First job was out in the fields picking strawberries, dirty work, long work, sometimes hot work, but we were doing it and I was proud of the money.
The trust comes from the transparency.
It doesn't come from you telling me, it comes from you showing me.
This person, you know, cleans out my bank accounts, or what if this person does X, Y, and Z?
Maybe that's someone you shouldn't be married to.
If you don't trust them with your finances, why do you trust them in other areas of your life?
Welcome to Penned in Ink, a podcast where we discuss marriage and long-lasting love.
Do you and your partner disagree about money?
Is one of you a spender while the other's a saver?
Are you disconnected on the money front, or are you aligned and killing it?
Everywhere you turn, you will hear that money and money fights are a leading cause of divorce breakups.
If that is true, then openly talking about and aligning around financial habits might just be the single greatest thing you can do to put yourself on the path to long-lasting love.
Today, we are taking our first dive into the dynamics of how we manage money.
All right, Melissa, this is an area we've spent a lot of energy and time on.
You ready to talk about it a bit today?
Absolutely.
Before we get into this, I have a request for today's podcast on this.
I love talking money.
I love talking finances and all the ins and outs of it, which might lead me to over-talk.
So if I get on my soapbox, if I'm talking too much in an area, just cut me off, jump in, give your thoughts.
Agreed?
So I'm hearing you're giving me permission to interrupt you at will.
Not that you need permission to, because you will do it anyway.
I'm actually requesting you do it, because I will probably go long-winded on some of these.
All right, with that, this is our first of many episodes where we will explore finances.
It's a huge topic in any relationship.
If you're gonna be successful over time, you're gonna have conflicts in this area.
Hopefully you're gonna find, eventually, shared goals and vision and alignment in this area.
It's a big topic.
We can't possibly talk about all of it in one episode.
So we thought a good place to start would be, let's talk about our early money habits.
Before we were a couple, how did we learn how to manage money, and what did that look like?
So why don't you go first?
How did you learn about money and managing it, or not?
No, definitely managed it.
We didn't have a lot of money.
We had everything we needed, but there wasn't any room for extras.
And so my parents taught us that you earn the things that you want, especially when it comes to the extras.
And so at a very young age, I think around age 10, my siblings and I, I'm one of three, I believe it was mom dropped us off at the strawberry fields and we picked strawberries.
And they would pay you, the people that own the farms would pay you, I think when I first started, 10 cents a pound for strawberries.
Put that in perspective, how much is a pound of strawberries?
It's like a bucket, right?
Right.
Yeah, so it's not like five strawberries for a dime.
It's a bit to get a bucket of.
I would come home with like $5 after a couple hours, if that puts it into perspective.
But it was $5.
Well, it was 1920, so.
$5, I had never made money before.
So it seemed like a lot to me.
It meant that Adam and I could ride our bikes down the corner store and get some candy.
It was a lot easier than picking up cans throughout town and turning them in for the.
Recycling money.
The recycling money.
Oh, we used to do that too.
So much fun.
Anyway, first job was out in the fields, picking strawberries, dirty work, long work, sometimes hot work, but we were doing it.
And I was proud of the money.
Once I started earning some money, mom said, hey, we're gonna go down to the bank and we're gonna open a savings account.
I was like, cool.
Mom takes me to the bank, we open a savings account, she shows me how to use a ledger, how to deposit, all that good stuff.
And that's really where I worked all the way through high school, doing babysitting, other agricultural work as well.
And I used that for the extras.
I wasn't required to pay for, buy my own shoes or anything like that unless it was an extra.
Like the guest jeans instead of the Wrangler jeans or something to that effect.
Yeah, so that's what I remember as my first.
Yeah, that's good.
So your parents instilled work.
Definitely.
Yeah, and I think that's something we share in common there.
We both came from limited resources.
Just enough to cover expenses you're sort of getting to, not an abundance of cash in the household.
You talk about 10, 11.
My dad got divorced when I was probably 15 or 16.
So I had lived out in the country until then.
We lived absolutely in the middle of nowhere.
And so life was far more taking care of animals and being out there.
Not a whole lot of need for money because there was nothing out in the country.
But when he got divorced, we moved into town, had an apartment.
My dad worked nights, he worked a lot.
And if I needed, much like you, if I needed extra money, I was gonna have to work for it.
I wasn't gonna be given that extra money.
One of my high school jobs was cleaning and buffing floors at grocery stores.
And that's nighttime work.
So my dad would work nights.
He would go to work at nine or 10 and be home at five or six, seven, whatever time he got home.
I would go to work later than that.
I'd go to work at like one o'clock in the morning because that's after the stocking and everything's done.
I'd work from one to five and then come home, sleep a little bit and go to school.
So yeah, work I think was a way.
We both sort of had that as a shared background.
You talked about formative years and where you really learned your early money habits.
I wanna talk a little bit about how we had to build our habits together.
Why don't you tell us, if you're listening to this, how did you learn your money habits?
Who were the influencers in your life that taught you those money habits?
Did they serve you well or did you have to unlearn them?
I feel like we've had to, the work part served us well.
Some of the other areas, like did your family talk about money?
Very little.
Yeah.
Mom was a stay-at-home mom until I started middle school.
And dad earned the money that was brought in that, and they didn't talk about it.
I had no clue what my dad made.
I knew nothing.
Like I said, I knew I had clothes to wear, I had food.
I was able to participate in sports because they paid for it.
I had everything that I needed.
We just didn't talk about, I have no clue.
