At its heart, marriage is a business relationship.
It’s a prickly one, though. Resentments can bubble up over how each of you spends and saves (or doesn’t) and invests. It’s a territory rife with emotions. And for many couples, that makes for a delicate dance. It is for me and my husband, and we’ve been married for more than three decades.
The millennial couple, both 40, and parents of two daughters, ages 9 and 6, turn a discerning eye to their own foibles and interview other couples about their money relationships. They also toss in advice from experts and lay out a blueprint for couples to navigate money conversations that can provide ballast to build and maintain a solid partnership.
Here are the edited excerpts of our conversation:
Kerry Hannon: Why do couples fight over money?
Heather Boneparth: Money is more than just money. Money is a manifestation of other feelings. Money may represent your values. It can represent your culture growing up. It can represent freedom and your desire for independence. It can represent shame if you have regrets over money.
When people are fighting about money, it’s usually not about spending or about a bill this month. There’s something deeper. That’s why fights about money are some of the most recurrent and systemic in relationships, and they’re the hardest to resolve because a lot of times we’re not saying the things that we really should be saying.
What are the keys to a meaningful conversation about money?
Doug Boneparth: You want to pick a place or an activity that is something you both look forward to doing. Heather and I enjoy walks. This is where we have these conversations. Frequency matters. You don’t want to have these conversations too often. You need to allow yourself enough time to see meaningful progress and change.
Heather: It’s more critical to have a quarterly discussion about this topic than it is to sit down every single week because by talking about this too often, you’re trying to force it in.
Doug: You have to get into the money-in and money-out discussion. People call that their budget or their cash flow. However, leading with these pieces of information in your discussion often is a mistake. Start by talking about goals and the things that you want to be working on together in order to then get into the conversation around how those numbers can make those goals happen. Start with the wins instead of things that need to be improved. Build momentum. What did we do right this quarter? What’s working well?
Heather, you make a strong case that in a good money discussion, you need to consider the value of time. Can you explain?
Heather: The conversation on your money date is not limited to the dollars and cents. You need to figure out ways that time is distributed equitably between partners, no matter how much money you earn. Do each of you feel like you have the time to do the things that you want and need to do? That means both professionally and personally. Do each of you have the time and the energy and the funds to do the things that fulfill you and fill your cup individually?
Then ask how can we juggle our responsibilities around? Do we need to hire a babysitter a couple hours a week to help us out? Do we need to outsource laundry? How much does that cost? And how can you fit that into your budget for the next quarter?
You talk about cultural differences and being sensitive to that when you have these money conversations. How so?
Heather: We’ve all lived a lot of life before we’ve met our partner. So you have to understand where your partner’s been as an individual before you can figure out as a couple. You may come from a background where money was scarce, money was tight, and that impacts the way you are today.
The reason that people get so defensive when they talk about managing their money is because these behaviors stem back to the way we were raised. You want to approach things as a team and what your shared family culture is between the two of you.
Let’s talk about financial mistrust between couples. How do we unpack that?
Doug: There are layers — from being uncomfortable about opening up communication all the way over to financial infidelity. Being transparent, open, and honest is an absolute must for building a healthy financial relationship with your partner. Little things that you think don’t matter can compound over time, from innocuous expenses all the way over to pretty harmful stuff like taking out debt or making serious purchases and financial decisions without the consent or without communicating with the other partner.
One way to prevent these types of things from happening is that both partners have the same understanding and level of access to all of their financial resources. Way too often, one person is holding the keys to their finances. Financial infidelity cuts so deep. It can be just as harmful and trust-breaking as other types of infidelity because it directly impacts your livelihood. Radical transparency is the only way to recover from that behavior.
Money hunnies: authors Heather and Douglas Boneparth, (Photo Credit:Nadia Leon Photography) ·Nadia Leon Photography
How do you come down on the decision to have joint versus separate bank accounts?
Doug:Joint accounts for operating a household is the preferred way. It builds trust and transparency.
When would separate accounts be best?
Heather: There are valid reasons why some people keep separate accounts. It could be because it is a second marriage. It could be because there has been a presence of domestic violence in someone’s past, and they feel like they need to keep their money separate.
A healthy compromise is to operate your lives out of a joint account but keep separate individual accounts with a certain amount of money you’re both comfortable with, so that you can feel like you have that perception of freedom and independence with your spending. You can maintain your autonomy without worrying that your partner is auditing your spending — a whole other can of worms.
Money is power in a relationship. How do we rebalance for a more equitable relationship when one person earns more or has inherited wealth?
Heather: Couples need to untether the idea that the person earning more money has more power to find your collective power as a unit. In terms of someone earning more money than the other, reframe it to consider this idea that our time has equal value, whether your time is spent in an office or holding a child’s hand in a doctor’s office or the drop off at school every day.
The person who is out in the world earning a higher income and maybe dedicating more of their time to their career is supported and enabled by the fact that there is someone else picking up the other pieces of the responsibility of their life to support them in that endeavor.
Parting thought?
Heather: Couples must remember it’s yours, mine, and ours. And that each of you has a voice. It’s maintaining a level of curiosity and communication throughout your relationship — that’s an act of love.
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