Marriage and money: What’s working for you?

Couples argue more about money than about sex, but not as much as they fight about the kids or taking out the garbage. 84% of our respondents note that money causes tension in their marriages, and 13% say they fight about money several times a month. The leading cause of dissension is disagreement about financial priorities.

Husbands and wives divvy up money-related tasks along very traditional lines. Men still tend to do most of the big-picture, long-term planning while women manage the household’s day-to-day finances. The gender divide seems to conform to some of our hardest-to-shake stereotypes. Man hunt food; woman make cave pretty.

In the poll’s most eye-opening findings, men and women had dramatically different ideas about who does what with the family money, and what their partners care about. Husbands were especially clueless, tending to underestimate how much women care about almost every financial issue, from saving for retirement to paying off debt. A hundred years after Freud, and men still don’t know what women want.

The gap between the financial issues that people care about most and what their spouses think they hold important may not be the Grand Canyon. But some couples will need an awfully big bridge to get across it. Women come much closer in gauging what matters to men. If anything, they tend to give guys too much credit, believing their husbands care more about paying off debt and saving for big purchases than men actually do.

PHOTOS: KATHERINE LEDNER

Are You Due For A Financial Tuneup?: Here is How To Do Your Own!

Last year, Ron Lieber of the New York Times devoted one entire weekday to tackling activities on his   financial checklist, like signing up for a higher-yield savings account and upgrading a cash-back credit  card. But I am advocating a set in stone one day a week solely dedicated to one financial matters, The Money Day!!

This day, preferably one outside your busy routine would serve to catch up on personal finances, maintenance, research, education, and more.  Mr. Lieber just introduced a new concept called Your Money: A Financial Tuneup, it contains a number of articles with practical advice for putting (and keeping) your financial life in order. (See all the articles here).

In “Take a Few Hours and Unlock Some Cash,” Mr. Lieber explains the basic idea of taking a financial health day, shares what he accomplished during his own financial tuneup this year and offers advice for how you might go about planning your own.

To help with the planning, they’ve created an interactive checklist, “31 Steps to a Financial Tuneup,” with a number of activities to consider. They range from saving another percentage point of your pay and automating your savings to finding a better bank.

You can customize the list based on your own needs and print it out as a guide for your own financial tuneup. The tool also includes video tips as well as a calculator showing how saving one more percentage point can impact your savings.

Other articles in the section cover topics including how to self-diagnose your financial health, why it’s important to review legal documents about your estate, new high-tech ways to track your spending to the penny, how a line-by-line scrutiny of your last tax return can help you formulate a better personal finance strategy and why you might want to switch banks.

For those who have lost jobs, homes, and saw their dreams turn into nightmares will never look at all things financial the same way again. And for the rest of us, the recession, Wall Street greed and vanishing investment portfolios have but awaken/created financial wizards.

So there is not better time than now to create a Money Day as boring as it sounds. The peace of mind, the knowledge and control of one personal financial matters are crucial to one overall well-being. Would’t you agree?