Dad could have been making 20 bucks or $1,000 an hour.
I would have no idea.
Right.
Yeah, transparency on money and how you openly communicate it was definitely not something even we did in my household.
My dad was a good earner, but he's also, as I asked earlier, you know, a spender or a saver.
My dad very much historically has been a spender.
One of his love languages is gift giving, sometimes to a fault where he just gives way too much.
Speaking my own opinion, my own scars there, but you know, interesting.
Yeah, so share with us, how'd you learn your habits?
Well, let's fast forward a little bit.
Let's skip ahead to later days, college, where we were actually in a committed relationship.
We were starting to build our future together.
And what did our early days look like?
Did we ever have the money talk and did we intentionally align around this area or did we sort of fall into it?
Now, before we get into that, I think it's pretty easy to say that our early money days were a little unique in that A, we were very young and B, we were poor.
We didn't have any money.
So some of our decisions were very easy to make, whereas given the changing dynamics around long-term relationships now, some of them happening much later in life than ours, where you might have more assets, you might be more established, you might have more financial habits that need to be broken.
We didn't have a lot of financial habits because we were super early on.
So ours was a little different.
So we didn't have to do some of these things we're going to talk about here, but we did naturally grow into some of these areas.
So what's a money talk?
Is that a term you've heard before?
Before we started planning this episode, what's the money talk?
I haven't heard a lot of people say the money talk when it comes to the people that I work with, but I've had people ask me about it, or they'll tell me, oh, this is how we handle our money, and then we'll have a discussion on it.
And so I've learned, because I know how we do it, but now I have a pretty good sense of all the different ways that money can be handled in between a couple.
Some of those healthy, some of those not healthy.
Right.
So let's dig into what the money talk is in this context.
So I think we all know the rom-com sort of version of, oh, we stayed up all night, we had this great conversation, we really connected.
This is maybe the more practical side of that type of conversation.
When in your relationship did you bare your financial soul?
Did you really have those heart-to-heart conversations about your money and how you manage money?
And there are different times in your relationship where it makes sense to have those conversations, and at what level you have those conversations.
There's no reason to go super deep with someone you're just casually dating and seeing.
But if you would get engaged, you go deeper on some of these conversations.
And those talks include things like, what are your financial habits?
Are you a spender or a saver?
How do you manage your money?
Do you budget?
Do you save for the future?
Or are you living paycheck-to-paycheck?
And I think for those money talks to be successful, they have to be super transparent, and they have to be open.
And again, at the right time in your relationship.
Now, if you're just casually dating, no, that's your individual business.
So when we were in college, coming out of my graduation, yours, we were engaged.
And I think at this point, we were very much in our financial transparency area.
And we had really explained to each other what we were making.
We knew what our assets were.
By the way, there were none.
We knew what our debts were.
By the way, there was lots.
Primarily around school, a little bit of consumer, but primarily around school.
But we started to align around what were our goals for that money, and how we were gonna build out of it.
Now, one of the things that I think is kind of interesting is there was a phase of time there where the money talk wasn't a thing at all.
But today, especially with Gen Z type people, it is something that's very intentional.
When you get to the point where you're committing to someone, bearing it all out is something that's growing.
And I was reading some research, and I'll put a link to this in the description, that was talking about somewhere around half, 47% of Gen Z report that they are having very intentional money talks as they're getting serious, which I think is awesome.
If it's a big cause of breakup and divorce, talking about it early, great, and with clarity.
So before we had our money talk, before we were married, we were just engaged.
How do we manage our money?
Totally separate.
You earned your money, you kept it.
I'm assuming you had a savings account and a checking account.
I think we reviewed earlier in episode two when I bought your ring that I clearly had a checking account, and someone clearly might've snooped in that ledger to see that an engagement ring was coming her way.
So yes, I had my own checking account and managed my own money.
Callback, go on.
Very much so.
And I did the same.
And I'm thinking it was because there was no reason to.
Your bills were your bills, my bills were my bills.
They weren't combined.
And so at that time, we did not need, I don't even think it crossed my mind that we would, when just dating, combine.
And nor should you.
You never should combine when you're just dating with somebody.
Even if you're living together, you should never combine.
There are protections when you combine finances.
When you're married, there are no protections if you choose to combine finances.
And that means buying things together, like a house.
It's really, really risky to buy a house together with someone you're not married to.
So yeah, we kept all of our finances separate.
To your point, it never really crossed our mind.
But I think now that you see a lot more people choosing to live together early, you're seeing a lot more co-mingling of financial responsibilities.
I would just say that the only clean way to do that is you maintain separate financial identities.
If you start muddying deals together, you can choose to share bills and do that sort of stuff.
But if you start combining resources when you're not married, that is very legally problematic.
So don't do that.
Okay.
Did we, sort of alluded to this, did we ever have a money talk?
Did we ever sit down and really bare our souls on that?
Or what did we do?
No, not in a formal way.
I'm sure you had an idea.
I was doing work study.
You kind of have an idea of what somebody makes when they're doing work study at college before I got my other job.
So we talked about what we made, I feel I did.
Probably.
Is that accurate?
I think it is.
I think where our real money talk came, we had dug a pretty big hole and we had some pretty good visions of where we wanted to go.
And I think we knew we wanted to, again, keep in mind, we were engaged at this point.
I think our vision was to do some big and some not so big things pretty quick.
Like we wanted to buy a house.
We did.
We were very much in the mindset of buying a house.
