Money and Marriage: 6 Principles My Husband and I Use to Manage Money as a COUPLE

You've probably heard some of the stats that money is the number one thing that couples fight about and it's also the second leading cause of divorce. That fact alone, for us married folk, is anxiety producing. And for myself, as a woman, and as what I see for a lot of women, that sometimes the easiest way to handle money in a relationship is to just let the guy handle the finances. And that's not what I recommend. I mean, it is the mentality that a lot of us are raised with. Consciously or not, we figure it's just easier to let the other person deal with it. That is what I used to do in my marriage with this wonderful man, my husband Craig. And even though Craig is actually a great money manager, it still led... Say that again. Yes, Craig is a great money manager. He has taken great care of our financial life. But it still led to problems and kind of serious problems in our relationship that we weren't on the same page when it came to finances because I had been abdicating my responsibility. And some of those problems were, well, we ended up in debt. We ended up in some late night fights about money. And today we're going to be talking about how we used to manage our money and the problems that that caused and our six principles for managing our finances now as a team. So if we haven't met before, hi, I'm Laurieann. I'm a money coach and co-founder of Dow Jeans. And this is my husband, Craig. Hi, everyone. And he has graciously decided to join us in this YouTube video a little last minute today. So I thought, hey, why not just show your face and actually we could talk about this together. So if you want to learn more about how to take control of your money and build wealth, be sure to subscribe and hit the notification bell so you don't miss out on future videos. Background story. Once upon a time, my husband and I, who we now teach widely about money and finances and taking control of your money, we didn't know how to talk about finances with each other. And it led to some pretty serious problems. So I had created $40,000 of debt and he was not happy about that. Not happy about that at all. And we come from really different financial backgrounds. Craig's dad's a financial planner. Dad's dad was a financial planner. And their family just always talked really openly about money. Yeah. And I think it's not so much the debt itself, but more so the kind of lack of awareness about it or real focus on it that was causing the problems. And, you know, both debt or spending so much that suddenly we weren't sure whether or not we'd pay our credit card bill that month. And being caught off guard with that, those were the sorts of things that were happening and definitely causing some friction in our relationship to say the least. Yes, it caused friction to say the least. And, you know, we came from such a different financial background and had different levels of financial literacy. I mean, I'm remembering the moment you're talking about, which is our credit card bill is due. We can't pay the full bill. It's the first time in Craig's life that he has not paid a credit card off in full. And he was mad, mad. Right. And I remember being like, what's the big deal? Like, we'll pay it next time or we'll pay in a couple of months. Like that's, you know, that's what this exists for, because I didn't have the same literacy that he did about how devastating credit card debt can be, how difficult it can be to get out of credit card debt, how astronomical the interest rates are and how, you know, that was money that we were, instead of investing and earning income on, we were paying someone else income to have borrowed that money when, you know, if we had better planned our spending, we maybe could have avoided that. And so I really was like, I don't get why it's such a big deal. And he's like, this is a really big deal. Honestly, it was tense. It was like, it was a lot of difficult conversations and difficult because we didn't really know how to talk about it. Like we didn't have clear agreements when it came to money. And we had moved in when we got engaged together and we had decided to combine finances right away because I moved from a different country. And Frank's father and his financial planning wisdom, his perspective was, hey, good marriages, they share finances. And so we just combined them right away without actually having a lot of conversation around, well, who gets to make decisions over what and what things do we need to discuss before we take action on and what things do we get to decide independently. And so I had made a bunch of independent financial decisions that it turns out Craig didn't really agree with. Yeah. And I think at that point, we could have gone kind of off the rails a bit. I think, I don't think that's an uncommon occurrence for couples, new couples, all couples, really. And so it was at that point that we really thought about, okay, how can we prevent this from happening in the future and try to work together on figuring something out rather than, you know, blaming Lorianne for creating this or that spending issue or really focusing on something much more negative and personal like that, which certainly does not help. You know, we realized that this was a real pain point in our relationship and we had to get on the same page financially. We had to start managing our finances as a team. So now we're going to talk about what we did to start managing our finances together. So the first thing we did is we set up a weekly money date and we started to budget together. This was really hard. It was really hard when we first started. And part of that was because we still didn't really know how to talk about money without getting triggered and without getting defensive. And it was unclear, like, was this my money? Is this your money? Is it our money? And so how do we make decisions about it? And so those first weeks of these budget meetings were OMG painful. That's how I remember them anyway. I must have blocked them out of my memory. And so I'm definitely willing to believe her. But yeah, that's what happens. You know, sometimes when you start off this way, oftentimes it's in response to kind of coming to a moment where you've realized it's not working. And so definitely expect for it to be perhaps a bit painful getting going. That's just kind of how it is around money. You got to make some tough decisions sometimes perhaps. And so having that expectation going in and getting started can really help. And just knowing that the two of you are doing it together and it's an opportunity for you to work and kind of come closer together on this really can help you through that initial rough patch. