Friday afternoons, Nicole and I sit down with our money for about half an hour. We call it a money date, which is a slightly ridiculous name that stuck.
In most couples one person keeps closer track of the details. That is true for us. It stops working when that person is the only one who ever looks.
Software does the sorting. Ours is Copilot Money, which pulls in the accounts and puts every transaction in a category. Claude builds the one page we actually read: balances and the month’s pace on the front, and on the back the wins, one thing to talk about, and two questions. Neither tool decides anything. They get us to the table with the same picture in front of us.
The first several money dates were rough. Our budget was aspirational, which is a polite way of saying the numbers were wishes. Every month we came in over, and every month the report told us we had failed.
So we stopped setting targets. We took a few months of what we had actually spent, category by category, and made that the budget. Almost nothing about how we live changed. The document stopped lying.
The honest budget felt like relief more than excitement. Nicole said she did not miss anything about the old one. That is the part I keep coming back to, because I had assumed the point of the whole exercise was to spend less.
Our giving does not move. That was settled long before any of this, and the budget bends around it rather than the other way.
Two questions do most of the work. Where do we want to intentionally adjust? And what is one win from this week? Naming something that went right is what makes either of us willing to sit down again next Friday.
We have not solved our finances. We are further along than we were in March. The budget tells the truth, the giving holds, and neither of us is guessing about what the other already knows.
There is more to work on, and we will get to it half an hour at a time. Friday is already on the calendar.