And I think you reminded me that we wanted to get a dog.
We did.
Yeah.
And I think they came dog first, house second, if I recall.
Very close together.
Not until we had decided and found a house and started that process.
Because we knew better.
We wanted a Rottweiler.
And we knew apartment living for a Rottweiler isn't sustainable.
I believe we got him a month before we moved into our first home.
I'll put some photos in here because we've got some great photos of him.
He was all of about, I don't know, this big or whatever.
And he ended up being well over a hundred pounds.
So he was- 130 actually.
Yeah, he was a beast.
But yeah, we had him in that little apartment to start.
Let's talk a little bit about our tendencies at that point because it'll be a good counterpoint as we get into how we manage money now.
By nature, are you a spender or a saver?
I view myself as a saver.
That's from the formative years.
I wanted specific things.
For instance, I wanted to go to horse camp so bad with my best friend.
And mom said, that's a lot of money.
She said, with your babysitting job, if you can raise half the amount, your dad and I will cover the other half.
And at $2 an hour, babysitting for summer, I was able to raise it because I bought very little office because I had a goal in mind.
I wanted to go to horse riding camp.
So I view myself as a saver.
On the flip side, I do like to spend.
And it's why I enjoy certain holidays and times of year more, birthdays and things, because I feel, oh, cool, I get to buy what I want.
I don't kind of give myself permission because the rest of the year, I view myself as a saver, partly because we do still have some very good goals that we have not reached yet.
And whatever I spend now will keep us, it will take longer to get to those shared goals that we have.
Yeah, when we were talking about this, you were, in our show prep, you were thinking that I was waiting for you and wanting you to say you're a spender.
I don't think that's right.
You enjoy spending, but we are very disciplined when it comes to our financial goals.
And there's two ways to really hit your financial goals.
There's how much you bring in and how much you go out.
And I think we're very good at managing what goes out.
We're not too shabby at what comes in.
It's both sides of that.
You got to really work both sides of that equation.
So no, I wasn't looking for you to be a spender because I think you are a saver.
I'm definitely a saver, have always been a saver, with the exception of I love to spend on experiences.
I'm not a big materialistic guy.
Although over time, I think I've definitely fallen into some things that I'd really like to have, and I've gotten better with that.
But early on, I could care less about a lot of the material stuff.
But if it was going to a concert, or if it was going to a show, or if it was traveling, yeah, sign me up, I'll spend on those things all day.
And I very much am still that way.
We're having a little bit of a transition right now around cars and that sort of stuff.
I don't care about cars at all.
The only thing I care about a car is, does it start and get me to where it goes?
You like cars a lot more than I do.
So we're having a little bit of give and take on the priorities there, because for me, I would much rather spend money on travel than a car.
So yeah, differences there.
What were our views early on on debt?
Was it normalized for you?
Were we comfortable with it?
Were you comfortable with it?
Yes and no.
I'm trying to think about, well, society normalizes it, right?
U.S. society, well, American culture normalizes it.
I wouldn't know that all of them do, but in the U.S., yes, we are very consumer-driven and we are very normalized of debt, yes.
Yes, the fact that I was in, I had just started college and I opened my mailbox at college one day, and there was an application for a Discover card.
I had never had a card.
I was all over that.
I was like, oh, cool, I can, before payday, I can spend the money I don't have.
And in that way, it was normalized.
I don't remember my parents, though.
They own cars, they own a house.
So I knew they had debt, but they weren't the kind of people that would go out and buy big things.
And I just did not see that.
Where debt, at the time, I was okay with was school debt.
I found it was a means to an end, and I was willing, looking back, I wish I wouldn't have been, but I was willing to pay whatever it took to get the education I wanted to do, the career that I wanted to do.
Yeah, your parents were very much savers.
I mean, again, they were working at levels where they probably were forced to be more savers than spenders.
So I don't know what their natural inclinations are, but reality was they were very much savers, and I think that rolled through.
We took on a lot of college debt, as you alluded to, because back then, college debt was considered good debt.
Good debt because you'll, in theory, go get a job that allows you to pay it back and everything.
We could debate and go really deep onto is there any such thing as good debt, and I would just argue there's probably not, and definitely not to the levels we went to.
Let's talk a little bit about how, during this time, our goals started shifting from individual goals to shared goals.
We alluded to it a little bit, but what were some of our shared goals that were coming out of this time?
First, we wanted to get married, and that does take some money to combine.
We wanted a dog.
We wanted a house.
We knew we wanted kids.
We didn't know when, but we knew we wanted kids, and we figured, at least I did, after the first house, we'd have a second house, a better house, and that's kind of how it worked, but we were aligned in that we wanted to get married, we wanted to own a home, and we wanted to have children.
Yeah, and I think this is when we had to then layer on some of the individual goals.
You still had more schooling ahead of you.
You had to go on to grad school for what you were leaning toward for a career.
I was jumping out into the workforce, so our individual goals started to shift and become more shared goals, and became a shared goal for you to get through school, whereas I think it was very individual, so just kind of that natural progression there.
I think that's pretty good about the money talk, and we'll revisit this a little later.
We've got to come back into the money talk a little bit in a future section here, segment here, but this brings us to one of our recurring segments, Inked Moments.
Inked Moments, we share a memory from our past that is relevant to today's topic, so Melissa has one she's going to share today.
Yeah, why don't you go ahead and share, what's your memory around money that we want to talk about?
I'm not really sure why I remember it so distinctly.
