Financial Stress in Marriage Can Unite You

Many of the things we take for granted today were once luxury items in our world.
Spending the night in a hotel was a treat because there you had cable TV, and that was something we had cut entirely from our budget during our season of extreme debt payoff.
After getting married, we decided to combine our finances fully, and when our daughters were very young, we chose to go through a season of scorched earth to get rid of all of our debts.
The goal was to remove all debts before the girls became preteens and really started to want things.
Learning to communicate around our money and operate our lives as one financial house took time, and then we took it to another level by working together to clean up our debt entirely.
For many couples, money and financial issues are among the most stressful parts of their relationship.
On the flip side, when couples work together, they can build some truly special things.
Welcome to Penned in Ink, a podcast where we discuss marriage and the power of long-lasting love.
Welcome to the episode, Melissa.
Last episode, you started off with, "How are you doing?" And I gave you grief for it, so I'm going to start with, "How are you doing today?" Today I'm doing quite well.
It's a much better question when I ask it, isn't it?
It just sets the tone.
Exactly the same thing.
Anywho, it's really been an unusual couple of weeks.
Actually, I was thinking about that the other day.
We both work from home, and so I'm used to seeing you a lot, but you've been really busy the last couple of weeks, and we haven't seen as much of each other.
That's different.
It is different.
I've been doing some projects for one of our daughters.
She bought a house of, I don't know, six months ago now.
No, geez.
Right?
Nine months ago now, 10 months ago.
Anyway, she's got me doing all sorts of projects.
So yeah, I've been over there many times the last few weeks.
They probably don't care too terribly much about this.
So we'll just say we're doing well, but it's very busy.
It's been a little while since we've sat down and talked.
If you joined us for our previous couple episodes, you know that this is episode three in a three-part series on finances and relationships.
What did we cover in the first couple episodes?
The first episode was about money character and your partners, how they view money, how you view money, what that looks like while you're dating or pre-marriage.
Yeah, and how we assess each other's money character in those two, three decades ago.
And if we were intentional about it or not, and more importantly, how if you're dating right now or considering marriage, what are some of the things you should really know about your partner?
Yeah.
Then the next episode?
The next episode, we talked about whether to combine finances or not, or a hybrid of the two.
And that was an entire episode, because it's such a big topic.
Yeah, highly debatable, highly contentious.
We had a few videos we posted out there that got people talking, and I think the ones that sort of hit home were, don't combine finances too early, don't combine with someone you're not married to.
That had some comments.
Some people were like, it's fine.
And others were like, you know, legally that's terrible, don't do it.
So we got through all that.
Today, we are gonna jump into the topic of what does it look like if you combine?
And specifically, what did it look like for us?
And what have been some of the struggles that have come along with that?
What are some of the positives that have come along with that?
And we'll talk about our season of extreme cutting out debt and how we navigated that relationally.
If you want strategies on how you reduce your debt and everything, there's lots of people who talk about that.
Our focus will be much more on what does it look like inside a marriage when two people are genuinely committed to trying to accomplish something together.
And in our case, it was around finances.
And we've done it in other areas, but this one's finance.
Absolutely, and I think before we go much further, we should introduce ourselves.
I'm Melissa, this is my husband, Michael.
We've been married for-- 31.
(laughs) I was gonna say 30 plus, but yeah, at this point we can say it, 31 plus years together married, and we were together for a few years before that even.
True, so older than some of you listening.
Right.
Longer than some of you listening.
Right.
And sometimes during the episode, I will refer to what I do for a living.
I am a mental health counselor in private practice, but what we're sharing today is not professional advice.
Right.
Because you're not paying me.
Now, if you wanna pay me, maybe we could talk about that.
Yeah, exactly, and I will never refer to my career because it's totally irrelevant for this.
(laughs) Unless we're talking computers and tech and video, then it doesn't matter at all.
All right, let's jump into this.
Let's start by sharing a story.
One of our recurring segments is our Inked Moments.
And this is when we kind of go back in our relationship over our 31 years and we try to pick out one little story, maybe sometimes not so little story, that sets the tone for where we're going today.
So we're going to share a little bit about our decision to get fully out of debt.
Why we do it, what it looked like.
We'll do an abridged version of this because it's much less about the decision and it's more about some of the impact on our relationship around finances there.
Where do you want to start?
What's the why?
Why do we decide to get out of debt?
Because most people, I mean, many people don't.
Right.
Let's start with why do we decide?
I personally, you can give your two cents in a second.
I found it stressful living paycheck to paycheck and just paying off the bills and not doing, paying off those bills because you had to, not because you were choosing to.
And it just, I guess it got old.
Yeah.
When you have a certain amount of your money that's committed to go out the door every month before you've even done it is for past decisions you've made.
I think that struggle gets a little hard and it's definitely the case today that there's lots of people who are living paycheck to paycheck.
And it doesn't matter necessarily how much money you're making.
