#1 Money Rule for Couples: You Must Play Together to Stay Together

Welcome to The Finance Gym Action Plan for a Better Life with Money video series. My name is Stacey Powell, and if you’re ready not just to know better, but do better with your money, then you’ve come to the right place.

Lately, we’ve been talking about our relationship with money and how it impacts our financial life. Today, we’re going to be talking about one of my favorite pieces of advice for couples, and that is to have monthly money date night.

I don’t care if you’ve been married for 50 years, if you’re a newlywed or if you’re thinking about getting married. Having a money date night every month can make a huge impact on your financial life.

Here are a couple of reasons why:

1. The only time you talk about it is when you’re trying to solve a problem, a big enough problem that requires the both of you to talk about it. It’s usually frustrating, stressful, ugly. So that’s your framework for how you show up to any conversation about money because most of your conversations are kind of icky, and frustrating without any simple solutions.

If you consistently talk to your significant other about money, your goals, and your dreams, you’re laying a framework in your head that that’s your money conversations are good. Not just icky stuff.

Then when the icky stuff happens, you’re much better equipped with a shared language and know how to work together. So that’s reason number one.

2.  It’s a stereotype, but I think it’s a true stereotype. In most couples, you’ve got the person that loves spreadsheets, loves accounting software, loves all that stuff and figuring out. Then you’ve got this person over here who wants absolutely nothing to do with any of it and is so happy that the other person is going to do it all. So there is one person making the vast majority of the decisions and actions around your money. While that might be convenient, it isn’t best. Here’s why.

I tell my clients all the time. Imagine I’m your accountant. I’m going to give you a ton of advice. I hope you’re going to take most of it. But I also hope you’re not going to take all of it because my framework – I’m conservative. I’m not always going to take risks. I’m not always going to go for the quick path. I’m going to spend 6 hours on a spreadsheet when I should have only spent 1 hour on a spreadsheet trying to make a decision. I should have followed my intuition more, right? That’s my framework.

Another person’s framework brings great value to your financial decisions and so bringing your two heads together is actually important and better. You might think you’re not good at money, but that’s not true. That’s the story you tell yourself. You have great value to balancing out your partner.

It’s not the end-all-be-all to fixing your money situation. It’s only part of the equation. So those are my top 2 reasons why it’s really important to have money date night with your honey. Keep your marriage together, going strong, and being fun.

So if you would like to join me and more of these conversations, you can Subscribe to these videos. You can join us over at Team Do Better on Facebook whenever you can come in and talk about money, and you can also sign up for our newsletter at TheFinanceGym.com. So I want you to sign off and schedule your first money date night.

Journey of a Spender and a Saver: A Bumpy Ride

 

In the beginning of our relationship, my husband and I would have a big fight about money approximately once a year. It wasn’t that we were holding it in for a year, we would have little “discussions” about money often, but once a year there was a biggie. The first one was the orange juice (part I). The second big fight was over a pair of jeans that he bought in New York and we fought about all through Europe. My argument was that he wasted $20 because he bought the jeans with the intention of getting rid of them in a couple of weeks. His argument at the time, was that they were only $20.

The challenge was that our value of money scales were so different: The spender thinks that $5 is nothing and $20 is barely anything. Whereas the saver, keeps every penny, because it’s one cent closer to a roll of 50 and it all adds up.

Fast forward eight years, we’re driving out to the coast for our anniversary and I ask my husband to refresh my memory about this long lost fight. He recaps defensively. I realize that something is still bothering him about that fight. He doesn’t talk to me for an hour. Fun times. Then after he’s had time to think back and sort his thoughts, the truth comes out...I wasn't ready for this one. 

He goes through all of the details again, along with the range of emotions that come when you’re angry, and finally lands on the real reason he’s mad – He thinks I’m a hypocrite! From his perspective, I was ragging on him for buying the disposable $20 jeans, when I bought a pair of leather boots that cost $127 (yep, he remembered) and the only time I wore them was on our trip. What he didn’t know was that when I bought them I planned on wearing them till they fell apart, but they ended up being horribly uncomfortable and made my toes go numb.