Like, I don't even know the name of the bank.
I just remember- Wells Fargo.
Was it a Wells Fargo?
Was it called that at the time?
Yes, okay.
So, Wells Fargo.
It was shortly after we got married.
I remember that we went to the bank together to discuss starting retirement savings because we knew that we did not want to get to retirement and have no money.
And so, at the ripe old age of 21, for both of us, we went, and I don't know.
I just remember walking through the doors.
I can still picture it.
It's the weirdest thing.
Yeah, in Forest Grove there, right?
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah, there's a lot of memories I don't have from my past, but that one is clear.
I wonder, we should explore that at some point.
Why is it that I remember that so clearly?
Maybe because it put us on the path to where we are today.
Maybe it's one of those, maybe it should have been in one of our episodes where we talked about important moments and life decision.
I remember that because I do think it set us on this trajectory to meeting those goals that we had was that one visit to Wells Fargo.
Interesting.
Keep in mind that when we talk about going to the bank to talk about finance stuff, this was over 30 years ago, dare I say pre-internet.
Yeah, that kind of makes us like, we had a life before you could just go online and do all your banking.
We had a life before you could Google and find out all the things you want to know about investments and stuff.
So back in those days, you had to go to experts in the field to find out information.
A bank was one of those ways.
I would say it was a very basic way of doing it.
There were financial advisors at that time and stuff.
We weren't really doing that.
But yeah, I think that showed where our mindset was.
Even though we weren't optimally executing any of those things, we knew that we needed to start down that path.
And if you are fortunate enough to be really early on in life and have the mindset of a long-term, you starting early gives you superpowers when it comes to retirement.
Compound interest, look it up, kids, it's awesome, will really put you on a path to financial success.
I don't remember how much we really leveraged and executed coming out of that, but the mindset it gave us and showed where we were was really important.
Yeah, it's a good inked memory.
Yeah, I had not remembered that and you brought it up in our show prep.
I'm like, oh yeah, that's a good one, save that.
But the more I think about it, I'm like, oh yeah, I remember exactly where that bank was and where all that stuff was.
Let's move on to our next segment.
And we're gonna bring back a segment that we introduced in some early episodes we have not revisited recently, which we refer to as from his perspective, from her perspective.
This is where we reflect on today's topic, put a little bit of a gender lens onto it.
And today we're gonna discuss who should quote unquote manage the finances in a relationship.
Now, to give us some context for this, when we say manage the finances, we can come at this from a bunch of different ways.
Who should earn the money?
Who should actually execute and pay the bills?
Who should set the budgets?
Who should save for the future?
You wanna start?
You want me to start?
I'll start with that.
All right, who should manage money in the family?
As with a lot of things, it's joint.
My, from a woman's perspective, comes from my mother managed the money.
She was the stay at home person.
Dad brought the money in and mom is the one that paid the bills.
I don't know if they had a formal budget per se, but she bought the groceries.
She, the electric bill, she took care of all of that.
And so that is what I saw.
And I think even when she started working, she still did a lot of that.
Now, when it comes to you and I, I think it's safe to say that I have an unhealthy relationship with numbers.
An unhealthy relationship with numbers.
You're bad at math.
Is that what you're trying to say?
I've never been comfortable with math.
Okay, that's a better way of saying it.
I do not believe I'm as bad as I think I am.
It's just, that's ingrained from a test taking experience in first grade.
Early day traumas.
It really is when, anyway, they scare me on some level.
However, so what has taken place because of my, I have a little bit, a little bit, I'm gonna say a little bit more than a little bit, anxiety about messing stuff up when it comes to numbers or that I don't do the execution.
I think traditionally, historically, it's been a male's role to earn money and bring it home.
And historically, whoever's managing the house, which tend to be women, would execute the paying of bills and the expenses and stuff.
It's a very outdated model for it.
And if we're putting a male perspective on it, I still think men for their spirit, if you will, need to be providers.
They need to earn because that does something for you as a man to provide.
You don't need to be a sole provider by any stretch.
And you don't even need to be the biggest provider, but you need to provide because I think that gives you something powerful in a male spirit that you're contributing.
For executing of budgets and everything, I would say whoever has a healthier relationship with numbers should do that.
In our children, I think Taylor and her marriage, I mean, she's a CPA, she loves numbers.
So I'm pretty sure she executes a lot of their bill paying and everything.
But that brings us to the concept of budgeting and saying where money goes.
I think that it is super unhealthy if either person controls the budget.
The budget has to be a shared thing.
One of the powers of money in a relationship is where you spend your money is where your goals are.
And if one person is setting all the budget categories or setting all those things, that's one person's goals.
That's not your couple's goals.
So I think we believe very strongly, I believe very strongly that a strong man should give guidance in those areas, but he has to be open to input and feedback on those.
If you come in and say, this is how we're doing it, you're just gonna cause problems.
One, you don't understand probably all the areas that you think you understand in running a household, and you're not building agreement and synergy, you're being demanding, and that will never work.
So from my perspective, I should provide guidance on what we're doing with our budget because I come at a perspective that you might not have on some stuff, but you know a lot of the areas of our budget way better than I do.
I believe the budget is a partnership.
And if one person is dictating, even if they earn 100% of the money, that person is dictating the budget, that it is unhealthy, and it can lead to resentment, and it's just- When you see this in your practice, you see financial abuse in your practice, where, and let's just be transparent, it's almost always the man is earning more money, and he's setting where we spend money, and how it's spent, and is controlling the relationship.
