Hold up a dollar bill—or a ten or twenty for that matter—and what do you see?
The answer you’re not expecting is “yourself.”
Money is a mirror reflecting who we are. That’s fairly obvious on the outside. Look at all the people driving cars, living in houses and taking vacations they can’t afford. They’re using money to create a reflection of themselves that they want others to see. But money also reflects who we are inside: the fears, confidences, dreams and psychoses that define us. Someone who is inwardly paranoid about the future, about living in poverty or being subject to inferior healthcare when elderly, will tend to hoard money, often at the expense of living life. Though unhealthy, they can’t help their actions because their brain is telling them that, at some level, their survival depends upon their ability to save now because the lean times are just a heartbeat away. They’ll probably come across as a penny-pincher or a Scrooge to those around them, but those around them may not understand the depth of the worries.
Money is deeply powerful emotionally because it represents so much more than the ability to buy a Happy Meal on the way home from work. It is as much an emotional currency as it is a fundamental tool of commerce.
In the context of a relationship, it’s rarely the money itself that causes a problem. It is the emotional baggage that comes prepackaged with the dollars that stirs up the trouble. That’s where a couple’s real money issues begin. You can’t really understand where one another is coming from financially until you understand that there are emotions underlying the words you’re hearing and the actions you’re seeing. Begin to understand that, and you can begin to build a more robust financial life together.
To get to this point couples must master the toughest part of marriage: communication. The art of talking.
Life comes so fast that we, as couples, slip into a groove that can be tough to get out of. We learn to essentially grunt our answers at each other as we pass on the way out the door. We text message truncated questions and one-word replies during the day and feel like we’re communicating: Bills pd? one asks. Yup, comes the reply. And that’s the extent of the financial conversation for the week. That’s simply not enough.
We don’t sit and talk because that means missing out on the rest of our lives, the part of our jobs we bring home, the TV shows we want to watch, whatever. Talking just takes too much time.
I promise you, though, that if you get nothing else out of this book, your relationship and your finances will be well served if you learn to communicate with one another. Communication is at the core of everything the rest of this book is about. So that’s where we’re going to start this half of the book. But before we jump into the talking, we’re going to start with an English lesson on personal pronouns.
Me + You = We
Marriage is not an individual sport. When you say “I do,” you are joining a team, a fact that is hard for many people to accept early in marriage. They’re accustomed to the single life and they still try to live that way after the wedding.
Joining forces financially is disconcerting to many a couple because the difference between “your” money and “our” money is so much more than a single missing letter. Everyone has their own ways of managing financial accounts and spending and saving the money they earn. When you’re finally married and see these habits up close on a daily basis, you’re slapped by the reality of each other’s tendencies—or, as you’re likely to perceive them, oddities. You can talk about these habits during your engagement—and you certainly should, as Section One made clear—but not until you’re actually sharing the checkbook and credit cards everyday in a legally binding relationship do you fully begin to recognize, in some cases, just how fundamentally different you both are when it comes to money.
The question you must answer, then, is: How do we integrate each other’s money style into a new family financial plan?
The first step: Recognize that you and your spouse are now a “we.” You’re no longer a “me.”
That’s easy to tell yourself, far harder to put into practice. You’re accustomed to your own ways of thinking about money and handling the finances of your life, and by the time marriage arrives, you’ve been managing your money your way for a few years, maybe many years if you marry older. Change doesn’t come naturally because you’re not likely to perceive the need. If your way worked for you all these years, there’s no logical reason you’d return from the honeymoon and suddenly think, “hmmm, I wonder if my way is the right way for the family? Better ask my spouse.”
But here’s the reality you have to accept: That independent you that once existed and once managed money in a particular way is but a memory. Certainly, you don’t have to lose who you are just because you’re married, but you do have to recognize that, by definition, who you are now includes another person. In fact, who you are includes another person by law in certain situations, since shared credit or joint ownership of assets imposes certain unified responsibilities and benefits.
Thus, marriage changes how spouses, personally, have to manage money. It’s now a joint affair.
Consider this scenario, for instance:
In both cases, both husband and wife are doing the right thing—saving a meaningful chunk of their individual paychecks and investing the money for the future. And you can imagine that a basic, pre-marriage financial query such as “Are you saving for retirement?” would yield an answer acceptable to both: “Yes. I’m saving 10% of my paycheck.” Everyone is happy.
Why, then, is this happiness fleeting?
Because the husband agreed to accept responsibility for paying the bills and directing the investments, and the couple never really discussed what that meant. So, the husband applies his financial norms because those norms have worked for him all these years, and the wife just assumes that the money the family is saving is generally being invested according to her definition of appropriate, her norms.
Only, the couple’s norms don’t mesh. When the wife discovers that cash sitting in a savings account and CD are her husband’s version of appropriate, she’s going to have a series of questions that could easily sound accusatory. He’s going to respond with a series of answers that could easily sound defensive and that are based on his intolerance for the kind of risk she’s comfortable with (and, of course, because this is how he has managed money his entire adult life). The conversation could become quite heated, and it’s all because neither had a plan for integrating their individual personalities into their joint personal finances. Maybe such a problem never even crossed their minds—until it became a conflict.
Countless such scenarios exist. But no matter the situation, they all share a common trait: Lack of communication. Perhaps the real frustration you’ll find is that this communication breakdown exists in part because you can’t prepare for, nor even know every possibility that might arise. While you might have experienced some of your lover’s financial quirks during the courtship, you won’t know about one another’s most annoying money traits until you’re under the same roof for some time and forced to confront how you both get along with the finances.
So, you need to learn how to talk about money. It’s a skill you’ll need in every upcoming chapter, and, more important, it’s a skill you and your spouse will need for the rest of your lives. Might as well learn it now.
Money Talks: Communication Without Conflagration
I’ve been with my wife for a long time, since the mid–1980s in one fashion or another. And for most of those years we never talked about money in any serious way. I would occasionally tell her about some investment I was making, or how well some investment had fared. Or, I would tell her about a raise I got, or question her on when her bonus check would arrive, or I would tell her our cre...