Money Expert Reacts to “Love Is Blind” Money Drama

All right, today we've got something very juicy. I love a good money conversation. And Netflix's Love is Blind just handed us a prime example. In season seven, episode eight, Hannah and Nick D. Are recently engaged, now living together, and they're talking about money for the first time. And let's just say things get a little awkward. I'm gonna break down what they did right, what they did wrong, and what you can learn from it so you don't end up in the same messy situation. Because, let's be real, love may be blind, but when it comes to money, you better go into it with your eyes wide open. Hit that subscribe button, grab your popcorn, and let's get into it.

It's nice that, like, if I tell you, like, hey, Nick, we take the trash out, you do. Or, like, hey, Nick, we get stuff out of the dryer, you will, but I feel like you. You should be able to do that. Like, I don't want to have to tell you every time, like, I do.

Take out the trash.

Yeah, you do.

Whoa, already, this is so juicy. She goes, I appreciate that you took out the trash, but I would like for you to have to do it without me asking. And his response was, I did take out the trash. Now if you just put that in writing, like a script, you would be shocked. This is already such a defensive response. Imagine, instead, he said, oh, wow. I totally appreciate that. Thank you for letting me know I'm going to do that in the future. It just automatically changes the dynamic of this conversation that I suspect they're about to have. Let's keep going.

Yeah, you do. But I feel like, like, today I had to ask and yesterday I had to ask. For us in our relationship, I think it would be nice to have, like, things that you do and things that I do.

Whoa. She says, I'd like for there to be things that you do and things that I do. I gotta tell you, I love a good system. I love a good system with my finances. I love a good SOP or standard operating procedure at work. I love a good system at home, too. So much of the conflict that happens between couples is simply a result of not having a conversation being crystal clear about what each person's going to do. So it's like the garbage gets full and one person just kind of takes it out, and then they end up doing it for the next 20 years, but nobody actually said it. And so it's never actually acknowledged. Better yet, to do what Hannah's doing here and say, hey, let's talk about Some rules. What are you going to be in charge of? What am I going to be in charge of? You can always adjust the rules, but let's actually talk about him and put him down on paper.

Yeah, I'm open to that.

With trash. Trash would be you. You take the trash out.

Cool.

Cool. Laundry. When you do laundry, you do my laundry. And then, like, with Luna, like, she is my dog. She's my responsibility to get that. But, like, now that we're married, your responsibilities are mine, and my responsibilities are yours.

Okay. What? No. What? This took a turn that I did not expect. So I love good system. I love a good set of rules. But notice the dynamic. She is now telling him, you do this, I'll do that. And what's actually happening now is that he is basically letting her take on the burden of deciding who does what. And she's taking that burden on. And I can understand why she's doing it, because the guy is not doing housework unless he's told to. I think he lives with his parents still. The problem is that this will calcify into the relationship where she's always going to be telling him what to do. He's always going to be receiving it. Maybe he'll do it, maybe not. And after five years, 10 years, 20 years of this, she's taken on so much of the emotional burden, the emotional labor of running a household, she's going to be resentful. And understandably so. What would be a better approach? It would be for both of them to say, hey, we're partners in this household. We are running the business. We. Of running a household. So what can we each do to make this household successful? And what that really means is he needs to be an active participant. Not like this. All right, I'll do the freaking laundry. No, he needs to be saying, hey, here's what I'd like to do. Here's what I think you should do. And then she goes, well, I don't really like to do that, but what if we do this and that? It's a partnership. That's the way to set that dynamic correctly. Let's keep going.

Yeah.

Like, if one partner is responding with one syllable answers, yep, that's a problem. That's a sign that you've taken a wrong turn way back here. And it. And it could be as far back as choosing the right partner. But I don't know anything about that. I'm just watching this clip. But it's certainly that the dynamic of the conversation is not correct.

How often do you like, vacuum and.

Sweet, like once every two weeks.

You vacuum once every two weeks, Nick, That's a lie.

This guy's not a good liar. He vacuums once every two weeks. That's a lie.

If I do the once a week grocery shop where I'm sitting $300 or something, I think we could split that.