And this is one of the big fears of how do you manage money in a relationship is if you have an unequal say, unequal control, unequal earning.
Yeah, it's a big issue, right?
Yeah, very much so.
All right, I mean, I don't think there's anything too controversial in there.
I think one of the things that you said in show prep that you didn't say in here is, I really clearly said I think it's important for men to earn money.
Is it important for women to earn money?
Without a doubt.
Why?
It's, you mentioned the soul for the men.
I think for, it's very similar for women as well.
I took some time off.
I earned for a bit, took some time off to have the girls.
And when I went back to work and got a paycheck, I don't, I feel it contributed to a higher self-confidence in myself.
I think it does for others as well, because I've heard it from moms that specifically in this example, moms that have re-entered the workforce after spending some time as stay-at-home moms, that they just feel really good about contributing.
They know that they were contributing before.
I'm very fond of saying to people, when they say they don't work, I say, you don't work outside the home.
You work.
It just makes you feel good and feel more ownership when you're also bringing in money.
I believe that is important for the vast majority of women I know, that they want to be a part of that.
Some don't.
And if that works for their relationship, then that's discussed by all means.
But the vast majority of people I know get value in bringing in money into the home and contributing.
Yeah, I don't disagree.
And again, the only reason I said it from a male perspective is because that's what the segment is.
So I just want to give you a chance to come back because I think it's important to every person's spirit that they are contributing however they define contributing.
And when we talk about couples, contributing financially has power to it.
And in some relationships, you need it to create the dynamic for shared decision-making.
We didn't need that in ours.
I mean, we always were gonna make shared decisions, but some people need that.
They need that.
I'm contributing, so I have a say.
Either because the dynamics in their relationship or because of how they feel.
That I shouldn't say anything, it's not my, I didn't earn it.
Yeah, so I think that's really good.
So how do you guys divide your finances?
Tell us a little bit about that.
There are many ways to slice and dice the earning, the paying, the budgeting, the savings.
So let us know in the comments how you manage your money.
Before we get to our closing segment, we want to go into one of the most impactful early decisions that you will make in your financial relationship.
And this is sort of a grenade, a hot topic.
If you go onto social media, you will see this all over the place.
And this is the meaty topic of, do you combine your finances or do you stay separate financially?
And we've already answered this question for us many, many, many times.
We would say, with just a few edge cases, that there is power in combining finances.
So let's dig into that a little bit as a topic.
Well, give me a case where you wouldn't combine finances.
Why would you not combine finances with your spouse?
If one has any type of addiction or severe mental health issue, I've known of some people during a manic episode will go and spend thousands of dollars in an hour.
Online, more these days.
There has to be some accountability and some help there for people that have a gambling addiction.
Yeah, I think that is the major edge case.
So when we go into our views on combining finances, we're coming from a lens of, you are mentally, physically healthy in a relationship.
Our view is you should combine finances.
And we'll talk a little bit more about how you might go about combining those finances.
But yeah, I think the basic edge case is, if there is addiction, if there is mental health issues, then by all means, keep your money separate because that's how you protect each other, that's how you protect the relationship.
It's not about protecting your assets, it's about protecting the relationship.
If you combine in that scenario and it drains everything, then you're both in trouble.
But if you can keep it separate, you have a chance with that.
So yeah, I think short of that, we're advocates for combining.
Now, why?
What does combining bring to us?
We've already talked a bit about how transparency is super important.
If you keep separate financial lives, if you keep separate checking accounts, you keep separate bills, you keep separate credit cards, transparency can be, and almost for sure, is going to be difficult.
What are the positives of combining it?
There's power in having a shared goal.
And when you see the shared account, you put in some, I put in some, watching it grow, it puts you on the same, heading in the same direction, working towards something together, there's power in that.
That feels good.
Yeah, I agree.
Where you spend your money is where your priorities are.
And if you have joint accounts, joint transparency, you're not going to deviate without it being very obvious.
So if we've agreed that we're executing toward this goal, and if our finances are shared and together, and money goes out of the account, we have an opportunity to talk to each other and say, why did that go out?
What happened?
If you are keeping things separate, there's a higher risk of financial infidelity.
Money just not going towards your goals, siphoning off.
How do we deal with imbalances of earnings?
How do you and I deal with it?
Yeah, how do we deal with it?
We obviously know how much you make and how much I make, but everything goes into the same.
I don't look at the amount that goes in one month and say, oh, Michael brought in this much, and I brought in this much.
And no, it's all co-mingled, and I feel like I own all of it with you, and not just this portion.
Yeah, we have an income.
Correct.
You don't have an income, and I have an income.
We have an income.
The family has an income, and we budget off the income.
Let's talk about, I think this is a good segue into a couple different ways that you could combine finances.
We are clearly all in everything together.
That is, I would argue, the cleanest, simplest way, and all of this assumes that you have a healthy relationship, and the number of times I hear the argument of, well, what if we get divorced?
Yeah, that's a problem.
What if this person cleans out my bank accounts, or what if this person does X, Y, and Z?
Maybe that's someone you shouldn't be married to.
If you don't trust them with your finances, why do you trust them in other areas of your life?
So we really encourage you to get to the point where everything is combined.
That's, I think, the ultimate, it's the simplest.
If you are 100% combined, then inequities and earning don't matter, because it all comes into one pot.
As an aside, if it all comes into one pot, are there any downsides to that?
Well.
Any downsides?
I didn't say big or small.
