ROUNDING TO THE NEAREST MILLION DOLLARS & 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 have been present throughout much of my married life. Budget-busting spending. Mushrooming debt. Not knowing how much income would come in. Often wondering where all the money went.
For extended periods during the year, my wife and I would share our meals quickly and in silence. Then she 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 dramatically declined.
Financial problems often cause marital strains and even contribute to breakups. In our household, however, we thrive on money issues. It’s been our oxygen. A driver in our lives. What’s our secret? Well, all those financial problems involve other people’s money, not ours.
My wife is a tax accountant. She conducts her business from home and has regular clients who keep her busy from mid-January to mid-April each year. In addition, she does volunteer tax advising for low-income residents here in Northern Virginia through the AARP Foundation. Tax season gives her a chance to swim in a sea of tax return forms and to perform financial forensics on the contents of clients’ envelopes stuffed with pay stubs and expense receipts. Each year, the IRS releases scores of new byzantine tax guidelines and filing forms that need interpretation. She thrives on the detailed minutia that make up the country’s tax code.
Tax season is when our meals together are seldom synchronized, and when they are, mostly quick and quiet. She aims to help her clients pay their fair share of taxes, no more, no less. So, for about a quarter of each year, I 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 don’t.
That’s because my career has been as an economist with the federal government. The agency for which I’ve worked administers our US foreign aid program, providing grants and loans to developing countries seeking to improve the lives and livelihoods of their populations. In my job, I’ve designed, implemented, and evaluated technical assistance projects and programs to help the US administration to spend as effectively as possible funding – from your taxes and mine – that Congress has authorized.
I played a part in the process by collecting and compiling information needed to go to Congress to ask for funding to run our American foreign aid programs. My government colleagues and I would start preparing our annual program budgets early in the calendar year, about the time my wife is launching into 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 put me on the road with trips to help my agency’s overseas 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 showed 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 to help my overseas colleagues adjust their program expenditures, either by drawing down unspent budget balances or reallocating funds to programs where they might have underestimated financial needs.
Not that I’m 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 tropical South American country, leaving her to deal with a winter snowstorm on the horizon.
I assuage my guilt by thinking she 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!” I’ve never asked if she ever thinks that way when I’m gone. I’m just assuming that I’d otherwise be in the way. Or perhaps I don’t want to know if I’m missed.
So, while my wife has little time for me during tax season, I’m 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 burst forth announcing spring, we can escape on vacation with time to rediscover each other again.
Over the course of our married life, we feel good that we’ve been able to manage our household finances well enough to have a comfortable and secure retirement. Unlike the federal government, we can’t print money in our home office, so 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. Watching how others – households and government agencies – spend money, we’ve seen up close how damaging accumulating debt can be.
So that’s us: a tax accountant married to a government economist. A match made in heaven. Sorta. Like most other couples, we have to work at making our marriage work. In our case, it’s because there’s a certain asymmetry in our professional lives. It’s an asymmetry that derives from too many or too few ‘zeroes’ involved in how each of us approaches money. In her tax accounting work, she rounds off to the nearest dollar and cent; in my government economist job I often round off to the nearest million dollars!
She to client: “Well, I see you propose to deduct as a charitable contribution the cost of a $100 ticket to a benefit dinner. It doesn’t work that way. You need to subtract just how much of that $100 was the cost of the dinner, because the meal is a service you purchased, not a contribution you made. You can only consider the difference between the dinner cost and your ticket price as tax-deductible.”
I as part of a government-to-government negotiating team: “We’re delighted to offer your country $100 million to build more school classrooms for your growing population of children. Please understand that the terms of our agreement call for an increase in your government’s spending to cover the costs of additional books and salaries of teachers for those schools. You’ll need to show us that your national operating budget has increased by at least $25 million to comply with your 25% counterpart 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 household expenditures. She pays the bills and keeps track of my spending on lunches, a monthly haircut and gas for the car. If I’m frugal, I might even save up enough for a beer or two with my buddies on weekends.
An economist married to an accountant doesn’t sound like it would kindle a great deal of conjugal drama. Still, we’ve had some heated disagreements over what I can deduct as a business expense and some lengthy debates over whether federal government deficits are good or bad for the country ... if those can be considered marital conflicts.
Overall, our life together has yielded abundant dividends by whatever monetary or emotional accounting might be applied. But resolving household money management differences still took time. So be patient. Regardless of professional backgrounds, a shared commitment to practicing sound financial practices can strengthen marital bonds as well.
If couples have even a modest mix of economics and accounting in their marriages, perhaps they’ll have as good a shot as us at a great life together. ###