My wife is the family CFO, and I like it that way

I don't know how it generally works with other couples, but my impression is that in every relationship/marriage, there is one person who handles most of the finances.

And by "finances," I'm talking the day-to-day, month-to-month cash flow that keeps a household operating.  Not so much the long-term, save-for-retirement decisions (though the same person may also have that job).

Sometimes it's obvious who should handle this chore. Like, if you're an accountant or a financial advisor, there's a good chance you're better with money than your significant other, and the responsibility for making sure the bills get paid almost inevitably falls on you.

As I've mentioned before, the chief financial officer in our house is Terry. It has been this way for nearly 29 years. It is extremely rare that I end up paying any of our bills, as I'm only there to supply the income.

Many of you are single and have to take care of everything by yourself, and I salute you. You are smarter and overall more capable than me.

I have absolutely no problem with Terry keeping this role until the day I or both of us keel over. I don't know that she "enjoys" it any more than I would, but she's good at it and is extremely organized. Things get paid.

More importantly, she has steered our financial ship such that we recently got to the point that our mortgage is our only debt. No car payments at the moment, no loan payments, no credit card payments, etc. That's all her doing.

We have been a single-income family for more than 20 years. Nowadays it works out just fine, but I remember when we really had to pinch those pennies. I am not too proud to say that at one point, we gratefully received assistance from the government's WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) program. Those were some lean days.

Of course, we were in a privileged position in that we made the choice back then to live on one income. We survived because we could. Many others have dual incomes and still can't get by, which is why I very gladly support WIC and other such programs with my tax dollars.

Anyway, the point here is that I have almost nothing to do with our short- and medium-term finances and am fine with that. It's something like Reason #58,714 that Terry can never die.