- Bethany McCamish is a freelance writer and designer who lives in Vancouver, Washington, with her fiancé, an electrical engineer.
- Together, they bring home an average of $11,500 a month and their budget gives every dollar a job. They put a minimum of $1,400 a month toward student loan debt and about $4,900 into savings and investments.
- For Business Insider's "Real Money" series, McCamish tracked their spending for a week. Between bills, groceries and dining out, and other incidentals, they spent about $838 this week.
- Want to share a week of your spending? Email yourmoney@businessinsider.com.
My partner and I have been together for seven years, but didn't actually talk about managing money until three years ago. We met in college, so our focus was on graduating and getting into our careers.
The conversations about money were tough at first since we both operated independently from each other. Our mindsets were rigid and we held onto emotional money baggage we picked up as kids.
Our first approach to money was to split everything 50/50. I was a teacher at the time and my partner is an electrical engineer. Our salaries had a huge disparity, and this meant that I felt financial strain trying to keep up with our life when he didn't. Not to mention I had student loans and a bad habit of spending instead of saving.
My partner found out about the Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) movement, and was ready to jump on board. At first, his approach was pushy instead of understanding, but eventually, we started to manage our money together. Our goal was to become financially independent and up our investing game. We decided to use our money as a tool to get financial freedom to make whatever choices we want in life. As a way to document our path to FI, we started the blog His and Her FI.
The blog really became a catalyst for some of our toughest money conversations. It kept us talking about money and led to us creating a budget together. We own a home in Vancouver, Washington, and our nearest city is Portland, Oregon. It's a high cost of living area, which makes following a budget even more important.