You can still be living paycheck to paycheck.
You have some very low earners, low income people who are living paycheck to paycheck.
And I think when we talk about that, we think, oh, that's what paycheck to paycheck means.
No, there's some very high earners that live paycheck to paycheck when you carry lots of debt.
Right.
A large percentage of your money is already going out the door.
So we got a little, you got a little tired with that.
I did.
Why do you feel that we started working on that?
Well, we teased it in the open.
I think we had, I don't think, I know we had girls that were eight years old around the time where we really said, hey, let's do this.
And we weren't newlyweds.
I mean, we'd been married over 10 years at that point.
I think we did the math on it when we'd been married 13 years at that point.
So we'd been married longer than some people's marriage last, many people's marriage last.
And we were sort of going along and the grind was fine and it felt normal.
But we were starting to realize that the girls, we were going to want them to do some things, have access to some things, and that they were going to start definitely wanting some stuff.
Whatever the trends were, the pre-teens, we're going to start wanting to get into.
And we wanted to make sure that we had a lot of things.
Costed money.
Costed, that's good English there.
I was next to saying, you've had a long weekend.
Yeah.
And so we wanted, I, I think one of the motivator for me was I knew there was things we wanted to do as a family and the debt servicing was really sort of a hindrance to that.
And it wasn't, we'll get into what the debt was, but it wasn't debt that we wanted to carry anymore.
It sort of felt like just bad every time.
So that was my motivator behind that.
Put some numbers around it.
Our extreme season came when the girls were about eight years old.
We went radical for about two and a half or three years.
We'll talk about some numbers in a minute or two, but we had a period of time there lasted about three years.
We hope that most people are willing to take on a season of extreme, but that they don't have to live in it forever.
So ours was a temporary.
And then we did something we'll tell you about in a little bit after that, mortgage related that extended it a little bit, but that looked a little different.
And when we talk about sacrificing through there, let's just, this is hammer some of the things we sacrificed to there.
Cause we dropped a lot.
Right.
It was, there were really, there were big things and there were small things.
One of them was cable.
We, we did not have cable.
Yeah.
This was pre streaming and everything.
This was back when you had like spectrum or time Warner and your bill was 150 bucks for, and it didn't include internet.
It was just cable TV.
So yeah, cut the cable TV dining out in restaurants.
It's expensive or money.
The only, especially when I like to cook, a lot of my girlfriends got their hair done, their nails done.
I think I got my hair done twice a year, maybe.
And it was just a cut.
Yeah.
Just those things that I didn't feel were, we didn't feel were necessary and that we could go without them for a while in the hopes of getting rid of the debt and eventually reintroducing those things.
Yeah.
And some things like no big travel, maybe the occasional getaway local driving trip, kind of the way trips used to be in the seventies, nineties.
Whereas I think now we've gotten to this, oh, family vacations are a flight or there's something a week.
We did little, little getaways.
And I think the other thing that we limited, we didn't really cut was activities for the girls.
And I think this is maybe a really big issue today where a lot of parents that have young kids feel like they've got to have their kids scheduled every day for enrichment, for growth and that sort of things.
We very much were the mindset of let's put them in one thing.
Let's make that their one thing for a period of time.
And one of our goals of getting out of debt was to give them more options to do more things, but we were okay in a season of them being in very minimal things, which put a burden on you, which we'll get to in a little bit, have less silver burden on me.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah.
So I think those are the things that we cut and eventually we brought things back.
Does anything jump out to you as something that we brought back after our extremes?
Well, once again, the cable TV, I think that was an early thing that we brought back and we introduced this.
It seems a little, but the girls had never had a gaming system and all their friends, the Wii was the thing back then.
And the Wii, right?
Right.
Right.
And so we got them a Wii, a used one, you know, we were starting small because we were still frugal.
We were still in our mindset of extreme.
We're not going to pay full price for nothing, but we'll bring back a little bit of, yeah, for sure.
Just some entertainment type things, maybe dined out a little bit more, but it was, you're used to cutting, that's the norm.
If you do it for several years, it's kind of hard some.
Anyway, we can talk about more.
Yeah, so that's the framework for our extreme season.
But what we really want to explore is what did that do to us relationally?
Was it always easy?
How's that as an open ended question?
Is there anything in life that is always easy?
No.
Was it linear?
Did we make any mistakes?
Did we decide to do it and went straight to it and got it all done?
I'm fond of saying in my practice, life is a cha-cha, a couple steps forward, a couple steps back.
And so there were- Is that the cha-cha?
Yeah.
Is that a saying?
Where did you get that?
I've never heard you say that.
I don't want to tell my secrets if any of my clients are watching.
Okay, fine.
It just so happened.
Can't have an episode of MASH.
No, it was a meme or- Oh, you gotta- There was something, and it was, you know outside coffee houses, they put signs and they write little things on them in chalk.
Right?
Like little quotes a day or whether.