Any downsides?
We talked about how I like to buy things around the holidays and around birthdays, and if there's something specific I buy that's from a specific store, and you see in our bank account that there was a withdrawal of this much, you probably have an idea of maybe what I got you.
That kind of ruins the surprise.
Yeah, so full transparency does have the challenge of it's full transparency.
So we have had to get creative a little bit about big gift-giving, which brings another topic to mind, which is where we set the threshold for individual spending and how we manage that is different.
We have a very simple budget, as in we don't go down into the minutia of every single thing.
We have big buckets.
We have a household bucket.
We have a car repair bucket.
We have a food bucket.
We don't have a meals out and, you know.
Grocery store.
Yeah, and we have an entertainment budget, but we don't have a date night and a movie night, or we sort of go very big buckets, and we agree on those buckets before the month, and then some of those buckets you fully execute, and there's some other buckets that I manage.
We also sort of have an agreed level of, if it's below this, we don't care about it.
So I'm just gonna pick a number, but let's say it's a purchase that's below $100.
We don't care about it.
Just do whatever.
Now, if it's gonna blow up a bucket, then let's talk about it, but if it's within a bucket, neither of us care about it.
And where that dollar line is, when we had very little money and had real debt relief goals, was different than where that line sits now.
So that we do get a little bit of the freedom to spend inside those categories, and we've always had a little bit of your spending money, my spending money, that's totally untracked, although even that's changed over time because back in the day, it was really important that we each had some autonomy on some money.
Now, we're just so aligned on these things that if there's something you want, you get it within the framework of our budget.
There are some negatives of being fully combined, but the synergies way outweigh that.
Now, let's talk about a second way that you might combine, but not fully there.
Another way that we hear and we see is that you might have shared finances for shared expenses, and then you keep your excess separate.
So let's go with a real world example.
Monthly expenses, such as your mortgage, your utilities, car payments, whatever sort of you've agreed upon, or shared household expenses, you contribute into an account, and that pays for those shared expenses.
And then whatever above that amount that you earn stays in your private accounts, whatever they earn stays in their private accounts.
A healthy way to go about that might be how do we fund that account is proportionally.
So let's say one partner makes $50,000.
The other partner makes $100,000.
That's three equal $50,000 parts.
So the one partner who makes 50 would put in a third of the bills.
The person who makes 100 would put in two thirds, right?
That's a proportional way of doing it.
And I think we see that work pretty well, and you have a much more autonomy there because you still are keeping your resources, and you can allocate your resources the way you want, but the household is taken care of.
For me, I don't know why we would ever want to do something like that for combining, because if we call everything that stays in your personal accounts as excess, and excess goes toward long-term goals, or it goes toward spending and fun, or it goes to whatever your priorities are, why would I want to put it in a situation where one partner has significantly less resources than the other partner does?
How are you going to plan joint celebrations, or joint goals, or all those sort of things with a severe financial inequity?
And a lot of relationships have that.
They have a big financial earnings imbalance.
What are your thoughts on that?
I was gonna say, I have seen very few people that have, they make the same amount of money.
It's very unheard of, at least in the crowd that I roll with.
And that's why I feel, I agree with you 100%, that doing the proportional piece, I think it might be good if you're living together, but you're not engaged, you're not married, maybe to pay for rent, to pay for those, I could kind of see that.
There are some benefits to it there, but you're just, it doesn't feel like a partnership to me.
And I know I mentioned partnership earlier, but it's really important.
That's where the strength of the relationships come from, when you feel you're an equal partner in a strong relationship.
I fully agree, and I think third way of combining, which sort of leads to this, is that shared account, and you both contribute to half the bills, and regardless of what you make, and I think that's, of the ways to combine, that's the absolute worst way to combine, because there's no equity and synergy in there.
That is a roommate agreement, at that point where you're splitting bills.
And to me, that's not a long-lasting partnership.
The example you just gave of proportional in roommates might make perfect sense, but managing it separately.
So let's go to Taylor and Carter.
Taylor started her professional career before Carter did.
That's my daughter and my son-in-law.
She was making a full income while he was still finishing school.
I don't know the intimacy details of their budget, but I think she carried a heavier percentage of some of their shared expenses during that time, but she did it from her account, and he paid from his account.
They did not combine accounts until they were married, because the legal mess of combining.
So that's a way to do it.
And I think in dating and everything, perfectly reasonable.
And even engagement, that's perfectly reasonable, because you're not married yet.
Things change once you get married.
You are fully committed at that point.
That's when you dive in and you create the synergy of combined finances.
Before that, it all stays separate.
And I would say the combined to just pay my half and your half, that's a roommate.
That's not...
It's not a partnership, it's...
And just in case we haven't driven this point home far enough, but another benefit of combining, how did that help you when you decided to stay home and spend a few years raising the daughters, our daughters?
I think it would have...
Actually, I know it would be impossible to do that if we had separate and I stopped working.
There's no money coming in.
The pressure would have been to you to get back to work.
And at the time, you didn't want to do that.
You wanted to raise the family.
You wanted to spend that time.
It would have...
You would have not had that luxury, right?
With us being in having everything combined and jointly managing things, it was a conscious decision and it was one that we could make.
I don't think that's possible to go 100%, no income coming in and still be able to live and have a kid on your hands.
I had two kids.
Yeah, I don't know how families deal with that.
I think that's interesting.
I think that actually leads to a good little point of let us know in the comments.
If you are not fully combined and you manage individually, how do you deal with times where unemployment...
