Thanks for the input. First point, important but outside minimalism (or maybe not) I started a bit ambitious, I have like 6-7 categories with each some sub-categories, in total it’s like 20-30 categories at the moment. Some are fixed/regular cost that I can predict in advance quite accurately (rent, taxes, all insurances, telecom, all subscriptions to services, magazines, clubs, saving for next car, public transport abos…) and some are variable: food (supermarket), care product, cleaning products, restaurant (outside work), food/restaurant at work (but it’s very rare, especially these days with home office), gas, car repair, furniture and house stuff, appliances, school/day care, clothes adults, clothes kids, objects for family (including toys, b-day/christmas gifts for kids and us), activities for family (day trip, gifts (outside household), holidays (split in 4 sub-categories: transport, accommodation, food and activities/souvenirs), objects for me only, activities/travel for me only, same two for my wife (this include electronics, gadgets, anything we don’t want/need to ask each/other to buy and restaurant with friends, activities without the rest of the family, travel without the family, like when I go on rollercoaster tour with my borther, one of my costly “passion” or when my wife go with some friends to visit a city). But for they 2 times 2 categories, I think it will eventually end like a freedom budget, the total will be a recurrent transfer to our personal account and then we manage as we want, save for big purchase/big travel or spend on little things.
They are others categories that I forgot but you got the idea.
It seams extremely complicated but in fact some categories are rare so it’s not so much of a hassle so far but I’ll see after some months, maybe I will merge some categories that doesn’t make sense to details or at least assign a budget across the main category that can be assign to any sub-categories. First I want to have an overview of where to work on or where it’s ok to let it go as it is. I did only January so far, I’ll do February on 1st of March (or shortly after).
What do you mean? We get quite a good tax return, and the money is invested with Finpenson, for me it make sense. Most people I talk with maxed out their 3a from the first year they worked, me I started after 10 years… But maybe I didn’t took everything into account here?
The thing is that she is kind of on board on this, she like when it’s tidy up and she is always ok if not pushing to sale or give stuff we don’t need or want any more. It’s just that she has so much to do with the kids, kitchen and cleaning, I mean I help as much as possible but I’m also working 100% so of course she is mostly on front on these, at least during the working days, so it’s very difficult to keep up and leave all surface clean most of the time and things can accumulate quite fast I know how it is. Maybe she is a bit more focus on keeping clean than tidy and I’m slightly the opposite but both are linked anyway, that’s why I tend to be the initiator to tidy up and she is for cleaning up and when there is almost no discussion possible on how to clean, it is a bit more complex to tidy up as I have to decide where to store stuff and if we keep it or not, so I’m always asking her and she feel like judge or something I guess.
At the end there is not so much conflict about getting the rooms tidy on floor, furniture and visible surfaces but it’s mostly shifting the problem by filling up every little drawer, closet, storage boxes, under beds and basement storage. She is aware of it as well and would probably want to do something about it but it’s not a priority for her and it’s getting more and more for me. At the end of the day, when kids sleep and kitchen is clean, usually at 20h (or 21h if unlucky), we have no energy to open drawer and closets and start sorting stuffs, so it just get postponed.
This is were we have to work on together and no I don’t want it to become a fight against my wife but more a fight of both together against the excess of stuff and I’m sure it will never end up in a fight that might lead to divorce or some degradation of the relationship, we are past that for sure and even if I feel it might, I’ll stop immediately and we will talk about it before anything.