Talking about money with your spouse

I always looked up to my grand­fa­ther when it came to invest­ing. We grew up low­er-mid­dle class, with echoes of the depres­sion in the back­ground. My fam­i­ly, for the most part, fled from Nazi Germany leav­ing what­ev­er wealth exist­ed behind. After serv­ing in the war, and tak­ing over two years to recov­er from malar­ia, my grand­fa­ther bust­ed his hump to achieve suc­cess.

From him I learned the eth­ic of hard work, and plan­ning for the future.

It’s why I was so sur­prised, when hang­ing with my grand­moth­er and she start­ed talk­ing about “the mar­ket”. She knew her finan­cial sit­u­a­tion exact­ly as well as my grand­fa­ther. While per­haps not as inter­est­ed in the num­bers, she had a great grasp of what they had, where it was spent, and the income they got from var­i­ous pen­sions and social secu­ri­ty.

I mod­el my own mar­riage in this man­ner.

Not only because if some­thing hap­pens to me my wife needs to know. But because in order for us to achieve our fam­i­ly goals, we need to oper­ate in con­cert.

Our goals reflect our val­ues, so our con­ver­sa­tions about mon­ey start with our val­ues. From there the con­ver­sa­tion drifts through our dreams and objec­tives, and ends with tac­tics — both short term (spend­ing, bud­get­ing, pri­or­i­ties) and long (invest­ing, and talk­ing about how to com­mu­ni­cate about the sen­si­tive top­ic of mon­ey).

One tac­tic we’ve devel­oped to align our spend­ing and sav­ings habits is to be delib­er­ate. It’s OK to splurge or to change pri­or­i­ties, and even to make uni­lat­er­al deci­sions. These changes should be delib­er­ate. Realize what you’re doing, what you’re spend­ing, and why. Don’t just “bleed mon­ey” and end up with­out enough to, for exam­ple, pay tuition when it comes due in 11 months.

By the way, as I’m writ­ing this I want to share that we don’t have a spe­cif­ic amount that we are each “allowed to spend on our own” because we’ve learned to trust each oth­er over time. Because we talk about mon­ey, and because we talk about how mon­ey relates to our val­ues and goals, we can trust that we each make delib­er­ate deci­sions in that con­text. Of course, and this is not triv­ial, we also both work and have pret­ty equal incomes — so we are able to hon­or our inde­pen­dent needs while not sac­ri­fic­ing the fam­i­ly’s.

Fidelity, my favorite bro­ker­age, has done a study how cou­ples com­mu­ni­cate about mon­ey. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, cou­ples don’t talk enough about retire­ment. In fact, in many cas­es, cou­ples did­n’t even know each oth­ers’ incomes! I find that shock­ing. There are two sides of the mon­ey equa­tion, what you spend and what you earn. There’s no way to spend well with­out know­ing what’s being earned. No. Way.

Want to get start­ed on a bet­ter path of com­mu­ni­cat­ing about mon­ey?

Why not take my free email course togeth­er with your spouse? If you do, remem­ber I’m always here with answers to your ques­tions.