In his bestselling book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey suggests that those who want to be successful in life should “begin with the end in mind.”1 That’s certainly true when it comes to your Money Relationship.
You need to have a vision for what your Money Relationship could look like. We find that most couples have a fairly simple vision. They want to stop fighting. They want a Money Relationship in which they work together instead of battling each other. They want to make decisions without arguing and solve problems without blame. They want harmony instead of conflict. So what do you want?
Think about that question for a minute. What do you want your Money Relationship to be like? Do you want to be equal partners in making financial decisions or are you okay with having a “money person”? Can you accept the occasional argument as long as it doesn’t get nasty and personal? Are you willing to cut back on spending or reduce your savings in order to have a more peaceful Money Relationship? If you come to your first Money Huddle with a clear vision for the future, you’re going to have a much easier time listening to each other and being willing to compromise than if you just show up and expect your problems to take care of themselves.
This is where your Money Dump will come in handy. Remember the cons you identified? They can be your guide to creating a vision for your Money Relationship.
In the previous chapter, Hannah’s con was that she and her husband, Jerry, hadn’t gone on vacation in five years. That’s a big con. So for Hannah, a healthy Money Relationship is one that balances security and savings with regular doses of fun, rest, and time with Jerry. That’s a clear, doable goal, one Jerry can sign on to as well.
Once you have a vision for your Money Relationship, you have to be intentional about making that vision a reality. You have to be committed to developing new patterns of communication. You have to be willing to give up some long-standing habits. And you have to be willing to set aside forty-five minutes a month to talk about your Money Relationship.
We use the acronym E.N.D. to help you keep your Money Huddle focused. The fastest way to kill the momentum you have right now is to turn your Money Huddle into a two-hour gripe-fest or let it flip over into a conversation about the details of your finances. Instead, keep your time short and to the point. Your forty-five minutes will be broken into three fifteen-minute chunks, each of them focused on one task.
Evaluate
Use the first fifteen minutes of your Money Huddle to evaluate your current financial situation. We know, we just said this wasn’t the time to talk about your financial situation. But we also want you to deal with the real story of your financial life as you work on your Money Relationship. So keep your conversation limited to the two biggest issues in your finances—debt and savings. We can’t stress how important it is to stick with these two topics and nothing else! These are the areas that create the most tension in a relationship; most of us have too much of one and not enough of the other. You’re not going to discuss every expense or deposit—you can do that later. You’re just getting a general overview of where you are right now. There should be two numbers to review: how much debt you have and how much you have in savings. Two numbers; that’s it.
This step is simple, but it’s the key to putting an end to financial infidelity. Financial infidelity thrives on secrets. It feeds off of a spouse’s willingness to be in the dark about the realities of a couple’s money. This step shines a light on what’s real—no more secrets, no more ignorance, no more hiding. When you know what’s real in your financial picture, you can start making plans. You can move forward. You can get rid of the fear and anxiety and mistrust and start over.
This is where the money person in the relationship gets to report on what’s happening with the family savings and debt. But that person doesn’t get to dominate the conversation. Her job is to lay out the facts, then spend the rest of the fifteen minutes working with her spouse to make plans for reducing that debt or increasing that savings.
Start with your savings—all of it. What do you have in your retirement account? How about the kids’ college fund? What do you have for emergency funds or vacation funds or let’s-buy-a-house funds? Lay it all out and talk about where you are. Talk very generally about where you would like to see more savings and where you might be saving too much. What kind of realistic changes can you make that will get you where you want to go? If you’re not sure where to start, we have all kinds of planning tools on our website, TheMoneyCouple.com, to get you started.
Then do the same thing with your debt. Look at your car payments, your mortgage, any loans you have, any personal debt you owe. As you do, remember that your debt isn’t the issue—you can get yourselves out of debt. What’s really important is that you communicate, that you work together to come up with solutions, and that you move forward instead of look back.
One more word about debt: we know a lot of financial advisors who put the fear of God into people about debt. They treat it as though it’s the child of the devil himself. And while debt can indeed be devastating, it is not the real problem for most couples.
We’ve been deep, deep in debt in our marriage. Like $50,000 deep. And it was scary. It took us a long time to claw our way out of it. But our debt didn’t tear us apart. In some ways, it made us closer. We had to work really hard to get out of debt, but we were working together. We talked about it. We made a plan and we stuck with it. When we stumbled, we pulled each other back up and kept climbing. And we didn’t dwell on the reasons we had accumulated that debt. We just looked ahead and rebuilt our finances. And along the way, we made our marriage even stronger. Now we look back on that experience with a little pride; we overcame something big and we did it as partners. That feels really good.
But we know couples who have called it quits over one-tenth of our debt. That’s because the debt isn’t their real issue; it’s the Money Relationship that’s broken, not the bank account.
If you have debt, don’t beat yourselves up over it. It’s just how life works sometimes, and there’s nothing to be gained by feeling ashamed or guilty about being in debt. Those feelings can quickly spiral into inaction, blame, and more financial infidelity. So stop listening to that voice that tells you debt is from the devil. It’s not. It’s just debt.