Yeah.
I got it off on one of those.
Life is a cha-cha, couple steps forward, couple steps back.
So what I mean by that is no, it was not linear.
Sometimes we were great, we were right on top of it.
Other times not so much.
Yeah, fair enough.
I like that.
I had not heard you say that.
And all the stories you shared with me about things you've been going through, I've never heard you say.
Oh, and then I told them it was like a cha-cha.
I don't know why.
Yeah, it's something they say to clients, not maybe to other people in my life, I guess.
Well, awesome.
I had never heard you share that story.
So that was good.
Clarification.
When I said talking about your clients, Melissa has a tendency to tell me about things she's dealing with in her day-to-day activities.
She does not tell me about client-specific issues, but I've never heard her say the cha-cha is a bit of advice she gave somebody today.
Yep.
And thanks for clarifying.
Yeah, every once in a while I say, oh, you were telling me about a client.
It wasn't a client.
You were telling me about an issue you're dealing with.
So it's a subtle, but very important difference.
Yeah, according to my licensing board, very much yes.
Yeah, I don't want anybody to hear that as an ethical violation, because I don't know anything about any specific clients, but I do know about things you deal with.
All right, disclaimer away.
No one cares except the legalese person who might be listening.
The thing that was really important through our extreme debt removal area was the relational skills that we built and the setting your priorities inside your spending.
There are points of friction in there.
And so the lessons we learned about respecting each other's views on money and realizing that there has to be compromised, especially when you're trying to go extreme, because what I might be willing to compromise on might cause you great discomfort.
Whereas flip side, there might be something that I don't even care about that you're willing to sacrifice.
And you just got to communicate around what those things look like.
And then there's also the concept of building confidence when we succeeded, that if we could succeed in this area, there's other areas we can grow upon there.
So I think those are the real valuable lessons we took from our season beyond just the benefits of reducing the debt, which we'll talk about.
Absolutely, yeah, it was growing experience more than financially.
Yeah, way beyond finances.
Well, I think we should probably talk a little bit about how we worked our way out of debt.
And in order to do that, I think we should take a moment to talk about how big of a hole that we had created.
And then we finally stopped going negative.
The main part of our debt was student loan debt.
Yes.
Yeah, you had- Of our consumer debt was student loan.
Very good, good point.
Of our consumer debt was student loan.
Yours was on the smaller side, but I chose to go to two private schools where I could have probably gotten pretty good education out of public school.
That came with a cost.
And so I think I came like 20 grand in undergrad and another 50 from graduate school.
That's a lot of debt.
Yeah, and think of, I mean, not to date us too terribly much, but we're talking 25 years ago, 70 grand coming out.
70 grand doesn't sound like a lot today, but you gotta keep in mind that education prices have gone up five to 10, 15% every year.
And we're talking 20 years ago.
So $70,000 from your side plus another 20 or so from my side.
Then you throw on a couple of car loans.
You throw some negative equity that went forward.
And I think you were looking at about another 20 to $25,000 worth of auto debt in there.
So when we really decided to go scorched earth, it was 100,000 plus, which today might make some of you go, holy crap.
And it might make a, oh, 100,000, that's nothing because the numbers mean a little different now.
But it was a big amount and it was significantly more than we were making at the time.
But yeah, so that was sort of what our whole looked like there.
And then we were carrying a couple hundred thousand dollars in house debt.
Now again, by today's standard, oh, only a couple hundred thousand, that's awesome.
But then again, we bought our house 23 years ago or four years ago.
So at the time, a couple hundred thousand dollars on top of a hundred plus thousand of student loan and car debt, three, 350, 325, somewhere right in there was about what it looked like.
That number becomes more relevant when you think about it that way.
Well, when did we stop digging?
Was it the day we decided to go out of debt or was it, when did we stop digging?
No, it wasn't.
I think it was a couple of years after we moved to North Carolina from Oregon.
And at that time it just- 10 years into our marriage.
Yes.
And at that point it kind of felt like we were just treading water.
We weren't moving forward as we were carrying this debt.
And I think we decided at that point, all right, we need to stop accruing debt.
You had finished up all your school.
You had been dual income for a little while.
We didn't really dig too much there.
The girls were born.
We took on a little bit of additional car debt associated with the girls.
We felt for that whole, the four seater sedan will not work.
So let's get the big stupid vehicle that's very large to protect the kids.
Then we realized that wasn't very practical.
So we flipped it into a minivan, which was way more practical.
But by the time you do two to three transitions and you do it with debt and all that sort of stuff, but we finally sort of, or like you said, we're status quo and we're stable for a few years before our commitment to extreme path.
That's sort of the landscape of what that looked like.
The thing that really drove us nuts in that time was how much of our money was going out every month to it and how limited the decision felt.
Because once you've paid for your student, once you've taken student loan debts, and then you're now six, seven, eight years removed there and you still have $70,000, $75,000, $80,000 worth of debt, that feels like a burden you're never gonna get out from underneath.
