Is money impacting your marriage? 4 Money Moves to Improve Your Marriage Money Management
Jun 04, 2021
Money and career are very important to relationships. Intentionality and investment are crucial habits for staying on the same page.
Success with money in your marriage is not a matter of how much you have, rather it is dependent on how you approach managing money. Marriage brings together two different world perspectives on what a healthy relationship with money looks like. There are spenders and savers, impulse-buys and thoughtful purchases, but planning ahead and regularly communicating how you will work together on purchases is the action that builds a healthy marriage.
There are 4 main categories we suggest discussing with your partner:
✔️ Explore money management styles.
✔️ Discuss financial fears.
✔️ Learning to manage money TOGETHER.
✔️ Plan your next financial steps.
Explore Money Management Styles
The first thing to understand is each of your individual relationship to money. Some of us are spenders and some of us are savers...and neither is necessarily right or wrong.
Unpopular opinion: spending is good. Even conservative money guru Dave Ramsey says that we have to spend what we earn or our brains start to wonder why we work so hard. It is okay to enjoy the "fruits of your labor," but the tricky thing in marriage is that spending has to be agreed upon.
We like to explore whether or not couples like to spend money on items or experiences. Again, neither are right or wrong, but it helps to understand what is important to each person. Regardless of your preference, planning for spending on a night out or travel vs. a brand new tv or sweet new shoes is the only way to ensure that our money is being put to good use when it's being spent.
Savers are typically praised for their wisdom and long term thinking. And we would agree, for the most part. Some people save out of guilt and fear detached from any sort of vision for the future or purpose. In a relationship, we have to discuss our reasons for saving, what we hope to accomplish in that effort, and determine how much we can put away.
The good news: you don't have to choose one or the other. You can enjoy your money and save for the future if you discuss your default money preferences, plan for both, and regularly check spending and saving against your plan.
Financial Fears
We were all taught something about money growing up...even if that something was nothing, we indirectly and directly learned about money. Some of us learned that money corrupts while others of us learned that money is a resource to be managed, and unfortunately, others of us learned that money just comes and goes without our control. No matter what your money lessons were growing up, we all have some semblance of financial fears that impact our relationship with money.
At TMM we use an assessment called SYMBIS (Saving Your Marriage Before It Lasts) and SYMBIS+ (for married couples) to uncover each individual's financial fears. The 4 most common financial fears are: 1. Lack of Influence, 2. Lack of Security, 3. Lack of respect, and 4. Not Realizing Dreams. Each of these means something different to the person with this fear, but discussing each of them can help you mange your money as a couple in a way that helps reduce these emotional fears connected to money.
Managing Money Together
The key word to all of our marriage advice in almost every category, but especially with money, is the word TOGETHER. Most of us learn to manage money as individuals before combining finances in marriage. For the most part, we learn to do what we want and that our decisions impact only ourselves.
As we plan for marriage or even well into our existing marriage, the one thing that differentiates couples struggling with finances and those managing their finances is the skill and habit of managing their money together.
Most of the time one person shakes out as the main bill payer. Whether that be setting up auto withdrawals, pushing the pay button online, or physically writing checks; the physical act of paying bills is often a solo sport. However, planning and tracking spending (budgeting) is a team effort.
We recommend a shared bank account and shared budget for all household and shared expenses. You should essentially have 1 shared bucket full of money and then categories into which you pour predetermined amounts of money to cover bills, needs, giving, savings, and entertainment. Some people prefer to have a smaller bucket for each individual for some autonomy; but even in that case, we recommend putting all shared resources into 1 big bucket and any individual money comes from that shared bucket.
Many couples scoff at the idea of a budget because it feels limiting, but we have found the exact opposite. Planning where we want to spend our money, evaluating how well we lived out our plan, and adjusting accordingly has lead to more trust between us, less arguments around money, shared goals, and surprisingly more money in our bank account. We check our progress monthly, and when things are difficult (like COVID) we do it every 15 days (this matches the typical frequency of pay checks).
Email us at [email protected] for a simple sample budget sheet we use to plan and manage our household budget.
Planning Your Next Financial Steps
One of the major contributors to marriages falling apart is money. Most people would assume it has everything to do with not having enough, when in fact; it has everything to do with how it’s managed. Like everything in marriage, mismanaged expectations and lack of communication builds frustration, mistrust, and a great divide.
In a recent consumer trends study by Jungle Scout (March 2021), more than half of American consumers (56%) said they are living “paycheck to paycheck.” Another study reported by Market Watch found that only half of American households have more emergency savings than they do credit card debt. With this added stress, it is no surprise marriages are struggling across the country.
We desire couples to be able to plan for each month, each year, and the future through planned spending, intentional saving, and investments connected to their shared goals. Money apart from a shared vision is void of meaning no matter how much of it you have.
According to our friends at Lifeworks Advisors, there are 8 common areas to focus when planning your financial future (not all will apply to every couple or in every stage of life).
- Family Strategy
- Financial Management & Reporting
- Risk Management
- Financial Planning
- Family Savings & Investments
- Estate & Legacy Planning
- Philanthropy
- Business Planning
Email us at [email protected] for any further information about resources to process the above 8 areas of your finances.
What's Next?
As with everything TMM does, our goal is to help facilitate discussion between couples on important marriage topics. If you want a guided conversation on money in your marriage and an opportunity to explore any of the above concepts, check out our Money Moves mini-course complete with workbook and budget resources. We are confident it will help open the communication lines about how you view money, how you manage it, and how to have conversations about how it is spent.
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