Whether you are $5,000 or $50,000 in debt, we want you to face the realities of your financial situation together. We want you to figure out how to deal with that situation together. We want you to see yourselves as true partners as you move forward together.
The Evaluate part of your Money Huddle might be a little painful the first time you work through it. If you’ve had years of financial infidelity in your Money Relationship, you’ll have all kinds of secrets to untangle. But you don’t have to deal with all of it at once. Take it one Money Huddle at a time and you can get through this. Do everything in your power to resist blaming each other and focus on how you can fix it. You have made a fresh start, and this process is only going to get easier.
Needs
The next fifteen minutes of your Money Huddle is the time to talk about what you need in your Money Relationship. Most of us are terrible at telling other people what we need, especially when it comes to money. We assume our spouses know that we have a hunting weekend planned for the same weekend every year or that we need a new outfit for a big presentation at work. They might know, but clear communication never hurts.
This is the time to keep everything you’ve learned about your Money Personalities in the forefront. If your spouse is a Security Seeker and he tells you he needs the family to cut back on spending, you know it’s not because he’s trying to be controlling; it’s because he’s worried. So talk about his anxiety. What does he need in order to feel secure? If you’re a Spender and you’re feeling the pinch of a tighter budget, talk about your need to have some freedom in your spending. Can you set up a small “mad money” fund that gives you a little leeway without busting the budget?
This is also the time to look at the cons you chose during your Money Dump. Those cons are really needs in disguise. So talk about what you need to get that con off your list. If it’s a vacation, say so—and start planning. If it’s more trust, say so and make it happen.
By being honest about your needs, you show your spouse that you trust her, that you value her insight, and that you believe the two of you can work together to solve problems. That kind of affirmation goes a long way toward connecting you as a couple.
The final fifteen-minute segment of the Money Huddle is our favorite. This is when you’re going to grab your dreams again and put together a plan for making them happen. It’s a monthly deposit in your Money Relationship that will add up quickly.
We see it over and over again. When couples dream together, they move forward together. And when they stop dreaming, they stop growing as a couple. So take this time each month to envision the future you want to build together.
During one of our Money Huddles, we started talking about our retirement. We love to travel, but we wanted to do something different when we retired. So we came up with an idea. We’re going to spend a year living in four different cities around the world. We’ll each pick two and spend three months in each city.
We know it’s kind of a strange dream, but it suits us. And once we came up with the idea, we started putting money into our retirement fund to make it a reality one day. That dream is helping us keep our savings on track. Because we are dreaming about the same thing, we’re working together to make that dream happen.
This is the time to talk about short-term dreams and longterm dreams, personal dreams and dreams for your family. Nothing is off-limits. Maybe you want to take a pottery class—talk about it and figure out how to make it happen. Maybe you want to help your aging parents with their health-care costs. Maybe you want to stay home with your kids or start a new job or move into a different house. Maybe you want to give more to your church or to a charity that’s important to you. You had these dreams before and you can get them back.
Whatever your dreams are, talk about them and start planning for them. We suggest couples bring a calendar to their Money Huddles. The process of dreaming together will draw you closer and build a deeper sense of connection and intimacy.
The Money Huddle brings together all the skills and knowledge you’ve developed while reading this book. And as the months go by and you stay committed to monthly Money Huddles, you’ll see your Money Relationship change dramatically. You’ll put an end to constant battles, mistrust, resentment, and financial infidelity, and you’ll replace them with meaningful conversations about your life together. And that’s worth more than the fattest bank account.
Something else happens when you use this time to talk about what you need from your Money Relationship. You’ll actually stop talking about money all the time. When you know you have a time set aside to deal with issues that come up during the month, you’ll find that you don’t talk about them over every meal or as you’re getting ready for bed. And when you’re not talking about money all the time, you suddenly have time to talk about other things.
We worked with a couple not long ago. He was a Flyer/Spender; she was a Security Seeker/Saver. You know enough about Money Personalities now to recognize that this relationship could have been a disaster. It wasn’t . . . yet. But there were signs that it was heading that way. He spent money they didn’t have; she was freaking out. Same song, second verse.
We encouraged them to try holding regular Money Huddles and report back to us in a couple of months. Sure enough, they came back with a renewed commitment to make their marriage work. The Money Huddles, they said, had been a great tool for helping them manage the way they talked about money. For a long time, he’d been frustrated that all of their conversations seemed to eventually come back to his spending. She was frustrated that he didn’t seem to listen to her requests that he spend less.
But the Money Huddle gave them a forum for talking about these issues in a calm way rather than in the heat of a disagreement. When their daily conversations started to turn into money conversations, he could ask her to table that concern and bring it up in their Money Huddle. And during the Money Huddle, he was more inclined to listen to her concerns and work with her to figure out some compromises in his spending habits. She felt heard, he felt that the nagging had stopped, and they could both see that their Money Relationship was improving.
MAKE IT HAPPEN
Plan your first Money Huddle. Really. Right now. Go get your spouse and your calendar and find forty-five minutes to start your new Money Relationship with the E.N.D. in mind.
1. Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).