Correct.
Like maybe you'll tackle the car, but the student loan, it started to grind on us.
Yeah, most definitely.
And I will tell you, it bothered me a bit more.
I was gonna ask that.
It did bother me because I wasn't using my degree at the time.
Oh, right.
At that point, we had gone down to single earner while I stayed home with the girls.
So I wasn't even using, so that debt, that I had accrued and then I wasn't using my degree, that was very heavy for me personally.
Well, let's pivot that in really quick into no more than two or three minutes about once that burden got high enough, how do we make the decision to actually start reducing the debt?
I'll give you the 30 seconds.
I listened to talk radio at work more so back in the day than I do today, but I heard a financial guy on the radio talking about living a debt-free life.
And as silly as it sounds, maybe to some, it had never really occurred to me that you could.
I just assumed that you always would have a car payment and you would always have some amount of credit card debt and you'd always have those things.
And it just got me thinking about, yeah, that'd be kind of nice.
And we already were down to one income.
And we've talked about this in other episodes and we encourage you to go listen to some of those if you're interested on how we got to that point.
But you were already five or six years into staying at home, seven years into staying at home, we had moved across country, I was a sole earner.
And the concept of just, could we attack it for a season, was appealing to me and I brought it to you and you what?
Felt like we were already doing it.
Yeah, I was like, what else can we cut?
There's no cable, there's no this, there's no that.
I think there was no cable at that point.
That's before we did the cut.
We still had cable and everything, but we were sort of, I think you were doing some couponing, some home economics, you weren't spending a whole lot.
But I think we still had some of those sort of things.
We had not gone scorched earth at that point.
That's where the conversation came in of like, where else can we cut?
What are the lifestyle things that we have?
And when you're asking your stay at home parent to consider cutting some things that you might be using, like, I don't know, the TV for entertainment or-- For them and for me, seeing them there.
Right, or the outings or whatever, when you're asking, hey, can we cut more for a season?
The thing we really wanted to get though was margin back.
I've said that many times.
You were hesitant when I came to you.
We spent a series of multiple conversations saying, hey, what would this look like?
What would it mean?
We had a plan, we had communicated about it, but that does not mean it was easy.
No.
Let's talk about what it actually looked like when we started putting the plan into place.
So we've talked a lot about the cuts and the sacrifices around there, but we didn't mention the other part of this, which was the let's find side hustles.
Let's bring in more.
And I think when I came to you, I was a sole earner.
I was full time employed.
You were stay at home.
You were doing some couponing.
What else were you doing?
And then what did you stumble to to bring in more income?
I was doing couponing, but they had a name for it then.
I don't know if they do anymore.
Extreme couponing.
I took it up a level.
Well, there was a little TV show about that, wasn't there?
Right?
Yeah, this is, it used to be, I just got one paper on Sundays.
Oh, papers.
Right?
We started this, you were flipping.
You cut a coupon.
It was before digital coupons, right?
And before we were just getting one, well, I found a way to find more inserts.
I can't remember how it was.
And I was cutting a, like we're talking a couple hours worth of couponing I was doing over the weekend to prepare for grocery shopping during the week.
Right, you had a binder of coupons with them all organized by category and food aisles and that sort of stuff.
Yeah, I remember that.
So extreme home ec.
Correct, yeah, that was definitely one of them.
I did some mystery shopping, local restaurants.
There were a lot of different ways, but it was just a way to get out of the house and to bring in a little bit.
I got paid nominally for those and brought some in there.
And actually when the girls first went back to school, I wasn't sure if I was gonna go back to being a counselor.
And so I did some substitute teaching.
It was a way during the day while they were at school, I only did it at their school.
And so we'd drive in together, I would teach for the day while they were in class and then would come home and I'd get paid for that.
So that was definitely a side hustle for at least a year.
I don't know if I did it longer than that, but there was at least a year.
So the couponing, the mystery shopping, substitute teaching and cutting out.
Yeah, and you love the substitute teaching.
Man, shout out to all the teachers out there.
What a difficult job.
It really was.
It was so hard that sometimes I kind of dreaded getting the call at 6 a.m.
because that's how they did it.
They called you the morning of.
Yeah, the things that I did around that timeframe was the girls had gotten back into recreational soccer when they were six, they had gotten back, they had gotten into, which brought me back into the game.
I grew up playing in college, playing high school, college, big part of my sort of growing up when the girls were five or so we started them in.
And then when they were seven or eight, so right around this time period, we moved to a different club.
And fast forward a year or so, we got into our debt stuff.
I started refereeing you soccer games on the weekends.
I was volunteer coaching for them.
Then there became a paid coaching opportunity and came up a year or so into this.
That actually led to, we now run that club and it's actually been a huge part of our lives.
And it started as a make a couple hundred dollars on the weekend, reffing and coaching my kids to a very nice side hustle and a family activity.