I don't think groceries will ever be that much.

What does this guy know about groceries? When was the last time he bought groceries? By the way, I love that I get the chance to say this could. Do you know how many people tell me, ramit Sethi's so out of touch, when was the last time you bought groceries? How about this dude who goes, we're not gonna spend 300 bucks a week on groceries. She's like, yeah, we are looking at the dynamic of this conversation. Do you notice how it's her telling, how she does it, how it should be? She's very expressive. But you also notice that he's physically doing this. Look at this. Leaning back, almost, almost metaphorically like this. It's not a good way to build a partnership. And I see this happening with money so often. You have one person who's better with money, which I would not be surprised if Hannah is, and they kind of go, they let it all out. Here's what I learned, here's what I do. And the other person goes, they start to physically shrink. What happens is that dynamic then replicates and calcifies over the next 30 years. So the one person who came out of the gate going, they then find themselves holding their partner for the next 30 years. And they're frustrated. Why won't they take out the trash without me having to ask? Why won't they sit down and talk to me about money? And it is frustrating. I'm not blaming anybody here. But the solution is not to simply say, like, I need you to do this better. Why aren't you doing this? If only you did X, we could be happy. Oftentimes that dynamic was set up months or even years ago. And we can see it happening right here. They are creating a dynamic where she's always going to be pulling him and he's going to be going along for the ride. This is like looking back in time. It's like a time machine right now. I wish that I could be there and just go, hold on, let's not do this. Let's do it a different way. Let's talk money.

When we get married, you don't want to join our account.

We could play it by ear.

Play it by ear. What the hell is that? No playing by ear. It's time to make some decisions. Too many couples go their entire lives go, let's play it by ear. Oh, no, we'll figure it out. No, make a series of decisions. The worst thing that a couple can be with money is indecisive. I hear it all the time. Couples go, I don't know. We'll figure it out. We're not sure. We'll decide later. I go, you've been putting off making five decisions for the last 15 years. What are you doing? Be decisive. Do you want to join accounts or not? If you're not sure, say it. Hey, I'm not really sure. I've never been married before. What would it look like if we joined accounts? Here's what I'm worried about. I'm not sure that I'm going to still have the spending money that I'm accustomed to. That makes me kind of nervous. I'm not sure that I'm going to have money just in case something goes wrong. Not that I don't love you, but if you just that. I always want to protect myself and us. But in order to have those conversations, that's challenging. You have to be quite self aware. You have to be articulate and sometimes you have to be willing to share what you don't know. I think with money, that's really hard. That is really hard to say. Gosh, I don't know how this works. That's one of the reasons I wrote this book, Money for Couples. Because every couple has challenges with money, but almost none of us know how to talk about it. I'm talking about literally, what words do you say? What if your partner doesn't want to talk about money? They're giving one word answers like, Nick, what if you have a bad dynamic that's been going on for 10 years? What are you supposed to do to change that dynamic? Or how do you actually have a conversation where you two give each other a hug at the end and say, I love you? That's what you find in this new book that I wrote, Money for Couples.

I'm not a play it by your type of person.

I'm not a play it by ear type of person. What a great comment. I love it. Just the self awareness to be like, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm not the cool girl. I'm not the play it by ear. No, we're going to talk about this right now. That's awesome. Money's important. Why do we Pretend it's not. Let's figure it out. Let's not. Let's do it right now. That's how you make money decisions. And hey, maybe you make a couple of wrong decisions, that's going to happen.

You.

You fix them. Because every six months, you take a look, what rules did we decide what's working, what's not? Let's fix it. And you can always change it. But you got to be willing to go out on a limb and make some decisions together.

Because, like, when we get married, if you're $50,000 in debt, or if I'm $50,000 in debt, your debt becomes my debt.

Yeah, right.

And my debt becomes your debt. Right.

Okay, I got a question for everybody. What's worse? Dating somebody and finding out that they have $55,000 of credit card debt or finding out that they're a picky eater? What's worse? Tell me, which one would you break up with right on the spot? This is a tough one because, you know, we're not talking about student loan debt, credit card debt. Odds are you probably made some bad decisions to get into that. Could we fix it? Yeah, we could fix it. But if you only eat chicken nuggets, we're never going to Thailand. We're never going to India. We're never going to this new restaurant that opened up in the East Village. That's a long life. Everybody tell me what your answer is in the comments. I have to know.

