First, if you don’t have any financial records, you don’t really have a business but a passion project which may or may not be profitable.  Only you can decide what works in your marriage but you seem to have a reasonable position.  My wife is on all accounts but other than checking the family checking weekly and seeing if I have deposited our budgeted family living draws out of the farm she doesn’t have much interest.  I do sit down with her at the end of the year and look through our balance sheet and tax return, which is about a 2 minute conversation before she personally has had enough.


The first level of organization is having a separate farm account and not dividing family living money up into business expenses.  If you are feeding the farm with family money that isn’t a long term sustainable plan.

The second basic level of organization is doing your cash accounting and, at the end of the year, preparing a balance sheet and a cash income statement (profit and loss).  An income statement is actually the difference between the beginning period balance sheet and ending period balance sheet.  This shows if you made a cash profit or loss.  This should be reflected in the balance of any loans and the balance in the farm checking account.

The third basic level of organization is doing accrual adjustments to the balance sheet.  So you may be breaking even on cash but each year you have more feed in storage, more cattle, heavier cattle, loans getting paid down, etc, which shows up as more net worth.  Plenty of people living cheap and not taking much out of the farm and paying family living out of spouse salary and are multimillionaires in their business, but being a net worth millionaire doesn’t take the family to Disney or put an addition on the house.


My wife and I have a budget and I work to live, I don’t live to work, so when I quit my outside job I put a family living draw out of the farm account into the family checking account each month and make my business expenses and investments work around that.  She does her retirement investing and I also do some and when we discuss that further, my retirement investments each year (farmland principal) are substantially more than what we put into IRA-type accounts, but my wife doesn’t perceive that as cash money because, well, real estate isn’t cash money.   It’s an analog.  So we work together on it, having now done this for 10 years our discussions take a lot less time because we worked hard on it at the beginning.



If it makes you feel any better, most couples go through the 7-years after marriage stretch when you get tired of politely waiting for your partner to quit doing dumb stuff and attentively figure out what you are politely trying to say, and if you are lucky, you will figure out what you really want, communicate it very clearly to your spouse, listen to what he or she really wants in return, and make a plan to actually accomplish those things.  It’s a real thing and I’ll just say, wanting some clarity and financial security sounds plenty reasonable to me.