And it's actually been jobs for the girls along the way and that's still a part of our lives.
But that started about this time.
Yep.
Yeah, we're nearing 20 years ago on that.
Interesting.
I know.
All right.
Yeah.
So something that stands out to me from that time is that trusting each other to work with good faith on this was something we had already been doing.
We had lived with joint finances for over a decade and we were very comfortable with that.
And so when we started to really hone in and negotiate on these things and have our little disagreements about where we were spending, or when we started earning more income and it started going in, that all felt very natural, but it doesn't mean it was easy.
It doesn't mean we didn't make mistakes.
I think during this time, we viewed things differently.
You as the sole earner, me as a stay at home parent, not contributing financially, I think we viewed the whole debt and getting rid of debt in a different way.
Right, well, and you as a mom and a woman valued different things than I did as a father and a man.
So I think there's a little bit of a gender lens we're gonna talk about a little bit on this.
Yeah, there is that piece.
There's a most of Michael perspective, but they do kind of fall into, at least ours did, into.
There's pressures that stay at home moms have that dads don't have.
Let's just like, let's cut the words here.
Why are we word soliding this?
You know what?
Because of what I do for a living, it's hard to break out of it sometimes.
So as a mother staying home, let's talk about that perspective, because it's different than mine as the dad who was not in the house, who was doing work.
Absolutely.
What are you gonna talk about there?
How to feel inside it?
How to feel inside it.
That's a good question.
It had its moments, both positive and negative.
I loved being able to spend time with girls and to be at home and to be in that position to be able to do that, that you had a job that afforded me that ability, not all parents get that.
But there's also some negatives to that.
There's the feeling like you're not contributing, the feeling like what you do is kind of invisible.
Because I know I was contributing in my head, if I could sit down logically, think about it, I knew I was helping out.
If I wasn't taking care of the girls and doing a lot of household things, could you have worked at the level that you did to support us?
And so I know that logically, but here in your heart, it feels differently.
There's some anxiety about that, of not being able to help out.
Yeah, so this is where I sat down the iPad, we have a discussion on this sort of stuff.
And depending on how I clip this into segments, people either get really mad at us or me, because I say something that seems offensive or whatever.
The whole discussion about the value assigned at home parents is always one of those sort of touchy things.
Throughout my career, I was making enough money that I would have been fine.
I would have had the resources to hire, I would have had resources to put the kids in daycare, I would have had resources to hire nannies.
But your contributions to those, since we were working together, allowed us to build something that was bigger than I could have built by myself.
Does that make sense?
Yes.
For me, it wasn't a survival bit, it wasn't a functioning bit, it was an enhancer on the career path.
For you, it was probably a lot different because you were sacrificing on the career side.
And we've talked a little bit a couple of different times about you've been able to build your career to the level you want to, without the pressure of having to build it to a higher level to support more than yourself or more than our shared goals for your income.
That was maybe a soft way of saying that you haven't had to earn as much because I've brought in more resources.
The thing that's a little weird to communicate there is that you could have earned a lot more money.
You could have gone into the field and you, if you had the pressures, you probably would have earned a lot more.
But the part of us being joined in a single unit means that you didn't have to have those pressures to earn more to grow a career side.
And I benefited from your desire and decision to stay home.
So combined, you and I, I sacrificed more time with the kids in the home life, you sacrificed more career time, but the trajectory got us both more of what we wanted.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
Did I navigate that at all without being too terribly offensive on it?
You know what?
I know you and I know how we came to these decisions.
So I don't find it offensive at all.
And you know what?
We can't control how other people are.
But no, I think that was a very good way of putting it, which is yes, what I do for a living, I could earn more if I wanted to live a different lifestyle.
If I wanted to do things differently.
And if you had had to live a different lifestyle.
If I had to, like if you would have died, right?
And I could have upped my game and totally supported myself and the girls.
I didn't have to do that.
And so I was able to choose a different path for myself and for our family because of that.
So how did that feel for you then?
Is that something that you were aware of while it was happening?
Or is that something you're looking at in retrospect and saying, oh yeah, I was able to, whatever.
Like, that makes sense?
Yeah, oh, it totally does.
But that's a great question because right, I am looking very forward.
Right, we have-- This is a really long time ago.
This is like close to 20 years ago.
Right, we have survivor bias.
We've been through it.
And now we're trying to look back on it.
So my question is, did you have that perception when you were coming through it?
I did, but not at the level that I do now.
Gotcha.
Yeah, absolutely.
I felt good about staying home with the girls.
I knew, I really felt I was going to go back to work at some point.
And at that point, I was there beating financially more.
That was in my head.
So I was totally fine.
I was more than fine.
I was good.
I enjoyed it for the most part.
Being a stay-at-home parent is very hard.
So I'm not going to say I enjoyed it every second of every day.
Yeah, I mean it did.
Right?