So finances are a very important part of relationship.

Yeah, it's a good thing. I don't have any debt. Or student loans.

I do have student loans. I mean, you're not gonna pay them, but I mean, let's say like something happened. Like, yeah, this is cool.

I like that she's raising the stakes of why this conversation is important. She's saying, look, look, what if one of us has student loan debt, which she actually does. If we get together and then something happens and that debt could be shared. One of the things I personally hate is when people are dating and they have to play it cool. Like, they don't really care about money. Like, if you talk about money, you're somehow selfish or greedy. I don't think that way at all. I think money is important. I think that it's worth having a series of conversations about, because if you're dating, you want to know what type of lifestyle you are both envisioning. Do we want to live in this city or that? Do we want to have kids? If we have kids, do we want to put them in this school or that activity. We need to talk about this because it's not just going to happen. Nobody accidentally trips and falls into a rich life. You have to build it brick by brick. And if you're building something brick by brick, you want to make sure you have the right partner to do it with.

So we'll keep separate bank accounts. Maybe eventually, when we have kids or something, we can join them. Or maybe we can have a separate joint account for, like, our savings and stuff for our travels or for a home.

All right, I like that. They're starting to talk about vision. That's pretty cool. It's actually a really cool technique to use in conversations about money when things get hard. Focus on the North Star. What is our rich life? Is it buying a house in the country? Is it taking a trip two times a year? Focus around that, because that is your North Star. And then you say, okay, well, what do we need to do in order to get there? You know, too often you'll see couples that are down in the weeds. Well, I think we should set up this checking account, and I think you should be paying for Target. You're in the weeds. Use that phrase. Say, you know what? I think we're in the weeds. Can we refocus on our rich life? What is it that we want to do together? Well, we want to be able to travel two times a year, and we want to know that we are safe in case one of us loses our job. Oh, fantastic. I feel so good about that. Okay, how do we get there? That informs all of your decisions. They're talking about setting their accounts up. Let me show you a little sneak peek at how you should set your accounts up. It looks something like this. And what this does for you is it gives you a simple account structure where you both have a joint checking account. All the money goes in there, and it is dispersed from there. That is how you set up your accounts so that you both are aligned together and you each have a little bit of individual spending money.

Well, split rent. Who's paying the bills? Are you paying the bills or am I paying the bills?

What do you think?

I think I'm financially more literate than you are.

Okay, first of all, they kind of just, like, glossed over. We'll split the rent. Here's why setting up your accounts correctly as a couple is so important. See, most people are getting married older than they used to get married. So by the time they get married, they have a checking account, a savings account. They kind of have a way of handling Their money. A number of couples now go, hey, why combine? Let's just keep doing what we're doing. We'll transfer money back and forth every month. And that sounds like, hey, what's the problem? Well, the problem is, is that if you are not combining your accounts, you are not unifying one of the most important parts of your relationship, which is money. When you unify your money, it naturally makes you more aligned. You're basically creating the right incentives for the two of you as a unit together. I find these open conversations about money so refreshing. Like how often do you hear a couple talk openly about money when they first start dating? Okay, let me show you the next thing I notice.

There's nothing wrong with this. But for you, the only bill that you, you have is just your car. Cuz you don't even know if you have car insurance cuz your parents are paying it, right? So this is my question to you. Are you going to join my car insurance and are we going to pay that together? Are you going to continue to stay on your parents car insurance when we get married?

What would be the benefit of joining?

This is good. I like that. He's okay. This is awesome. Because we can't expect people to know everything about money. Let's give him a little bit of grace. He has his parents paying a lot of his bills. There's probably no way he would have ever learned about how car insurance works. And what's the benefit of going here versus there? And to his credit, he's articulating that. That takes a lot of courage to say, hey, what would be the benefit of that? Let's see what she says.

