Setting great financial goals with your partner

When it comes to your financial lives, are you and your partner operating in sync?

When you don’t agree on money matters, it can be a major problem for a couple. But when you set goals together and work towards them as a team, you can achieve a lot more than you might have ever accomplished on your own.

Here are some ways to set some effective goals as a couple, and stay on track to achieve them.

Acknowledging your differences

Your first step is probably to acknowledge that, even if you are quite similar and see eye-to-eye on most things, when it comes to your money lives, you probably have different perspectives.

Maybe one person is a dedicated saver and the other is more of a spender. But sometimes it’s more subtle – one person is more cautious about investments, perhaps, or another feels more anxiety.

To get started, it’s important to have a conversation (or more) about how you each approach your financial lives, and what you see of how the other behaves. This will help guide you as you work to set goals.

Setting priorities

As a couple, what do you value the most? Do you want to have a savings account so that you can have a regular holiday? Or is financial freedom the most important thing to you and you want to do whatever you can to be able to retire as soon as possible?

There’s no right answer when it comes to setting your money goals – as long as they’re in line with what’s most important to you. It might help to order your priorities in a list, so you can work towards more than one goal at once.

Creating rules that work for both of you

To make it workable, your goals will need to fit with both of your personalities. Maybe that means saving a bit more slowly than one of you would like, but which allows for breathing room for the other. Or perhaps you agree that you’ll save for a boat at the same time as you increase your mortgage repayments.

Keep your goals simple, measurable and achievable, so you can track how you are progressing.

Keeping the fun

If you’re working towards a big goal, make sure you create opportunities to have fun along the way. Maybe buy yourselves some extra treats with the supermarket shopping when you’re a quarter of the way there, and book a dinner out (if that’s what you’re into) when you’re half-way. Keep celebrating to stay motivated.

Communicate, communicate, communicate!

Keep your lines of communication open, and regularly reassess about what’s working for you and what’s not. It might help to talk about why you’re going for the goals you’re working towards – sometimes this reminder of the bigger picture can be really helpful to stay on track.