My boyfriend and I aren’t ready to get married. I’m not just talking about emotionally or mentally ready. We aren’t financially ready. Neither one of us has credit card debt, but we essentially live paycheck to paycheck. If we see something we want, we buy it. If we can’t decide between this one or that one ... we get both. I have some money set aside thanks to my mom and brother who helped me make smart money choices when I was younger. My boyfriend has a few hundred dollars saved up, but given the right purchase ... he’ll blow it away.
We both turned twenty-six this year. My cousin and her boyfriend recently bought a house together. That was the first whiff of reality. We would both love to own our own place, but without training ourselves to be financially responsible, that’s not going to happen.
Yesterday my boyfriend said that he’d like to buy a house in two years. He had gone out with one of his high school buddies who had come back for a break from medical school. His friend had just gotten engaged to his college sweetheart at the beginning of the year and said that he was planning on moving back to San Francisco when he was thirty. After he’s done with this final year of medical school, he was going to move to another city for three years and then move back. I think this made my boyfriend realize that he has no real goals set up for the future. And so ... now that we have a goal in front of us with a time frame, maybe we’ll finally shape up.
I use spreadsheets all day at work and it bleeds into my daily life. I’ve kept track of our finances on multiple spreadsheets. One that I keep on Google Documents is the overview of the balances in the bank and our credit card totals for the cycle. Part of this also has a estimate of what we’re going to bring in for the next two years and I adjust it as the months pass to see exactly how much money’s gone out and how much stayed in. So ... (it’s nerdy/geeky ... yes I know) it really hasn’t been that hard to calculate how much of a down payment we’ll need to save (plus closing costs, possible remodel costs, insurance, property tax) and then break it down into how much we’ll need to each save ... then how much we’ll need to put away per year, per month, etc.
Putting the plan into words and numbers gives me a better view of the future. It’ll be interesting to see how everything actually turns out.
