Queercents

“A half truth is a whole lie.” – Yiddish Proverb

Anyone remember the story about Kathy Griffin’s husband sneaking into her wallet, taking her ATM cards and withdrawing money from accounts without her knowledge? The guy is now her ex-husband.

According to a Harris Interactive survey, twenty-four percent of all those currently in a relationship say honesty about finances is more important than honesty about fidelity. Nearly a third of these people in this same survey say they have been dishonest with their partner about spending habits. Remember the post about women paying cash to hide splurges from their husbands?

Or do you recall that first big money fight I had with Jeanine? That hovered in the “white lie” category… what you don’t know won’t hurt you? Or can it hurt your relationship? The USA Today reported recently that money and fidelity go hand in hand: Read the rest of this entry »

In Episode 11 of The L Word, we get a short but powerful glimpse into money and relationships. As Tasha and Alice start house and apartment hunting it becomes quite clear that communication and an understanding of each other’s money styles is lacking. To make matters worse I’m not so sure they share the same values. We’ve seen on the show recently what kind of havoc not sharing the same values can have on individuals and relationships.

True to form, Alice has Tasha marching all over town looking at really nice houses. Fancy, beautiful pieces of lodging that would be quite the gem to live in. Knowing that they are in the Greater Los Angeles Area tells us that these little gems are a fortune. The only problem is that it is way outside their budget. Alice is hot on the heels of what could be a lucrative career in television so she is riding high. She is ready to jump right in, become house poor, and then end up on the California foreclosure heap in Season 6 I guess. Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s that big Hallmark Holiday (as I refer to these holidays like Secretary’s Day, Mother’s Day, etc. that were created mostly to sell cards) called Valentine’s Day. While I am all for celebrating love today and everyday, I have to snicker at the whole push to “do” Valentine’s Day. You can drop a heck of a lot of money for one day in February with little ROI in terms of happiness or even relationship building. The mass market is of course targeted at straight couples. After all having gay and lesbian couples in all those adds would make too many people squirm and the right wingers get their panties in a twist, right? So, as a result - will you spend more or less than the average on your Valentine’s Day as a LGBT individual? Read the rest of this entry »

A trouple is a three way couple in a long-term relationship and they have financial challenges just like people who co-mingle finances in a traditional marriage or domestic partnership. Watch an episode of Big Love and you’ll see that money issues aren’t really that different when two, three or four adults are involved in a committed relationship. This week we have a guest post written by Ceejay from Minneapolis where she’s interested in your input on their troupled finances. These are her words…

I’m a bisexual woman and make the financial decisions for my household (3 working adults). I think I’m on the right track, but I welcome any suggestions or input about how we are handling our money. We have a ton of debt: mortgage, student loan and personal/credit. We have no savings except our 401(k)s; but our net worth (calculating retirement + house values - debt) is $63,000. Our ages are: 33, 34 and 28.

Last March we got serious about our money situation, and have paid off over $15,000 of debt since July. My main goal is to eliminate almost $70,000 of remaining credit card and personal loan debt, after which we’ll start saving and investing, paying only a little more than the minimum on our $70,000 student loan debt and $300,000 in mortgage debt. With the probability of kids and an international move looming in the next 5 to 10 years, I really want to get us stable financially. I feel that investing and saving are more important than eliminating mortgage and education debt, but I do go back and forth on that. Read the rest of this entry »

Managing joint finances can be a challenge for all couples gay and straight alike. Unfortunately there is no how-to manual on managing a couple’s finances and running a home. Perhaps one never got written because in the old days a man and woman would marry, the man would have a career and bring home all the money, and the woman would raise the kids. No worries about joint finances because there was just one income stream and one person in charge of the money, the man. Thankfully we’ve come a LONG way from there. Even in traditional marriages more than half of the time both individuals are working outside the home. According to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics:

The proportion that were dual-worker couples (both husband and wife employed) rose from 51.3 to 51.8 percent.

I have to believe that number would actually be much higher if it could account for the number of women not working in a snapshot of time but who plan on returning to their careers after a short or long period of being a full time Mom.

Add to this statistic the number of gay and lesbian couples and unmarried heterosexual couples and you get a darn lot of people out there navigating the joint finances maze. Read the rest of this entry »

“Whatever you focus on you get more of.” – basic idea of The Secret

Below is a LiveJournal post where the author relays a story about how his friend believes that money is easy to get and we all can be rich if we want it.

The entry is called Scarcity and I should preface my thoughts by saying, I’ve never quite clicked with the LiveJournal crowd. The format seems so oddly personal and predates the more mainstream blogging phenomenon that got me started on Blogger way back in 2005.

For some reason, when I link to a LiveJournal post, I always think I’m inappropriately crashing the party. I guess that’s not the case since a Queercents reader sent me the link and indicated I would find the topic of interest and thus, I figured you would too.

The author writes about knowing people who focus on money and how they’re “continually on the hunt for” and “confident” about money whereby it has become a more “a fluid quantity for them” than it has for him. Here he explains: Read the rest of this entry »

One of the more difficult things with being a couple is trying to work together on a budget. Initially, we had nothing and just went on a wing and a prayer with the occasional nagging that we should tone down the expenses.

After a few years, that got old and we decided to work together on the money more closely and figure out what was coming in and going out. Every 2-4 weeks we would sit down together and see if we were on track with income, bills and figuring out what needed to be reigned in. That has and still continues to this day.

However, there was still an issue that would come up. You see, my partner is a stay-at-home spouse and enjoys it thoroughly, but she felt that she wasn’t contributing enough financially. So on occasion we would see what job she could pick-up. But she didn’t like working out of the house much, so these jobs would be short-lived. Read the rest of this entry »

I previously blogged about how I would eschew diamonds in my marriage proposal to my partner. At the time of that post, I was still trying to figure out exactly how I would go about proposing. Over the holidays I finally did propose, so here’s how it went.

Heterosexual couples have some well-established guidelines that describe all sorts of things surrounding engagements. The man is supposed to propose to the woman. The engagement ring is supposed to have a diamond and cost a certain amount. Immediately after the proposal you’re supposed to call your family. The bride’s parents are supposed to throw an engagement party. In deciding how to propose to my partner during the recent holiday season, none of those guidelines were much help, because they just don’t make sense when a man is proposing to another man. Read the rest of this entry »