Married + In Business: Financial Alignment
As a husband and wife duo, we are required to be aligned in more things than just our business model and role delineation for household or parenting tasks. We truly are partners in business and life, so there is one area that we must be willing to work together on: finances. There are multiple ways for partners and spouses to split the responsibility on income & expenses, we want to share our way to be an example of how two people who are married and in business together make this work!
We jokingly say that "Alisha makes the money, Maurice spends the money." It's against the gender norms with what you see in most households, but it's what works for us and is true for our relationship. But, before we get to where we're at now, let's talk about how things started.
Alisha was raised by a single mom who instilled in her to "never rely on a man" and that included finances. When Maurice and Alisha started dating (and even years after they were married) finances were always separate. Maurice had been victim of the consumer society, carried some credit card debt, and found himself living paycheck to paycheck despite making a decent salary for a single person. As we prepared to get married, he needed to pay down his debts, recover his credit score, and get his spending under control. Alisha has a tendency to hoard money, often saving instead of spending, and frequently looking for ways to invest and get her money working for her. Going into marriage didn't change things for her financially, she had planned continuing to rely on herself despite now having a partner that she would share tax responsibility with.
Shortly after getting married, we attempted to purchase our first home. In this process, we discovered that Maurice's credit score would hinder us from qualifying for the best interest rate possible. As a result, he was held off the title and loan for our first home purchase together. That stung. Maurice had already been in the process of eliminating debt and repairing his credit. He'd come a long way, but the residue of decisions from years prior lingered as we went into the first large purchase as a married couple.
Going through the process of qualifying for a home and filing taxes together forged us into a financial partnership that we have continued to improve on since 2015. We set budgets for ourselves, specifically, allocating percentages to savings before any spending was allowed to happen. We opened several different savings accounts for the various endeavors we wanted to have money available for: travel, house savings, emergency fund, etc. We also then started being prioritizing more of our money to retirement. The bare minimum wasn't going to cut it because we were both self employed people and didn't have the support of an employer to bolster that savings over time. And then we allowed the rest of the money to be for expenses.
As our income grew, we kept our percentages the same. For example, 20% continued to go towards retirement; so the dollar amount went up each time we got a raise from our businesses, allowing more & more to be saved and invested. Once we reached a point where all our living expenses were met, we used extra money to do further investing. We set up brokerage accounts, started buying stock, continued flipping the real estate that we lived in. We began ammassing some wealth for ourselves and were really starting to see the money work for us.
We are now in a place where Alisha can focus mostly on how to generate more income for our household, and Maurice focuses on where it will be sent for expenses or investments. As a result of living in and flipping our personal homes, we've generated capital to make investing in secondary properties, other peoples' businesses, and even our daughter's 529 account a reality. We have always kept our living expenses at a place where they don't exceed 30% of our total household income, and by being intentional to live below our means, we have extra capital to make work for us.
In just the 7 years that we have been very focused on our financial decisions, we've created a level of financial freedom for ourselves that we didn't know was possible. Sometimes we still pinch ourselves with how much can be created and generated by being aligned in our financial decisions and working as partners in our approach to next steps for building our net worth.
