The Boring Newsletter, 1/5/2025

Hi Friendos,

Happy New Year! As usual at the beginning of the year, I am tackling an update to my Family Finances Binder, which includes running through a financial checklist (rebalance my investment portfolio? done!) as well as an annual checklist with some non-financial items.

It will surprise exactly zero of you to hear that in my marriage, I am the spouse who is more involved in our finances. I love personal finance and my formal education has touched on many topics that have helped me in my own financial life. No surprise that I’ve been the one drawing up annual savings plans, tracking our monthly spending, rebalancing the investment portfolio when needed, buying our insurance, and paying most of the household bills. If you’re reading this newsletter, maybe you are also the financial manager of your household.

Of course I worry about how things will unfold for my spouse if something happens to me. That’s why I set up the family finances binder in the first place – so he would have a guide to our finances and be able to learn details as needed. But it’s not like I can just put a binder on a shelf and call it a day – my spouse and I need to be a team, making the big money decisions and plans together, even if I am the one who executes the logistical steps of those plans.

I recently came across an excellent talk Mike Piper gave at the 2023 Bogleheads Conference. Mike is a financial advisor and excellent writer (check out his Oblivious Investor blog and books, including one that I own and keep with my family finances binder, After Death of your Spouse: Next Financial Steps for Surviving Spouses). His talk was called “What the Less-Involved Spouse Needs to Know About the Financial Plan.”

If you have a spouse and they are less involved in your finances, I suggest you send them this newsletter and ask them to spend 45 minutes listening to this talk and then follow up with you to discuss your household finances together, maybe having different discussions on different financial topics. Below I summarize a few key points for your spouse and hopefully convince them that this is a fabulous idea!

-Stephanie

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So…your spouse sent you this newsletter? And you’d rather not spend time on your household finances! I understand!

Here’s the thing…did you see those awesome Dune movies or read the Frank Herbert books? No because you’re not a nerd? Fine. In this story, there’s a young fellow who doesn’t feel like doing his martial arts and weapons training one day. He wasn’t “in the mood.” “Mood?” his trainer asked. “What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises – no matter the mood!”

Someday you may have no choice about managing your household finances (death, disability, divorce), so do you plan to start from scratch at that difficult moment? Bad plan my friend!

Your spouse worries about how you’ll do if they can’t be the financial manager any more. They love you and want to know that you’ll manage ok. Taking a few hours to engage with big picture financial topics with them, to ease their anxiety and reassure them, is very loving indeed.

Also, your spouse is not perfect. They are doing their best in managing your finances but everyone has blind spots. You have a critical role to provide oversight and ask thoughtful questions. In my own financial life, I personally have had episodes of procrastination, made decisions in a scattershot way, and failed to move forward with something due to analysis paralysis. Check ins with my partner can help motivate me to get financial chores done. The questions he asks cause me to think about why I want to do something a certain way.

This talk covers the following 7 key topics. For each one, I selected a few questions that Mike touches on in his talk to give a sense of what each topic is about:

1. Cash flow (spending)
   • Do you know how much you spend each year?
   • Do you spend in a way that aligns with your values?
   • Are you spending the right amount given your future needs?
2. Risk management (insurance)
   • Do you have the right kinds of insurance? Do you have enough of it?
3. Investing
   • Are you diversified?Are you keeping costs low?
   • Can you simplify the portfolio? Streamline the number of accounts?
4. Retirement planning
   • Do you have a plan for when to retire and what you are retiring to?
5. Estate and charitable planning
   • Do you have a will? Medical power of attorney? Financial power of attorney?
   • Are all of your account beneficiaries up to date?
   • Do you know where these documents are?
6. Education planning
   • Do you know the impact of school choice on cost? Have you researched scholarships?
7. Tax planning
   • Are you behaving in the most tax-advantaged way?

Mike suggests talking to your spouse about these things, one topic per month. I like that idea –break it up into chunks so it’s manageable. So take topics #1-7 in the list above, you could do one each month now through July. And if you need to skip a month here or there, you still have plenty of time to get through them all by the end of the year. What an accomplishment that would be!

-Stephanie