Taxes
It’s tax time, one of the times of the year that can be extraordinarily stressful at my house. The reason is because Jeff and I have completely different styles of dealing with money. When you get married young, you and your spouse develop patterns that seems to work well for you as a couple ~ patterns that develop almost organically. When you have a second marriage or marry late…you’re stubborn and old and don’t want to change your ways of doing things! So we’re likely to butt heads at tax time.
In our marriage, we each handle the numbers for our individual small businesses. Jeff keeps the records for the family. We keep our numbers in spreadsheets on our individual computers. I keep receipts of all my transactions in an accordion organizer file to back up the computer spreadsheet. Jeff for some reason keeps few receipts – not enough to recreate the spreadsheets. Last February his computer was stolen along with the records for the first two months of 2013. No receipts, no computer backup and … I’m glad the computer was stolen in February and not December!
Golf
We had one, only one, blow-up this tax season. I was filling out the forms the CPA sent. We’re running a little late, it’s already April 2. I needed more information from Jeff because what he had given me was incomplete. When he came home from work I asked him for it…but he was on his way to …you guessed it….the golf course. He did not want to deal with taxes! So instead of asking, can this wait or do you need it now, he had a little fit and started ranting about maybe he should just cancel the golf game and sit here the rest of the day and deal with the taxes and he’ll just be miserable and is that going to make me happy! Well, he just lost it! So I lost it in return, and told him he was acting like a big baby and that I had just spent an entire work day doing our taxes and he’s running off to the golf course without any acknowledgement of the value of my time which I spent handling our taxes instead of taking care of my business. Thank the goddess that argument ended in about 5 minutes. It does point out however that money is a hot topic and people have invisible triggers that can get set off very easily.
Money
Money in and of itself has no innate inherent value. It’s a means of exchange. We could use shells or peach pits. It’s simply an agreed upon mechanism that allows us to distribute products and services. Some people like money and other people hate money and another group of people have a love/hate relationship with money.
An individual’s relationship with money comes from their money blueprint. There are eight basic blueprints in the system I use with my clients.
My main money blueprint is the opposite of Jeff’s. We didn’t know this when we got married and it wouldn’t have stopped us anyway. When we talked about money, we had very similar values. For example, we won’t go into debt to buy things. But who knew he would throw out every receipt and I would file them? There are two very different mindsets going on here that come from two different money blueprints.
Money Blueprints
My top money blueprint is the Accumulator, which means I think like a banker and enjoy keeping track of the financial details. Jeff’s top blueprint is the Connector. Connectors don’t stress about money, because they don’t understand its value. Accumulators want to invest their money and grow it and create independence and freedom. For the Connector, freedom means the freedom to not think about money. There’s definitely some incompatibility there, and conflicts are inevitable. Like with any disputes in a marriage, both of us will need some give and take to work it out.
A new, positive outcome is that Jeff agreed to put all his receipts into the accordion organizer. I offered to get him his own accordion organizer but he doesn’t want one, so he’ll either give the receipts to me or use my organizer. Saving receipts is a good back up plan in case another computer gets stolen.