But it was, and looking at it during that time, I saw that.
Now, almost 20 years later, I look at it and go, wow, that was a gift that we were able to work together to make that happen.
Wouldn't change a thing about it.
Yeah, so I think the flipping it and looking at it from my perspective, there was definitely career pressure to stay, well, career pressure in multiple ways.
I stayed with some companies longer than I would have stayed.
I stayed in positions longer than I would have.
I didn't try to change fields when I probably would have changed fields.
And there was definitely some monetary reasoning behind that when you get to a certain level of income, it's hard to be willing to step back and try something new, especially when you have a family that is dependent on that.
So I think there are pressures on both sides of that equation.
And I think there was sometimes where looking at your life from the outside, it looks, oh, okay, here's an example.
Nice summer in North Carolina, it's nice and warm, and you're at the pool with the girls.
And if you look at the Instagram quality post of that, it's like, oh, day at the pool, toes in the water.
And when you're at work in your fifth meeting that is boring the crap out of you, and you just don't have the passion for it the moment, that's a hard thing to go.
So that's a little bit of a sacrifice, there's a little bit of jealousy or envy in that position.
But at the same point, I don't think I ever discounted the value of what you were doing because those moments of what appear to be rest and relaxation and all the childcare around it and all the home organization and all the, in our relationship, all the meal prep or all the, you know, whatever, all those extra things that aren't as glamorous, right?
Yeah, so you might be envious of the fun we're having, but maybe not so envious of, because that's like you said, a snippet of the day.
Right.
We're at the pool for maybe an hour or two the rest of the time we're doing.
And you might be envious of the paycheck that comes in, but not of the slog that it took to get to the paycheck.
Absolutely.
Okay, anything else jump out there that were in those seasons?
I did worry a bit, and I don't know how much I vocalized this.
You can tell me if I did, but I was concerned that you would resent me because you were the one that paying off the student loan debt, and most of it was mine.
Yeah.
And so occasionally, probably multiple times a year, I thought, I wonder if Michael ever thinks, I'm putting in, especially some of the hours you worked for startup companies, you were 60 hours a week and- 60, you're cute.
Okay, yeah, they were more than that.
And I was like, oh, Michael's working so hard, and a lot of the money's going to pay now my debt, and I'm not financially contributing.
So there were some concerns that I had during that time that maybe you would, either you did resent me or you might come to resent me.
Yeah, fair enough.
Yeah.
I've lived with that resent for 20 years, I'm still waiting for you to pay it all back.
I think we are, I don't know that I knew how much that was, but we definitely talked about that.
You've voiced that multiple times throughout that.
And I think that's one of the things that we really learned during this process was you have to communicate when you're feeling some of those things, and maybe not every day, and I'm feeling this being sucked into it.
But I think you expressed that enough times that I knew you were aware of that, and I think we talked about that a handful of times throughout those years, so fine.
But again, we had already been living 10 years with joint money, we didn't keep score on it.
So I think for me, it never really felt like, I was paying our debt, it never really did.
There might've been some times in there where it felt like, but for the most part, I don't think it did.
It felt just like we got a crap load of debt, we got to get out from underneath this.
But it's because we had a shared vision for what we were working toward.
But interesting, the other thing, or another thing that I think came in for me that's probably worth mentioning is I didn't spend much money, you spent almost all the money.
You were the ones spending money, because you, I paid our, and still, we have this relationship where I pay the reoccurring bills, but you do most of the spending, you buy most of the household stuff, you do most of that.
And for a very long time, I would always prioritize what the girls needed or what you needed or what the house needed over any personal wants.
Part of that's my nature.
Yes.
I think so, some people are spenders or they're gamers and they want the entertainment stuff or they have things.
And so part of my nature 25 years ago, or 20 years ago when we were really going through this, 15 years ago, not the math really matters, 15 years ago during that, the sacrifice was fine.
I didn't have a whole lot of needs.
I've been very content with what I had.
And so that was fine, but I was definitely hesitant to do things that now I don't even pause on.
So I do love my Adidas shoes.
I do love some of that sort of stuff.
And before I would never like, oh, I'm not getting an extra pair.
Or until we had rocked out some really big things, I didn't pursue my tattoo or any of that sort of stuff.
And I very much wanted that really early on and I didn't get it till I was close to 50.
So, that was something I very much delayed.
There's trips and travels and things like that that I really wanted to do that I just was fine with not doing.
I think those are some of the pressures that come with sacrifice.
So you might've been really concerned about what you were spending.
I think that was maybe a two way thing.
I didn't.
And I think some people probably would feel deprived by not doing that.
I'm earning the lion's share of money, but I'm not spending any of it.
I had some moments where I was like conscious of that, but not for the most part, but I know people, that's something.
Cause like, well, I'm making all this money and it all goes to the house.
And I was okay with that, but that's something that a lot of people are gonna hit with.
Yeah, I could totally see that.