So, we talked about it for the rest of the ride… We now understand each other’s side of the story. And I’m embracing the fact that I’m a flip flop/barefoot girl and I accept that no matter how much I spend, the shoes aren’t going to be comfortable. So, I’m going to stop searching and save our money for something that we’ll both enjoy.

In short, these are the overarching lessons that we were reminded of:

• No matter how long we’re together, it’s all about ongoing two-way communication.
• While there may be some yelling, it’s best to talk it through sooner than later.
• Compromise. Compromise. Compromise. On both sides.

- Leah Schonlank

Finance Gym offers personal finance coaching in professionally facilitated peer-advisory groups. 

Are you ready to reach your financial goals? Get motivated. Get support. Get results!

Journey of a Spender and a Saver: Finding Common Ground

My husband and I are celebrating our first date & wedding anniversary this Friday and I'm feeling a bit sentimental. So, I'm going to tell the story of how we got on the same page about our finances. Romantic, right?

A little background: nine years ago we had our first date, one month later we signed a lease, three months after that we were engaged, and then married three years after our first date.

When I met my husband, he was a spender. No, that’s an understatement, he was a big spender. He spent a lot on everything and often. He made good money and smart investments, but at the end of the day he should’ve had more money socked away (granted that could be said of me as well, but that’s another story).

I’ve been cheap for a long time and it’s ingrained in everything I believe and everything I do. Don’t get me wrong, I splurge on some things, but I splurge with intention.

It was apparent early in our relationship that our spending/saving habits were very different and it was going to be an issue. We had to get on the same page about our finances. We both knew that it wasn't going to be easy. And I can't speak for him, but I knew that we had to address this immediately, especially considering how quickly our relationship was moving along. 

I still remember our first big fight about money – it was about a glass of orange juice. Have you ever noticed that a tiny glass of o.j. at a restaurant is around $5, but you can buy a half gallon at the grocery store for $2.50? My husband hadn’t and he didn’t appreciate me bringing it up at breakfast during our ‘we just started dating’ weekend getaway. He argued that he likes o.j. with breakfast, so he was going to have o.j. with breakfast. I argued that it was a huge waste of money and just because we want something doesn’t mean that we should get it. It was not a romantic weekend.

We learned a lot about each other that weekend…We huffed and puffed…We talked and talked…Then we moved on. He admitted that my argument was logical, but he didn’t care. I learned that this approach wasn’t going to work.

It was time to do some deep thinking. I asked myself, “Why do I save? How do I justify depriving myself of wants on a daily basis?” The answer was simple, travel. The more I saved on the things that I didn’t really care about, the more I had for travel later – a longer trip or a nicer trip.

I knew that I couldn’t marry a man that didn’t enjoy traveling with me. And I figured that if he loved traveling as much as I did, he may refrain from impulsive purchases and expenditures in order to save for adventures abroad. 

I decided to test my theory. Our first international trip together showed him that dreams can come true: we spent three weeks in Costa Rica jumping from one surf spot to another and staying at guesthouses on the beach. 

Hook. Line. Sinker.

My husband-to-be started to question his big ticket purchases: electronics. He realized that $500 on a new shiny electronic toy will only bring him a small amount of fleeting satisfaction, because it's outdated almost as soon as he buys it. He now sees that same $500 as a plane ticket to another adventure.

And the orange juice...he orders it when he really really wants it, but more often than not, he refrains because the white pineapple in Costa Rica tastes better than the glass of o.j. ever will. 

Lesson learned: Don’t tell him. Show him how it can be better. 

- Leah Schonlank

Finance Gym offers personal finance coaching in professionally facilitated peer-advisory groups. 

Are you ready to reach your financial goals? Get motivated. Get support. Get results!