Fighting With My Spouse On Spending Money

This past weekend, C and I had a few spats on how we do our financial management. He's been feeling that my goals (early retirement) are unrealistic and that I want to sacrifice too much for something that is unachievable. I've been feeling that he doesn't support me in my goals and has misconceptions of what my definition of retirement is.

It's killing both of us to have these arguments since we normally have a great relationship and we're on the same page for a lot of things.

I agree that I may be too extreme in some of my ideas. Hanging around the PF Blogosphere gives you a skewed point of comparison.


My husband and I agreed to put aside our differences for the weekend, but neither of us is completely happy right now with what the other person is thinking/feeling. In response to what my husband said about my goals being unrealistic, I decided to create a spreadsheet showing what I thought our financial picture would look like if we both retired early.

He was right in that we would probably only be able to semi-retire in our forties. My conservative calculations show that we probably need to generate a fraction of our current income in our forties to enable a comfortable retirement later on. I'm still tweaking the numbers, but it has shown me how important it is for us to agree and focus on our financial goals together. After I get feedback from C, I will post some more details on the assumptions I made. I'm also hoping to make the model a bit more complicated since I left out one key factor - inflation.

My husband may not believe in what I share with him from my readings, but he is a big believer of math. It's amazing what compound interest will do!