I think I'll probably have.
So.
All right, well, let's talk a little bit about the, I think I just hinted at it a little bit, but the different values we have.
We talked about there were some communications and things that we didn't sort of go there.
So, yeah, what skills did we come or learn?
Or how did our disagreements about priorities around money shape where we are today?
It kind of forced us to align and communicate about things.
About what you were, you're smiling.
I was waiting for you to say something.
Well, I think it's one of the biggest concerns or criticisms or fears people have with combining money is that we're gonna have disagreements.
I would say that's a feature.
Like you're going to get to know your partner so much better when you have to align around something as fundamental as money.
So go on, that's what I was smiling about.
It was, once again, a growing experience in our relationship to see where our priorities were and to find ways to meet both of those.
And it was through compromise for the most part.
Or sacrifice.
I mean, there was definitely, like I was just telling, there was a period where I just sacrificed a lot.
And I was okay with that because I knew where our vision was and I was okay with sacrifice.
Yes, there's some compromise in there, but there's also sacrifice that happens in there.
And knowing you knew which things I was willing to sacrifice or learned which things I was willing to sacrifice.
And I learned which things you were willing to sacrifice.
I also learned which things you're like, no, that's a comfort or that's something that makes a, to me, what seems like an outsized positive.
Like I wouldn't be plus by getting, I don't have an example off the top of my head, but there are certain things you wanted or would have that bring way more joy to you in your life than they would ever bring to me.
Well, I mean, here's an example.
birthday and holiday spending.
Yeah.
So, give me your view on that, because I don't want to sound curmudgeon-y and tight, but there's a background of why I'm curmudgeon-y and tight on this, which I'll share.
We definitely have very different views, and this has been a discussion for years.
I mean, even yearly, I think we still discuss it.
Well, and it's not resolved.
It's an ongoing one.
It's an ongoing thing.
We view holidays and special occasions like birthdays very differently.
I was raised in a way, birthdays were like, we didn't celebrate a birthday day.
It was at least a week.
If not, you had a birthday month, man.
Well, your mom still celebrates her birthday month.
So, yeah.
Yes, mom has a birthday month.
I love that.
Anyway, it's just something, so it's a big deal.
And I like to show appreciation for those big deals by spending on them.
And- And you do holiday baskets and you do- Oh my goodness.
Boo baskets and Easter baskets.
The girls are almost 27, and I just asked Taylor yesterday.
So, what do you guys need in your boo basket this year?
27, she will almost be by the time that I'm done.
Yeah, I like acknowledging it and it's fun, but those are discussions that we have about where are the priorities.
And I feel I've come to learn that, okay, if I do this, what is it taking from or what?
And so we've discussed that, especially with, I recently had a large purchase and I said, will this keep us from X, which goals that we had set, and we discuss them and we talk about them and we compromise.
And yeah, there've been things we sacrificed on each of us.
So, I think the Easter baskets and the gift giving and those sorts of things are a good example because I grew up in a house where acknowledging birthdays wasn't nearly as big.
It was a day and it was a small little thing.
But on the flip side, Christmas in my house was always, to me, very extreme and over the top.
And my dad, he's a gift giver, he loves giving gifts.
And I don't think I'm breaking his confidence or any of this sort of thing.
I think I've told him all this sort of stuff before that.
And I saw sort of the feasts and famines cycle with his spending at times around holidays.
And he would always give to the extreme around Christmas in particular.
And I know that that bill would follow him and I've seen it, I know, so I was always sort of scarred by the overspending nature of it.
So when we were in our really extreme seasons, then I wanted to hold tight to those things because they weren't a value to me, whereas you wanted to protect those things because they were a value to you.
And I think there was an area where definitely it was compromised.
You way restricted your spending on there, but it didn't go to zero.
There was always stuff in there and even more around the birthdays and the holidays, maybe the incremental baskets and those sort of things were much more subdued.
But Christmas was always, it was always something we carved grace out for.
There was always stuff that was abundance there.
Anything, any other, any other topic to talk about on that stuff?
Because I mean, there was different values and then it's finances, so it's mainly around spending.
There was some differences around, we cut off retirement saving and we cut off some of those things.
So we were very aligned about the saving goals in there because there was no savings.
It was get rid of all the debt.
So we really are focusing in on values.
In this case, it was spending because it's really the whole thing because we had cut investing and everything.
We've always been aligned on that.
And that was one of the things that freed back up.
We've been very aligned about how much should go into savings, how much should go into those things.
Anything else you wanna hit on there?
I'm trying to think.
I feel like there was another one we talked about.
Well, on our list was holiday travels, birthday spending, oh, travel and cars.
You sort of alluded to it a little bit with your recent big purchase was a new car.
Was it was a new car?
New to you car.
New to me car.
Even this late, still new to you.
Right, yeah, it's a point to find a new car.
Come on now.
There it is.
Don't be a hater.
That's fine, my opinion.