Let's say you go through a career change.
Let's say you choose to stay home and have kids.
How did you manage those?
And did that put extra stress on your finances and your relationship?
Or did you guys do great with that?
I generally would like to know because I think that's an area where it's the most concrete.
We can talk about all the goals and the shared visions and all the synergy that comes from that.
Those are all absolutely real.
But for me, the part of you taking the time to be without an income and raise the kids, how would we have done that effectively without the synergy of that?
All right, I think that's pretty good.
Yeah, so let us know your thoughts.
This is, in the financial world, this is probably, and with couples, this is probably one of the hottest topics.
And I think we'll probably address in a future episode what happens when it goes wrong on the divorce side and how do you get out of that.
You've got some very sad stories of people who are stuck in relationships because they've let themselves get so far into two stuck situations and finances being combined.
And then we're talking educations of financial abuse in those cases.
And just like if you have physical abuse in a relationship, if you've got financial abuse, that's a problem.
It's gonna be hard to get out of.
All right, on that downer note.
Very uplifting.
Yeah, well, aspirational.
Let's move to our pen to paper segment.
This episode has been totally centered on building financial trust in your relationship to put you on a solid path toward long lasting love.
It's actually kind of funny that I just closed on financial infidelity and our lead into this is that we're gonna build financial trust, but it is important.
So building financial trust.
In this pen to paper segment, we are going to give you a practical challenge or reflection to help you write your own lasting marriage story.
Have you and your partner had the money talk?
Have you bared your financial souls to each other and started down the path of creating a shared vision for your financial future?
If not, what's stopping you?
Is it too early?
Are you holding something back?
Are you afraid of what you'll discover?
Are you scared of being judged?
I would say all of those are probably the answers of yes, why I have not had my money talk.
Having the money talk can be difficult, but for long lasting love, it's a must.
So let's really dig into how do you go about having a financial, the money talk.
When do you know it's the right time to talk?
How do you set the scene for it?
What might those conversations look like?
When do you think it's right to have the money talk?
And is it just once?
Those are two big questions.
Definitely not on a first date.
To me, logically, when there is about to be a transition in your relationship, maybe you're talking about moving in together, or maybe you're talking about getting engaged.
Those are really good times and kind of necessary times to bring up that talk if you haven't done it already.
But I don't think it's in the very, your first two or three dates.
It would be uncomfortable, I think.
Yeah, it's funny we talk about what sounds just like a comical, who would do that?
I think people do that.
I think there is a mindset among some people.
We use the term healthy or unhealthy on these.
I think it was probably an unhealthy mindset that you got to be transparent from the start.
No, we are total individuals and you have no right to know how I do any of these things early on in relationships.
But there are probably some points where as the relationship, and I think moving in is a great time.
What are some topics you might talk about when you're considering moving in?
What would be the depth of a financial talk at that point?
You have to know how much they make in a given month.
It will determine what place you're gonna get together, right?
You would have to know that, not just- Or at least know how much they can afford.
I might not even know how much you make.
I might need to know how much can you, or are you looking to spend on rent?
Oh, I like that better.
That is a very good point.
Because just because you're moving in together doesn't mean that you're moving on to engagement and marriage.
And do they need to know everything?
That's a very good way to put it.
Can you afford your rent?
Can you afford it?
I think that's important.
Because the next one I was gonna say after how much did you bring in was how much is going out, how much debt.
But by your question, it's more concise.
You're asking them how much can you afford, and that would involve both those things, how much you make and how much is going out.
And that's a reasonable level of detail to have with someone you're considering moving in with.
I think at this point, I would probably want to know how much do you eat out?
How much do you cook at home?
How much do you spend on some of these extra sort of things?
Because those are important to how you run your household.
Is the expectation that we're gonna eat out five days a week?
Maybe I don't do that.
I'm a cooker, and I prepare my own meals, but you don't.
So those are some of the things you might start talking about.
Money, I would call these what are your money habits?
So part of it is what can you afford, what do you spend?
But I think this would be a relevant time to say what are your habits?
What do you like to spend money on?
Where does your money go?
Maybe not how much do you spend and what your proportions are, your percentages are, but what do you spend your money on?
I think that would be a good thing.
Another milestone where you would go deeper is engagement.
Once you're engaged, that money talk should go deeper.
How much debt do you have?
Correct, what are your views on debt?
Are you working to get out of it?
Might be a right time of how much do you earn?
Because these start setting some visions for where we might be going.
Are you comfortable with what you're making, or are you aspiring to make more?
And if you're aspiring to make more, are there actions that align with that aspiration, or are you just wanna make more?
Because who doesn't wanna make more money?
But are you actively doing something?
Are you going to school?
Are you getting education?
Are you working a job ladder in your organization?
What are you doing?
What other things might you talk about in engagement time around finances?
I think you could start talking about the long-term goals.
Do you want to own a house?
Do you want that dog?
Do you want children?
It gives you an idea of how much money it takes.
How much are you going?
If you decide you don't want kids, which is not as unusual as it used to be, you might not have to make as much.
And so knowing those things, what are there?
What are your goals?
Are they shared goals?
What's your lifestyle vision?
Yeah, are you a minimalist and wanna travel and backpack through Europe for a year, or are you ready to build a house and really tuck in on that sort of stuff?
I think that's, yeah, perfectly reasonable.
And then from our standpoint, before you get married, it has to be 100% transparent.
