I have a partner in managing it all.

We check in regularly about our finances, set goals together, conquer and divide paying bills and setting budgets, and are a true team.

Every family is different and has to figure out what works best for them, but for us, I am grateful that we realized the importance of working on our finances — and took steps to change together.