Happy Life with a Russian Wife

Posted By Liubov on August 12, 2010

That was six years ago… By November, almost all of my family gathered in a three-room apartment with the total area of 64 square meters. “Almost” – because only my son-in law was not present, rebuilding a new apartment in another city. At the same time, there were my daughter with her four-months-old baby, my son and his pregnant wife and, of course, me.

“It’s terrible,” said my acquaintance, a Doctor of Medical Sciences. – “My friends just broke up with their children forever in the similar situation. Money was the reason for conflict. The parents were helping their son’s family, and the children were responding with cruel ingratitude. They just did not care to notice the parents’ efforts believing that it should have been so. As a result, parents started to dream of getting rid of the children!”

My situation was also difficult. My daughter and I did not work; my daughter-in-law had to take a maternity leave soon. My son, who taught at the university, earned enough for pocket expenses. My future husband suggested that I would not look for a job just to provide for a living, but instead get pleasure while communicating with my family and friends – especially as he had already planned my move to America. He offered his help, certainly not unlimited, and I did not want to deny myself the pleasures of life just because of the circumstances.

My relations with money have always been difficult. I did have it, if anything, but the money did not linger in my pockets for long. For somewhile, I had even been proud of it, for nobody could accuse me of money-grabbing. But one day I realized that there was absolutely nothing to be proud of in this regard, because behind it there had been my unconscious belief, “Do not put money aside – you will be deceived.” I am not mentioning of how often I became a victim of a primitive fraud. I did not like money, I was afraid of it…

After a while, I experienced a shock while making repairs in my apartment and moving the books from my son’s room. There were so many books that another myth about “being poor people who barely make both ends meet” fell down about my ears. The books were good and expensive, many of them bought by my son during his studies – of course, not only on his scholarship, which had been enhanced though. The classic version of “Where did you take the money from? – From the bedside table” worked here as well. The second part of the question, “But wherefrom did it appear in the bedside table?” had not even arisen.

Having discovered that, I was beside myself with anger. First, I was angry with my son, who did not exercise due diligence to, so to speak, other family needs. Then I was angry with myself for not controlling the expenses and not discussing money matters with my son.

Then I realized that it was not a lack of attention and due deference to me as a  parent on his behalf. We just had different priorities, and each of us acted in default according to our own ideas about life. My priorities implied giving a good education to my children – and that meant supporting my son’s basic life functions and freeing him from the necessity to think about our survival. His priorities also included getting a good education – but for him it meant the freedom to buy the books he had deemed necessary, regardless of cost. We did not discuss our differences in perceptions of life, because they had not even been implied: I just thought that if I had been “the head” of the family, things would have been naturally settled as I wanted them to.

It was similar to my elder sister’s family, who had brought me up since I was four. Beside me, there was another sister of ours, who also needed support up to a certain age, as well as two younger children. Now I understand that it required a sophisticated skill to plan the costs of the two salaries – my elder sister’s husband and hers – so that there would have been enough for all. Well, she was an accountant, and a very talented one! Maybe that was why the family financial planning was not discussed by her with the younger sisters and children and we have not noticed it in time.

Now history repeated itself, and it became a very serious lesson learnt by me. Having calmed down, I decided to share my discoveries with my children. I understood it clearly that the situation at hand was not the result of someone’s guilt – rather, the old family traditions and rules caused it. However, this would not do for me absolutely. I intended to keep and develop trusting relationships with my children and did not want money to become an obstacle on this path. On the other hand, I did not want them to spend my money improperly and myself to be a victim of circumstances and needs of the younger family members.

Outwardly, it looked like a conflict of interest, which we began to resolve with the help of frank conversations about what we had and what we felt about that. By November, when the whole family gathered in my apartment, we had already bought a computer program called “Home Bookkeeping” and began to analyze our incomes and expenses.

We had several objectives:

• to reveal the structure of our spontaneously built budget and find out the “holes,” through which the energy of money drained,
• to set priorities and monitor how well they were followed. If not,
• then to find out what was the cause of it: either the priorities did not meet our true needs or it was a personal discipline issue. And finally,
• it was important to define each family member’s input into our joint home bank.

A clear bookkeeping of expenses helped us make decisions without resentment: we could reject some expenses or add additional sums. Or we could attribute overruns on account of a family member who had spent money on something unexpected.

Having arrived from another city, my daughter said, “Pshaw, I have kept books for a long time at home, but in Excel.” She quickly taught me how to work in this program. And then, during the next six months, we had passionately compiled monthly reports on our expenditures, and it was she who made me look for every penny spent with a merciless perseverance. I tried to resist, plaining about the fact that the home accounting was not serious and that a rough calculation would be enough. But my daughter insisted that bookkeeping rules would be the same in Africa. Oddly enough, a free-flier whom I had been fell in love with those “boring” articles of accounting, as if they were my best articles in journalism.

It was especially difficult to collect all receipts and put down the expenditures without receipts. Those tricky pieces of paper were always lost, or we could not make out what had been written on them, or could not remember the figures once we had deciphered them… But gradually everything fell into place, and we discovered that knowing exactly what was happening, and therefore making decisions that suited everyone become much easier. I started to perceive my expenses on the family that exceeded the planned ones as an investment and not as a sacrifice. My family members began to perceive theirs as investments too, and not to take them for granted.

I appreciated much later how right and effective was this decision when I realized that the “money question” did not destroy but strengthened the relationship in my family. Moreover, it helped me overcome many difficulties in America, when my husband and I, two independent people belonging to different cultures, started a new life together there.

We were deciding on getting married for a few years. Used to calculate everything beforehand, husband was fearing that he would not be able to provide a “decent” life for me. When we finally overcome our fears, he discovered that he had missed an important item of expenditures in has calculations – my health insurance. Horror of horrors! I sobbed and declared that I was not going to get sick or die in the nearest future, and that I was blessed with good health.

In the end, the lessons learnt with my children saved the situation here. Once again, we bought a home accounting software and started to track all expenses. It was easier with the receipts here in America, since all of them were stored from one tax period to another. It was not difficult to separate them in different budget items. It was more difficult to define the system of budgeting and set priorities. My husband suggested “average” system: to plan for each item based on an average cost per year, and to keep in mind that we have to save a certain amount for future expenses each month. For me, it was easier to make monthly real estimates. At the end of the month, we had a heated debate on how my account coincides with the bank data and what to do with our budget savings.

This went on for six months. I carefully considered all costs without integrating budget items. I wanted to explore the quality of our life and to prove the necessity (or efficiency) of change having figures at hand.  Six months later, I presented a financial report of all the colors of the rainbow, in which each budget item was calculated as a percentage from the total costs. And then something unexpected happened. My husband said, “Interesting. I would like to discuss it with you”…  Our battles for rationality shifted into a discussion of efficiency, and it was a completely different level of relationship.

The main thing that we discovered through our analysis was that we started living much better, and costs had declined significantly in many areas. We began to notice that money was not flying away to nowhere, but bringing us real joy. Recently, my husband passed annual medical tests and discovered that his health has become much better by all accounts!

The sensations were simply unrenderable. We did not do anything that would require extraordinary efforts. We just deliberately touched the energy that we had previously spent anyroad, and about which many grievances and misunderstanding had arisen in Russian-American families. I was grateful to my children …

Categories: Empowering Each Other, Family Matters, The Family Budget
Tags: family budget, how to improve relations with grown-up children, keeping accounts