Before MRP ever became needed in my life, I have from the beginning of time in my cohabitation LTR arrangement captained the finances like a mother fucker. Over the past decade I may have found myself with a dead bedroom, and I have had my house descending into anarchy at times due to me. But my finances have always been 100%. No fucking around.

Twelve years ago, early on in the cohabitation relationship I realised we were spending money like the navy at a whorehouse. I decided to stop it. Here is how I did it. I created a monthly budget, and tracked EVERY CENT in a spreadsheet. There was a column for "budgeted", and a column for "spent". For our personal expenditures which were budgeted as "personal" in the spreadsheet, I allotted a value. I worked on this budget with my LTR. Got her buy in. I held this budget firm. At a given day of the month, one of us would go and withdraw cash for each of our personal spending. Personal spending meant anything that was not budgeted for.

This whole process made her uncomfortable. The reason was, anytime she had looked at fiances growing up with her dad there were feelings of exacerbation when money was discussed. Still to this day she is uncomfortable about it at times, really for no reason at all other than her experience growing up. She is aware of this and externalises it. There were difficult times with some shit testing (or maybe she was just looking to be comforted because thinking about money made her unhappy?) but I made sure we stuck to it.

Now something funny happened. Sometimes, I would spend my monthly personal before hers and she JUST LOVED the power and back and forth about me asking her for cash, of course with the obvious unspoken overtone that I was running the money show. Oh it was great for tingles looking back on it, we had lots of fun with these faux quibbles. Sometime she would “lend” me money with a smile and giggle. But all the while, this woman, who came from a family who squanders money, became proficient in spending money wisely. And even better, she came to understand the value of paying down debt aggressively along with investing for the future.

The second thing I did was to create a net worth spreadsheet. If you don't know your net worth every quarter, you are missing out. The problem with not having a net worth statement every quarter is twofold.

Firstly, three months of time is actually a pretty course snapshot of your daily spending habits. If you are not evaluating at least quarterly your level of frugality, you are squandering an opportunity to measure the health of your everyday spending.

Second, it takes the FEELZ out of finances. Before I began tracking net worth quarterly, I always had an uncomfortable feeling about what I was spending (or borrowing or buying and so on). Once I began quarterly tracking I stopped with those feelings, and instead used logic and sound judgement about what we did financially. The feeling of “well maybe I shouldn’t have” or “man I have a lot of debt” just went away, replaced with a sense of accomplishment for ridding ourselves of debt, or guilt free purchases of whatever.

There are powerful positive implications of setting the frame and tone of your finances that bleed over to other parts of your relationship and life. For example, right now I am “in between jobs”. This means I got laid off and am exploring opportunities. My clear understanding and more importantly my communication of where we are financially is critical to keeping my crew-member confident as to our direction. It has allowed me the freedom to re-evaluate who I am in life, double down on MRP theory and self improvement, and spend the time it takes to network. I've had the time to seek out employment opportunities that may not only bring home a paycheck, but that I would passionate about. Hopefully my new employment will find me in a state of flow more often than not.

I can’t emphasise the importance of this last point. Here I am typing at 10AM on a weekday, 4 months unemployed. I have a quarterly tracking sheet on the other screen showing the best year over year of our 12 year cohabitation, and the most exciting job prospect shaping up (I have been told I’ve been “hand picked for” for a dream job, all from my sports team’s network).

Who knows, one month from now our net worth may be cut in half by bad investments or the economy / real estate market, and maybe this job prospect will have disappeared. But you know what? Neither will bother me, because at no time is there any uncertainty of where we are, and I'll be ready to call the shots like a boss.

TLDR: (Don’t be lazy! If you are not 100% on your finances read the entire post).

My guide to financial success and serenity: 1) Create a monthly budget with your SO, garner her buy in, and stick to it. Do this for at least 6 months, a year is better. Use cash for personal expendatures. 2) Track net worth quarterly. Anything less will not alert you to troubled habits in time.