Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge

I alluded to this earlier, but I wanted to say something more about it because during our conversation we talked about money and our finances. I accidentally included MFC in a signature line on an email exchange and he confessed to reading a few entries.

Back when we were dating, I had a lot of student loan and credit card debt. I was grossly underemployed post dot-com bust, making $17K a year. It was pretty bad and frankly I’d hesitate getting serious about someone with that much debt too.

My ex-boyfriend is a cheap bastard. I say that fondly though since that’s what he says about himself. He even said that during dinner about saving some tin boxes of mints I gave him years ago. He still has the boxes. Back then, his frugality embarrassed me. He’d make me take a free ice cream even when I didn’t want it, just so he could eat it himself, not that he really wanted the ice cream either. That just seemed tacky and wasteful to me. But perhaps he was right. That ice cream was going to melt and be uneaten anyway.

Lately I’ve been thinking about why I’ve been so interested in personal finance or the things that have influenced my burgeoning frugality. I used to think that I was always this way, but it’s not true. This particular ex-boyfriend definitely showed me a different way of viewing money. I never shopped at a Wal-Mart till I dated him. Wal-Mart didn’t exist where I lived growing up north of the Mason-Dixon line, but they did down South where he was raised.

He was really great about taking me out on free or inexpensive dates. He was also very sweet and took me out to some really good dinners or to the movies. We had a lot of fun on our small incomes. I think of it as one of those training steps changing my thinking about how to save and spend money.

He offered to take me to Ruth’s Chris in San Juan when we were picking restaurants, but I would have felt really awful about making him spend that kind of money on dinner after standing me up at the ferry. (His sailing trip went over long due to rough seas. I actually kind of worried about that when I saw lightning on the water.) I’m just not that vindictive or passive aggressive to make someone spend lots of money on me.

I got a lot of closure with our chat and it was good to know that since everything ended, we’re both in better places, financially speaking. It was a huge obstacle for us and frankly it’s good to know that we’re both better off now than we were before. I would hate to have so many years pass by and be stuck in the same financial mess as before.

The Frugal Duchess has a good post for merging finances in a relationship. My ex and I definitely got to the point where we discussed these things and I think her post has some really good advice for couples.