I’ve been wanting to take my wife out to lunch for a while now since I’ve been working from home. Now that Christmas is over, kids are back in school, and our baby is now 7 months old, it was a good time.

We have tried to have “budget meetings” several times. I’ve tried different dates and times and put them on the calendar. Each time something seems to come up. Life happens.

So I thought that we could try having a budget meeting during a lunch date.

We went to a Mexican restaurant and sat down. I had the envelope balance report and spending by month reports printed out.

Sometime we will go out to dinner, sit down and stair at each other and say, “so, what do you want to talk about.” We seem to get so busy in the day to day and with our kids that once we get together we don’t have much to talk about. And talking about personal finances is not a romantic dinner conversation peice.

Since we planned our lunch date around the budget meeting, we had something to talk about. Yes, we reviewed the budget. We reviewed our spending and a couple of areas we had gone over during Christmas. We talked about how we would make up for the overspending and how we could reduce our grocery spending by being better at planning meals.

But then our conversation moved on to the WHY. We talked about our dreams. We made plans for our 15-year anniversary this summer. We both know we definitely want to relax on a warm beach somewhere and San Diego looks like our my budget-friendly option at the moment.

Sure, I spent $30 eating out for lunch, but as we were getting into the car my wife said, “I have a confession… I was planning on going to The Container Store after my doctor’s appointment tomorrow.” Since we had just covered that our “decor” envelope was spent she decided it would be best not to visit The Container Store. That will surely save me far more than I spent on the meal!

So if you’re struggling to find time to talk about finances, I highly recommend you schedule a lunch or dinner date budgeting meeting. It gets you out of the house and allows the time to enjoy each other’s company and focus on the budget. I will definitely do this again.