Diane GardnerFounder, Adept Business Solutions · Profit First Professional

Money & Relationships - Can Your Relationship Survive if You Lose it All? #themoneyhabit #money

12 Sept 2025 · 0 min

Watch on YouTube

0:06

In this brief excerpt from Sandy Waggett’s YouTube interview, two speakers discuss their personal experience surrounding the 2008 financial crash. Speaker B recalls the period before smartphones, juggling young children, and the abrupt loss of their financial safety net. The crash forced them into a “robotic” survival mode where one partner knew how to act while the other felt lost. Speaker A reveals that the aftermath triggered a deep depression. The dialogue highlights how the sudden loss of money reshaped their relationship dynamics, emotional wellbeing, and coping mechanisms during a time of extreme stress and uncertainty.

I wonder if you can reflect back on the prior to having the system to post how you felt in the relationship to money.
Going back, then you're going before smartphones, plus we had young children and I was very busy, so it's hard for me to even remember that. I start to think about those conversations after the sort of crash and when we lost everything and we sort of had to rebuild. I remember that time for me, very robotic in a way because I knew what to do. You didn't know what to do.
I went into depression. No, 2008.
Yeah. And you, you were shaken, shaken to your core. And I was like, we had 3 young kids and I went into survival mode and I felt, I guess, comfortable. I knew what to do. I knew what to do. I remember saying to you, I can't keep going on the roller coaster with you on this, on what are we gonna do. Because I think also I just really trusted you to figure it out because you're just so driven and hard worker and were already like forming plans and things. And even if they— I didn't understand them because I didn't at that time. I did not understand where your brain was going with it. I just trusted you, but I needed these kids to be okay. So I know how to feed us. I know how to do this. Our paths were going side by side at that time. We were united, but we also had two very different jobs to do.