I'm allowed to have an opinion.
You told me not to be soft earlier.
That's true.
That was me.
That's my hard line.
Don't buy a new car.
Anyway, whereas you really liked the travel and like to spend money on that.
So that's a difference in something that we've compromised on and talked about.
Right, and both of those during our extreme season got cut, like neither of those.
So that's a good example because those both got the full acts during our really extreme seasons.
And yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think that's the transition too.
We've talked about our extreme seasons and the misaligned values.
And we talked about why we did that.
Let's talk about being on the other side of the extreme.
And was it worth it?
What were some of the things we brought back?
What were some of the big lessons we learned from it?
And how is it impacting us today?
Go.
Right.
Deer in the headlights.
Is this a scare to the dog?
No.
First off, so worth it.
So worth it.
I'm so glad you were listening on.
Right, talk radio that you heard it, that you presented it to me, that we discussed it, that we did it.
It changed the family trajectory.
Oh, wow.
We were.
Wow.
Yeah.
I mean, it seemed like a very simple concept that we just had missed.
Right, everybody has debt, right?
Yeah, and didn't even dream about that.
And yeah, so go.
Yeah, absolutely.
And now that we're on the other side, debt free, it has afforded us some opportunities, you know, career workload, like I said earlier.
So I'm back, I'm in private practice.
I work, I could work more than I do.
I choose for quality of life and the things that we enjoy.
I don't take on as many clients as I could.
And I can do that because we're on the other side of our debt journey.
Right, you have the freedom to choose that.
I do, I do.
And I can take time off for travels and things.
And those are things that we can do now that we didn't do before.
Right.
Yeah, so I think that's one of the things.
And we have more opportunities to kind of chart our own path and do what we want with our money instead of this is where it goes.
This is where it always has to go.
It goes to these bills, it goes to, we can take it in a different direction now that we're on the other side and don't have any debt.
Yeah, so the sacrifice for us has given us freedom, it's given us the opportunity to choose.
It's given us more margin, which allows us, it makes the decisions easier.
Yes.
To be honest, when you get away from paycheck to paycheck and you have the four walls and the foundation of your house sort of all set and good, and you have some more margin, it allows less conflict because the lines where we really have to come together and the values come into play, they're much different than they were back in the day.
So I think putting in that sacrifice and dedication has put us in a good position.
Now, if you are feeling financially misaligned with your partner, we have an activity that we'd like to share that maybe will help you start down this path, this journey of creating alignment around finances.
And maybe that's a springboard for creating alignment in other areas of your life.
So let's get into our pen to paper section.
In our Pen to Paper segment, we give you a practical challenge or reflection to help you write your own lasting marriage story.
If you are feeling financial stress and looking to align better with your partner, we have a challenge today that we hope will help you start that journey.
Today's challenge is to name your own version of an extreme season.
Pick one recurring expense to eliminate together over the next 90 days and assign every dollar that you save from not spending on that to a named debt or you can identify a goal that you want to reach.
Our extreme season included dropping cable and the modern version of that would be any of your streaming services, getting rid of Disney Plus or Netflix.
The extreme season looks different for everybody.
We mentioned cable TV, yours might be dining out, yours might be, I don't know, whatever your sort of thing is.
But the key is set a timeline, 90 days.
And during that 90 days, start to share with each other.
What are you feeling?
Are you excited?
You're seeing the debt number go down.
Are you excited because you're seeing savings goal go up?
Are you really missing your favorite show and it's driving you nuts?
Talk about it.
Yeah.
You have to do it multiple times.
90 days, it's a significant amount of time, but we think you need that much in order to really feel what this looks like.
You can't experience a season of extreme cutting back if you just do it for a week.
You're not gonna feel that.
So talk about it throughout the 90 days and come together at the end and really decide, was that a good thing or was that a good experience?
Right, and maybe that is the launch pad for you really going hardcore into a full extreme season.
So test drive it.
Right.
That's today's Pen a Paper segment.
Test drive, that's what phrase I was looking for.
Good work.
There you go.
(laughing) So that brings us to the close of our three part series on finances in marriage.
If you missed our first episode on assessing your partner's money, character, pre-marriage while you were dating, or the second episode where we talked about combining or keeping your finances separate, we invite you to check those out next.
Also, we did a deeper dive into our extreme debt journey in episode eight, I think it was, which was titled Money and Marriage, Building Financial Trust in Your Relationship.
We will put all links in our description and show notes.
We have talked a lot about finances in the last few episodes.
If we missed any topics you'd like us to explore, let us know in the comments.
With that, we wanna thank you for joining us and we invite you to connect with us by joining our free Penned in Ink community.
Here we share free digital guides and occasional updates to help you build your own long lasting love.
Click the link in the description to join now.
Also, remember to share a comment, ask a question, and let us know your thoughts on today's topic.
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Thanks everyone.
Have a good one.
(upbeat music)