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe you don't remember them as painfully as I do because it's possible they weren't as painful for you. But for me, you know, I had up until that point a real avoidance pattern with money. And so it wasn't like I was sitting down doing these weekly money ritual dates by myself. It wasn't until we started doing it together that I like had to face look at money in the face. And just doing that in itself was painful. And so the second thing that we did that really helped is we started talking openly about money and about our money stories. We shared more about our perspective on money. We shared more about like what we were taught about money growing up and helping to see our similarities there like where our values aligned around money. And also seeing our differences of where he had a perspective that I'd never heard of or I was coming from, you know, a place of scarcity that he didn't understand and hadn't experienced before. It really helped us give each other I think some respect and some empathy about some of the past financial decisions we had made that we were now having to deal with. And then the third thing we did is we had to take a close look at our current financial reality. So we took inventory of everything that we owned and everything that we owed. And we got actually just in touch with the financial reality, which was something that Craig had been really good at doing before we got married. But then we combined finances and we never really got clear on what that picture looked like. And this wasn't a practice that I already had. So I was, you know, this was a new experience. But doing it really helped us do the next step, which was now we were clear on our financial situation. Well, now we can talk about our financial goals. And this really helped us get very clear on our values and our shared financial goals. This is when money started to become more fun, at least for me. You know, it wasn't fun to deal with like the painful mistakes of the past, but it was really fun for me to imagine what we could build and what we could create together when we were on the same page. And we saw that actually, we had a lot of the same goals. We just hadn't discussed them before. And we hadn't put them on paper. And we didn't have a plan for how we were going to achieve them. But once we started doing that and saying, okay, instead of just earning income and spending income and seeing what's left over, what do we actually want in our life? Yeah, I think it makes budgeting so much all that much easier to when you have this in place, because this is the exciting stuff. You know, this is what you are curtailing your spending for, you know, so having that may, you know, arriving at those goals together is just has you and your partner be even more on the same page about the budget and having it work because this is what you get at the end of it. And so this was definitely where the fun kicked in. Yeah, I remember like at one point we I made the savings tracker and had all these little dots in it and color a dot in every time I saved $1,000. And you know, became something that was really fun and something that we were doing together and supporting each other and doing instead of being at odds and kind of at war with each other around money. Another thing that we did that also really helped free us up around money is we brought some clarity to decisions around money and which decisions we had to agree on and which decisions we could make independently. And prior to this time, it was just vague, right? Like we both been financially independent people, we were used to just spending money on what was important to us without talking to each other. Because we knew that we were new in this relationship or new in our marriage and making share financial decisions. So we agreed on a spending limit, that if it was under this amount, we could spend it however we wanted. And if it was over a certain amount, then we had to talk and we had to agree to that decision together. There was also a period of time where we put in our budget, we each had like a personal spending line. And the money that was in that budget line, we could spend any way we wanted with no conversation. And that helped for me still feel like I had freedom. And I didn't have to like check with my husband before spending money because I didn't feel very good. But you know, the rest of our budget was something that we built in agreement that was going to bring us towards our goals. Yeah, both of those are important numbers. And then one extra that I'll throw in there that just because it's really been something that I think that's helped our relationship for a number of years now is just figuring out a number between the two of you that you will not fight about money above that number. And certainly over the course of your life, you can try to increase the number. But you know, we like for example, we made a decision that anything under 100, anything that happened that was kind of cost under $100, especially accidents, things breaking, we're not going to fight about. And over time, we've had increased that number. And it has done a lot for our relationship. Yeah, yeah, thanks for remembering that. I mean, this really kind of stemmed from a time we went on a walk and I brought this water bottle and it was glass and I ended up breaking it and Craig was like mad because he really liked that one. And I was like, well, it's okay, I can just buy you another one. And like, it was an accident. And this doesn't have to be a thing that, you know, is causing pain for us. And so we just like created the rule that we didn't want money or material possessions or, you know, accidents or a lot like things costing us money to also cost us moments of love and connection and positivity in our relationship. And so, you know, it's like, Hey, how about anything under 100 bucks, like we're just not gonna get mad about because it's not worth it. And like you said, that number's gone up over time. Okay, another thing that we did is we aligned on financial duties. So there's a number of different things that need to happen in order to stay financially responsible on top of your finances. And so we set like duties of who's responsible for which things, things like managing the budget on a weekly basis, or tracking our investments, paying the bills, filing the taxes, reviewing our credit card statements, managing our accounts, things like that. So we decided who's actually responsible for doing each of those things. And then during our money dates, we get together and we share any updates or ask it, you know, any, any questions that are relevant to our part of the financial duties. Yeah. And one thing I'd add there is, I think the advice, our advice here is to split it up how it makes sense for the two of you. Not, you're not trying to split it up so that it's even or any, you know, equal. It doesn't, it doesn't have to be that. I mean, a number of those things that we just went through do fall to me and our relationship, but that is how we've decided to do it and how it works best for us. And so we always come together during the monthly or weekly money review our date. And so that's the time where the two of us are involved. And it doesn't have to be that, you know, you split things 50, 50, if that's not what makes the most sense for the two of you. Yeah. And for me, it works really well to not be the one who's actually like in there managing the nuts and bolts of the budget. Craig's a Virgo. He's super good at super detailed things like that. And for me, it worked really well to like, get to come in and like, you know, look it over and be a second set of eyes and, you know, point out things that I see that don't feel quite right, or that I think there's an opportunity. And, you know, that's part of how we collaborate. So I totally agree. Things don't have to be split equally, but someone does need to be accountable for all of the major things that need to happen in order to keep your financial life really secure. So that is how Craig and I got on the same page and how we started managing our finances as a team. And like he said, the way that we manage our finances, it may not be the best for you. Not every married couple even has shared finances. So it's okay to figure out for you and your personality and your goals and commitments, what is the ideal situation, the ideal way to do this with your partner. If you're interested in more videos about how we manage our finances together and, you know, how we came to some of those decisions, you know, let us know in the comments so we can make some more videos together. All right. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this, make sure you click subscribe and the bell so you don't miss any more videos from DowJane.