Wife has major aversion to budgeting, I'm not sure what else to try
I'll try to give a succinct run down of my wife's financial history and how it's affecting us as a team today. We're both 27, married for 2 years.
She's always expressed frustration that her parents never taught her how to handle money. All they would do is say cliches like "you need to learn the value of a dollar" but never actually teach her skills. She never budgeted and before we moved in together, she had no savings and was fairly often in a place of "do I pay for gas or food this week?". She missed bills, got her electricity shut off at least once (that I know of). Fortunately no debt, as she knew a CC would be a bad idea. Throughout knowing her I tried to help her budget (and I myself only started properly budgeting about 7 months after we met). When I tried to show her how, she would get frustrated that "this system doesn't work for my brain". She essentially would try to just mentally keep track of when bills were due. There were details like the fact that she had to deliver a paper check to support this claim that a digital budgeting app wouldn't work. We moved in together and that helped, but she still made no effort to save (IIRC?). We then got married and I encouraged us to combine finances. To be honest, this was a practical step because whether we were married or not, her lack of personal finance effort was going to affect me. At least if we pool our money and I manage it, I can kind of force her to save. This was 2 years ago and since then we've just fell into a routine of me managing the money and her trying to be somewhat conscious of the finances, but in a very abstract way--never about raw numbers, never in terms of expenses vs income vs savings. It's more about if she subjectively feels like she's "doing good" with spending. She doesn't look at the budget, she doesn't consult it.
Our first child is due in December and we're still not quite sure what she's going to do as far as work (we'd both prefer her to be a SAHM). Regardless, expenses will go up and income will go down, which means being on the same page financially is vital. But this is hard when she has such an aversion to numbers, nitty gritty details, budgeting, etc. She kind of does personal finance off of vibes. If I say, "hey, we overspent on X this month". She'll say, "I thought I was doing good!" -- she doesn't ask or talk about the objective numbers. I tell her, "It's not about good or bad, it's about having a certain amount of money and staying within that budget". Eg. she wants a nice chair for the nursery. I also want this chair, and I know we'll need a chair. But that doesn't mean we can just like that drop over $800 on a chair while we have other things we need to plan for. There was also a sale from some online baby clothing site. She wanted to buy an $80 PJ set for herself that kind of matches a baby outfit she likes. She also wanted to buy multiple $30 sets of newborn outfits. At this time, with us needing to practice frugality to see how well we can handle it, I have a hard time agreeing that those are good uses of our money. Because she refuses to look at the numbers, we can't have a meaningful conversation where we evaluate if buying this chair or those clothes is realistic right now. It's just based on vibes: "we need it eventually so let's just get it now".
Yesterday I tried to go through the budget balancing process with her to pull her in more and help her have more awareness about our finances (maybe if she sees the process for covering the constant overspending it would help create awareness?) This process is monotonous but not that hard if we do it weekly (it's something that up to this point only I have done; I think I've tried to do it with her in the past but it never sticks). It involves squaring up the transactions in the budget with the bank's transactions, then "rolling with the punches" and moving money around in the budget to cover overspending. Which, unfortunately, is a constant thing with my wife. Usually in the form of eating out. Which, to be fair, she's currently pregnant so that's expected.
When doing this with her, I tried to start by having her do the process. I would walk her through each and every step since she's a very visual learner and budgeting is unfortunately not very visually stimulating. I figure we all learn best by doing. She got visibly frustrated and was irritated by trying to walk her through it instead of just doing it and having her sit there passively. I know this isn't the first time I've shown her so I thought she could handle doing it with me guiding (I know she can, but she thinks she can't therefore she can't).
At one point she said, "My brain doesn't know the difference between this and something like public speaking". It's like budgeting triggers her fight or flight.
At this point I don't know what else to try. She refuses to be involved in the finances. She budgets based off of vibes instead of numbers. She doesn't look at the budget before spending. If I didn't take over the finances, she wouldn't save. She blames her parents for not teaching her how to handle money, which is fair, but she also makes no effort to teach herself now that she's an adult.