So you might go through that engagement phase, but hearkening back to the opening, if finances and financial stress is one of the leading causes of relationship breakups and divorce, the more transparent, the more clear you are, and that's where you would start to really dig in on the, how are we gonna execute this going forward?
We're huge believers in budgeting, not because budgeting controls our spending, but it actually takes a lot of stress out of our spending.
Once we know what the buckets are, I'm a detail person, it frees me up to not worry about the minutia in a bucket, and it frees you up to have the flexibility to spend in a bucket without me, the pressure of wanting the minutia in there.
For us, budgeting has been a really important part of what we do.
When you transition from being, before you transition, but as in preparation to transition to married life, you need to really detect how are we gonna manage our money?
Are we 100% together, or are we doing proportionals, or what are we doing?
What does that look like?
Don't get into it and try to figure it out.
Figure it out ahead of time.
Yeah, nobody needs that stress that early in a marriage.
There will be plenty of other stresses.
Correct.
So if you do it in advance, or as you should, it's already taken care of.
Kind of like you were talking about, you don't have to worry about it.
It's already taken care of.
We've discussed prior to saying, I do, that these are our goal, and this is what we are going to do.
There's enough other stressful things about getting married.
You shouldn't have to think about that.
Well, let's close this pen to paper with two very specific points on this.
How do you set the stage, and what might it sound like to have some of those conversations?
We talked about the decision to move in together.
How would you suggest someone go, let's say I wanted to have that conversation, how would I go to my partner to start that conversation?
What sets that up for success?
I think going to them and saying, hey, we're thinking about moving in together.
I think that puts us at a spot, where we should probably talk about money.
I've given this a lot of thought, and, but I don't know how much you have.
Let's say that set a day in time.
We don't have to do that now.
If you haven't thought about it, not a big deal.
Let's schedule something sometime soon that we can talk about, and I think it'd be good to come with numbers.
So don't attack, don't do it in the moment.
You might've been thinking on it for a very long time.
They might not be.
Setting the stage for a good conversation is letting them know, hey, I wanna have this conversation.
We're at a point where it makes sense to me.
Hope it makes sense to you, and then setting some dedicated time to have that first conversation, and knowing that that first conversation is probably the first of several, right?
But then I think I like that point of being tangible.
Bring some numbers to this.
Think about it a little bit, reflective.
Going into the engagement type discussions, that's where you really might want to do that same sort of approach.
Hopefully it's not your first time talking about money by this point.
Hopefully it's the second, third, fourth, where you're really digging into it.
I think that's where you say, hey, bring the receipts.
Like, let's start looking at stuff.
Let's put it on the table, and let's start building that trust and transparency.
And the trust comes from the transparency.
It doesn't come from you telling me.
It comes from you showing me.
So bring your statements.
Show the money.
Open up there.
And if you're not truthful in those points, I think that tells you you're not ready for those next steps.
If they're not truthful in those points, that tells you they're not ready for those next steps.
Which brings me to my final thing I want to talk about, which is how do you manage red flags that come up during this?
They have to be addressed.
If somebody is hesitant to bring their numbers to the table, that's a red flag.
And you have to say, hey, I'm noticing some hesitancy here.
What's that about?
That we can't do that.
Is that the shame?
Is that the embarrassment?
Is that the hiding?
And you have to get to the bottom root cause of those.
So a red flag might not stop everything, but it sure should stop your process enough until you figure out what is that flag.
Because if you know in your relationship that you've discovered there are earning inequities, or there's educational background inequities, or there's proficiency inequities, or you have an unhealthy relationship with numbers, this is an area of stress for you.
It might be coming from a position of embarrassment because I don't know what my finances look like.
Or it might become from an area of, I want to hide this and not show it.
And those are two very different things.
And if it comes from a lack of skill and knowledge and comfort, fine, you can get through that.
But if it comes from hiding and deception, you need to uncover that.
And I think we need to reclassify.
I think that's a yellow flag.
I don't think that's a red flag.
I think a red flag would be, I'm not showing you my stuff.
A red flag would be a refusal.
A yellow flag would be the hesitancy.
And you have to call.
Yeah, I guess I was viewing it as their hesitancy was I'm not doing it.
Oh.
But your point is good, yeah.
Yeah, yellow is I'm working through these things.
Red is I'm not gonna do it.
Yeah.
Yeah, fair enough.
All right, so to close this segment, we ask for your feedback once again.
Have you had the money talk?
What did your money talk look like?
What did it include that we maybe didn't hit in here?
Yeah, share your experience on the money talk.
Have you avoided the money talk and are now in a situation where you're kicking yourself and wishing you had had it?
Share those experiences too because we all can learn from those mistakes.
Well, that wraps our first taste of finances.
We just scratched the surface on here.
We haven't gotten into any of the real big meaty things that can come with this and the disagreements that come with it and our own personal struggles with this beyond laying out that we've really been combined and have built some pretty awesome things with that.
In our next episode, we're gonna take a dive into how technology is changing relationships.
And much like finances, it's a huge topic and it goes in many different areas, but we'll take our first little pass into technology and modern relationships.
Anything else you wanna cover?
I think that was really good for our first.
Of course, there are a lot of other things that we could talk about.
It was nice and focused.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we wanna thank you for joining us today.
We wanna invite you to connect with us, share a comment, ask a question, let us know your thoughts on managing finances before marriage and into your married life.
If you like this content, give us a like, leave a positive review and remember to subscribe to get notified of future episodes.
Thanks all.
Have a good one.