地道美语听力练习:夫妻在花销上产生分歧

Disagreements About Spending Money

Ezra: Wait a minute. What happened to the $500 in our joint account?

Charlotte: I probably paid bills with it. You know that our paychecks barely cover our monthly expenses

Ezra: I know, but I was counting on that $500 to pay for new tires for my car.

Charlotte: Do you really need new tires right now? The way I look at it, if there’s any balance in our account, I have dibs on it for some new shoes.

Ezra: Forget it. The tires are a necessity and your shoes are not. We’re each supposed to have $150 a month for discretionary spending for nonessentials and new shoes definitely falls into that category.

Charlotte: You don’t need to spend $500 for a set of new tires. You just want to splash the cash for some fancy ones.

Ezra: Let’s stop arguing about who gets to spend the money and first figure out what happened to it. According to this, the money was withdrawn from our account for automatic contributions to our retirement accounts.

Charlotte: Our what?

Ezra: Our retirement accounts. Remember last month we decided to start saving money for retirement?

Charlotte: Whose harebrained idea was that? Do you think we can get the money back?

Ezra: I’m not sure, but if we can, I have dibs!