Make Financial Decisions TOGETHER With Your Filipina Wife

The topic of money, or finances, comes up frequently in regards to a foreigner and Filipina relationship, especially marriage. After marriage, many people want to know about a man’s obligation to his Filipina wife’s family. I have covered that in previous videos so today I want to look at a different financial angle, that is about including your Filipina in financial decisions. I think a wise man does that. Please subscribe to Love Beyond The Sea to see many videos about many aspects of foreigner and Filipina life. Leave comments, and get notifications for future videos.

This is higher Fil-West Education; I’m going to tell you the things you need to know. The longer I am married the more I can learn and share with other men who want to pursue a Filipina. To pursue you may need to go where you’re wanted (GWYW) or risk nothing changing.

It would be simple to decide that since you have made most if not all of the money that you possess as a married couple, that you and you alone should be the one to make the big financial decisions, and I agree with some of that, but I think it would be a mistake to not learn what your wife thinks. I believe that a wife should be a helper to her husband, and she is able to provide him a different perspective at times, that he would do well to listen to. He is still responsible for their decisions and I think he makes better ones when he takes into account what his Filipina has to say. In other words, he needs to listen to her.

What are some examples? I am referring to where to go on vacation (some trips are more expensive than others), how much to help her family, what kind of house to buy, if you should buy a house, where this house is located, what gets fixed around the house, even investing. For example, if you want to be very aggressive and she thinks the savings should be invested more conservatively, it would be best to meet in the middle somewhere or for sure, to explain very thoroughly the pros and cons of your idea. Sometimes concessions need to be made for the good of the relationship. I have not hesitated to involve my Filipina wife in meetings with our financial advisor. She needs to know how solid financial decisions are made.

Maybe she would prefer a safer area of town, maybe a bigger or smaller house, perhaps she would like a say in the best order of house projects. Maybe it’s just something like whether or not you should get Neflix. It could be how much to pay for cable and cell phones. My wife is always wanting to save money. She convinced me to drop her from our Sprint phone plan because she thought she could save money doing it another way, and she was right. I am not interested in cutting our grass and would rather pay someone else to do it, but she convinced me to buy a lawnmower instead, but it wasn’t easy.

A big one for us was a car for her. Initially we could use one car because my supervisor was very nice about allowing me to change my start time to coincide with hers. Sometime after that her department went to mandatory 12-hour days, which complicated our original arrangement. She convinced me to let her buy a car, with her own money. I agreed because it made sense, however, I insisted that this car be a safe car, which meant it was going to cost a lot more than what she had in mind. I wanted an AWD SUV to help with driving in winter, and many safety features which is going to cost more.

I think she is very happy with her car, and so am I even though she is paying a lot for it. We made this decision together. When it came time to getting an extended warranty or not, we went back and forth. I didn’t think it was necessary, she wanted it. I allowed her to get it, then she changed her mind, then she wanted it again. So, we sat down and she was able to ask all her questions at the dealership about a warranty and I remember the guy looking at us, asking us what we wanted to do.

Aiza looked at me and asked me what she should do and I told her to do whatever she wanted to do. I didn’t want to make the call for her since it was her car and if she strongly believes having the warranty is a good idea then it would be best to allow this. Normally she would want to save every penny she could but she was not comfortable doing that in this case. If she ever needed to use it, she would feel proud that she made a good choice, and if she never needed it, she would feel good that I allowed her to make the final decision.

I would have this philosophy even if she was never going to have a job. I just feel it is a wise thing to do. A woman will have a different intuition or sense of things. Her opinion just might be necessary to avoid making a bad decision. If what she suggests is clearly not a good idea, then that would need to be explained in a precise way, so that she is able to understand why you think it is best to do it differently.

You don’t want to throw your weight around and make all the decisions because you can’t make all the right decisions without her input. That would also be being a dictator and dictators get less sex! My wife recently became a US citizen. Initially she didn’t want that even though I made my case for why it would be a good idea, then several years later she decided to do that. No one wants to be pressured into making decisions.

I absolutely did not want us getting the covid vaccine, although my wife wanted to get vaccinated. I tried my best to help her understand my reservations about it, and she acquiesced. Later on, I told her we may have to risk getting vaccinated in order to be able to fly to the Philippines, which we’d like to do this year still. I don’t put my foot down very often, but if it is something I can’t live with, I will need to do that, but only after thoroughly stating the reasons why.

If we found a very large amount of money on our doorstep, my wife’s initial reaction would be to pay off the house, and I can understand why. However, I would have to tell her that while that helps us immensely in one way, it also would hurt us because the money we found at our doorstep could be invested a certain way and make more money that we can use for later in life, later in her life, and continue to make payments on the house. We would need to sit down and talk about it, and I would need to hear her out.

My position is based my assertion that any money either of us makes is “our money”, so we need to decide together the best way to use it. This would include the monthly budget too. I have kept track of a budget for about the last 18 years and I gave my wife the opportunity to keep track of it. She has good financial sense, but I have still taken the opportunity to describe to her why we are investing the way we are and why it is better to spend more on some things than on others.

I also want her to know that I appreciate how she makes good financial decisions. Just because a Filipina might not have grown up having to manage money, she likely grew up learning how to make it last and use it wisely, and I respect that. Just because she might not have had to think about how to use money for decades later in her life, that doesn’t mean that she isn’t capable of having salient ideas for the future.

I think it’s best to make financial decisions with the help of your love beyond the sea.