Chapter 3: How can Money Help or Hinder? 2. Financial Teamwork

In the first place, there must be financial teamwork. Before marriage each made final decisions about spending the personal income, but if one should continue this attitude into marriage he would be carrying a single person's type of mind into a married person's situation. Marriage is a financial partnership in which each must be considered. Without learning this lesson the partners are not likely to have harmony, for if the members of the family put themselves in competition for the income there will never be enough, and this attitude will set them in opposition to each other.

One sees families in which a husband maintains a luxury account, while not providing spending money for his wife; or he keeps the money in his own hands and doles out small sums, as to a child. One who spends money freely for himself, but never takes flowers or other tokens of affection to his wife, is far from being an artist in the use of money; and one who is a despot in financial matters will find it harder to rule over the heart of a mate. If the husband has personal spending money so also should the wife. If, on the other hand, the wife has brought money into the family she should guard against a perhaps natural tendency to play the moneyed person. A wife should face the duties and necessary economies of the home with loving care and thoughtfulness. If, on the contrary, she is negligent of the home and if she uses money carelessly and always calls for more, financial trouble will not be far off. The happiness of many families has been wrecked on such reefs.

Many homemakers, on the other hand, have been proud of their success in using limited resources with such skill as to achieve a standard of living which usually goes with more ample means. The real level of living, however, is mainly an inner matter: not what the lamps cost, but what kind of books we read in their light; not how elegant the chairs, but what kind of talk we have as we sit in them. Thus, even families which have hard going financially still can have the lift of high fellowship.