Managing Finances Teaches Marriage Management

Many approaches that serve you well in managing your money will be useful in managing other aspects of your life and marriage is no different. True, working out the intangible personal give-and-take of marriage cannot be charted on a balance sheet. It is not as precise as that. Yet the principles of money management – self-discipline, self-understanding, shared planning, direction toward long-range goals – are also the principles which help build an enduring marriage.

The techniques of keeping track of where your money goes can also be applied to another very valuable possession – your time. Budgeting your time may not be as common an idea as budgeting your money, but if you do it successfully, you can be spared the remorse of looking back on wasted years.

Review the values for your marriage, it should be clear to you that time is an important ingredient in achieving all of them. A better job, more education, a better understanding of those with whom you share your life – all this takes time.

Budgeting Your Time

It is never too soon to start making wise use of your time. Like using your money wisely, it takes some practice and it should be developed as a habit.

You have little choice about many activities which have a claim on your time. Work takes up a large part of your day. Raising a family can make almost a 24-hour daily claim on your time. You like to have some time to enjoy yourself. Budgeting your time certainly does not mean eliminating recreation – an important element in a well-balanced life. Budgeting time does mean eliminating the dead gaps – the evenings or the week-ends when you had no special plans and thought that maybe you might get started on something, but somehow let time slip by without anything to show.

It means meeting your commitments to yourself. If you have decided you want to spend an evening a week studying or practicing the piano, consider your decision a promise not to be put off by an evening of video games or a session at the bowling alley.

Budgeting your time means each member of the family does not get so absorbed in his own interests that there is no time left for family activities. The man whose job runs into many night meetings or who takes an extra week-end job to pick up extra cash; the woman who gets deeply involved in community activities may be using time in a way that crowds out the essential family goals. Even the over-conscientious home-maker may make this mistake. She can so busy herself scrubbing and cooking and feeding that there is no time and energy left to know and enjoy her family.

Budgeting time means planning time for work and time for play, time for being alone and time for doing things together, time for making today pleasant and productive, and time invested in moving toward tomorrow’s goals.