The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Shouldn't it be more like "whatever's left after deducting shared expenses she can do with what she wants"? The 1K discretionary sounds a tad lower than that (depending on the magnitude of those expenses of course) if she's making 35% of $175K.
That's one way of doing it. Realistically what this will look like after 10 years is that I will have saved up a lot of money and she will have saved up almost none. Then when we go to buy a house, the deposit will primarily come from me, partly because I earned more and partly because I saved more.
The earned more part I don't have a problem with. That's what I signed up for by getting married. My money is our money. But the saved more part makes me feel like a schmuck. Why should I be sacrificing more for that goal than she?
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Sure, that's as good a way, it depends on how much room they want to give each other I suppose.
Just that considering the numbers here, it seems like part of what's going on may be OP imposing his taste for saving on the wife -- if she's making ~60K, that's probably something like 4K/month after tax in the US. If they live someplace expensive I guess they might be spending 6K on general living expenses, but given the 'frugality' aspect of OP's personality as described I'll bet he's got a fair chunk of the wife's money going into savings. If she doesn't want to save as much as him, and he wants to make her by imposing an artificial cap on discretionary spending, it's not clear to me that it's her (or her spending) that's the problem.
Well, yes and no. Yes, because 90% of all the bills come from my account, but no, because if she'd paid "her share" she'd have almost nothing left. I think this is part of the problem. Because all the bills are coming from my account, she has quite a lot of money left in her account, and this makes her feel like she hasn't spent much. In fact, she "saved" $10000 in her account over the last 9 months or so, and was quite proud of it. Pointing out that this number wasn't very meaningful because only 10% of the bills came from her account didn't land very well.
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