ROUNDING TO THE NEAREST MILLION DOLLARS AND CENTS
My wife pursued a career as a tax accountant; I chose mine as an economist. You can imagine how stimulating our pillow talk must be.
Money problems, serious money problems, have been constantly present through much of our married life. Budget-busting spending. Insurmountable debt. Mushrooming tax payments. Uncertainty over whether or not income would be coming in. For extended periods during the year, we would share our meals quickly and in silence, after which my wife would cloister herself for hours in our basement home office and often not emerge till long after I had turned in for the night. On some occasions money issues were so pressing that I left the house, often for days. During those periods, conjugal communications declined precipitously.
I’m sure you’ll agree that it's not news that financial problems often cause marriage strains and even marital breakups. In our situation, though, we’ve thrived on money issues. It’s been our oxygen. A driver in our lives.
What’s our secret? Well, all those money problems and financial challenges have involved other people’s money – not ours.
Well, you see, my wife is a tax accountant. She conducts her business from home and even today has a number of long-term regular clients who keep her very busy from mid-January to mid-April each year preparing their returns. In addition, she does volunteer tax consulting for low-income residents in Northern Virginia through the AARP Foundation. Tax season for her is a chance to exalt in budgeting spreadsheets, to wallow in tax return forms, to perform financial forensics on the contents of clients’ envelopes stuffed with pay stubs and expenditure receipts. Each year the IRS releases scores of new byzantine tax guidelines and revised filing forms that need interpretation. She seems to live for those moments.
Tax season is also when our meals together are seldom synchronized, and when they are, tend to be quick and quiet. That’s the time of the year she pretty much lives in our basement office. She takes her job seriously, and while her objective is to help her clients pay their fair share of taxes, no more no less, her job is part of the process of enabling the U.S. government – federal and state – to collect revenue. So for about a quarter of each year, I nearly cease to exist in her world. During that time, I’m off the leash, unsupervised, free to howl along with our family cat.
Except, I generally can’t.
That’s because my career has been as an economist with the federal government. The agency for which I’ve worked administers our United States foreign aid program providing food, technical assistance and, yes, money to low-income countries struggling to improve the livelihoods of their populations. In my job I designed, implemented, and evaluated technical assistance projects and programs to enable the U.S. government to spend its tax revenue – your money and mine - as wisely and effectively as possible.
I contributed to that process by providing my bosses with the information they needed to go to Congress to ask for funding to run our American foreign aid programs. My government colleagues and I started preparing our annual program budgets early in the calendar year, about the time my wife is gearing up for tax season.
That meant long hours to meet tight deadlines for the required bureaucratic reviews before our ‘budget justifications’, as they’re called, could move forward for congressional approval. It also frequently put me on the road with trips to help my agency’s understaffed overseas field missions design projects and budgets that U.S. congressional budget hawks would review for the fiscal year ahead.
And that didn’t always happen as expected. Congressional staffers would often be on the prowl for excessive spending on foreign aid projects that demonstrated little or no evidence of promised results. Or they might criticize my agency for not spending appropriated money as fast as it promised.
That’s when I’d be called back to the field again to help my overseas mission colleagues adjust their program expenditures to draw down budget balances, or reallocate funds to other programs where they might have underestimated the needs for financing.
Not that I was missed during my work trips away from home. My wife’s work is driven by her own set of deadlines for filing clients’ tax returns. Which means I don’t feel guilty traveling and leaving her behind … even as I jet off to some hot tropical South American country, leaving her to deal with a winter snow storm on the horizon.
I assuage my guilt by thinking she probably wakes up some of those mornings, rolls over in bed and recalls, “Oh yeah, he’s gone till the end of the month. Good! One less distraction from my clients’ 1040s today. What a relief!”
I’ve never really asked if she ever actually thinks that way when I’m gone. I’m just making the assumption that I’d otherwise be in the way. Or perhaps I don’t want to know whether or not I’m missed.
So, while my wife has little time for me during tax season, I’m equally absorbed in my work days with the government budget preparation cycle. Fortunately for us our two busiest work seasons apart coincide on the calendar. Then, when daffodils begin to burst forth announcing Spring, we can start talking together again, and even planning a vacation escape somewhere where we can rediscover each other.
Over the course of our married life, we feel good that we have been able to manage our household finances well enough to have a comfortable and secure retirement. Since unlike the federal government we can’t print money in our home office, we’ve learned to save it and put it to work for us. This has meant living not within but below our means while saving and investing the difference. By watching how others – households and government agencies – spend money we’ve seen up close how damaging accumulating debt can be.
To be on the right side of compounding interest rates - that is, not as debtors but as savers - has meant we can look back over the years and recognize that we’ve had both a blissfully enjoyable and financially rewarding married life together.
However, it’s clear that too many households find themselves on the wrong side of compounding, and struggle to reduce debt levels that seem never to diminish and as a result threaten the quality of their retirement years.
So that’s us: a tax accountant married to a government economist. A match made in heaven. Sorta. We’ve still had to work at making our marriage work because there’s a certain asymmetry in our professional lives. It’s an asymmetry that derives from too many or too few “digits” involved with how each of us approaches money. In her tax accounting work she rounds off to the nearest dollar or cent; in my government economist job I often round off to the nearest million dollars!
Her to client: “Well, I see you propose to deduct as a charitable contribution the cost of a $100.00 ticket to a benefit dinner. It doesn’t work that way. You need to subtract just how much of that $100.00 was the cost of the dinner, because the meal is a service you received and it’s not deductible. You can only count the difference between the dinner cost and your ticket price as your tax-deductible contribution.”
Me as part of a government-to-government negotiating team: “Our government is delighted to provide your country with $100 million to build more school classrooms for your growing population of children. Please understand that the terms of our grant agreement call for an increase in your government’s spending to cover the costs of books and salaries for the additional teachers for those schools. You’ll need to show us that your national operating budget has increased by, say, at least $25 million to comply with your funding commitment.”
To get around the reality that I often round off to the nearest million dollars in my work, my wife and I have followed an iron-clad rule in managing our household finances: she won’t let me near our family checkbook. Her much more demanding dollars-and-cents threshold for detail has made her the go-to person for tracking our money.
She pays the bills and gives me my ‘walk around’ allowance to buy lunch, get a monthly haircut, put gas in the car and, if I’m frugal, have some change left over for a beer or two on weekends with my buddies. And I’m the happier and the better for it.
An economist married to an accountant doesn’t sound like it would kindle a great deal of conjugal drama. Actually, we’ve had some steamy disagreements over what I can deduct as a “business expense” and some heated debates over whether federal government deficits are good or bad for the country ... if you can count those as conflicting marital views.
Overall, however, our life’s partnership has generated abundant dividends in whatever monetary or emotional units they might be measured. Perhaps if couples made sure they have a healthy mix of economics and accounting in their marriages, they’d have as good a shot as us at a great life together. ###