I'm just asking, when we get married, are your parents still going to be paying certain of your bills? Are you joining them with me?

I would join them with you.

Phone bill, your parents pay your phone bill. What's your plan with that?

I mean eventually, like in the next year or two, I'll probably start paying for it. But if as long as they want to pay for my.

The look of disgust on her face. You find out that your fiance has essentially all of his bills paid by his parents. And so she seems to be somewhat financially knowledgeable. You're like, oh my God, what am I doing here? But I should also point out this is very culturally constructed. So in America we expect people to graduate high school, leave their parents house and then figure out things like paying bills, et cetera. Okay. And they were both born in America, but in India, where my parents grew up, for example, my mom lived with her family until she got married, and then she went to live with my dad. So there would have been no way for her to learn the same things that Nick and Hannah are discussing right now. Again, I'm just pointing this out to show you how much of the way we think about money is totally culturally constructed.

Phone bill.

So I'll keep his phone bill for me.

Yeah.

I mean, if he's not paying any of his bills except for his car, I would be like, how much you have saved up for retirement? Because technically, you should have a ton of money saved up. If he didn't, that would set off a lot of alarms for me. Like, you're paying basically nothing. Where's all the money going?

Because you're 28 years old. So I've been on my own since I'm 18. So I've had to pay all the bills. Right. Like, I pay my car insurance, I pay my health insurance. Then I contribute to my 401k, then I contribute to my stocks.

I don't know about stocks.

Right. If you ever want to invest in stocks, just let me know and invest your money.

Why are they talking about stocks? Stocks, stocks, stocks.

What Stocks? I could give about stocks.

What? What. What is with his responses here? I don't know about stocks. I could give a. About. So why are you talking like that? Why not say, oh, I don't really know much about stocks. How does it work? Can't you lose money? I don't give a. About stocks. What's with this?

I can teach you.

Do you know about sports?

No, but this is a classic ego reaction. Because he's experiencing this dissonance, this dissonance, saying, I am a man. I am starting to feel very insecure that I don't know about something which technically men should know about investing. Again, culturally constructed. What does he do to protect his ego? He goes, do you know about sports? Like, oh, my God, it's.

Watching sports make you more financially successful?

I don't think stocks does.

I don't think stocks makes you financially successful. Also, why are we talking about stocks this way? It's so weird. Talking about stocks as if they represent money is like talking about thread as if it represents clothes. It's one tiny piece of it. And more importantly, with stocks, there are so many ups and downs. Is anyone going to explain this to me on the show, or am I going to have to go insane on my own, sitting in a room looking at a camera?

What are stocks?

Can't you lose money from putting money.

In stocks when you're investing.

I love that. She just goes, what are stocks? That's amazing. Like what? Do you even know what the you're talking about, bro? And then his response is, can't you lose money with stocks? Okay, Ramit Sethi needs to do a little breakdown for everybody. Let me explain what the is going on here. When it comes to making money, there are different types of investments. Stocks are one type of investment. There are bonds, cash. And of course you do not have to pick individual stocks when you're investing. That's what people think investing is. I sit here on my screen, I have green color letters running across and I picked a P E ratio that optimizes. That's not investing. Okay? That's what you see on tv. Real investing is calm, boring, monotonous even. You're not picking individual stocks. You're not sitting there deciding between Microsoft and Nvidia. You're. You're typically picking an index fund. An index fund is a fund that includes a whole bunch of different stocks. And a simple index fund would cover 500 stocks in America. You can get even simpler. What I love to recommend, for example, to my family is if you are wanting to invest in a really simple way that is going to grow your money over time, you pick something called a Target Date Fund fund. All you do is pick the fund that corresponds with the year you will retire. So let's say you're going to be 65 in the year 2050. You go and find a fund called Vanguard 2050 or Fidelity 2050 or Schwab 2050 and it has a basket of different stocks. And as you get older, it becomes a little bit more conservative. It's automatic, it's low cost. Boom. I love target date funds. They're so easy. All you do is pick one fund. You put as much money as you possibly can in it. Again, we're not talking about individual stocks. I don't know why they're obsessed with stocks and getting in a fight over stocks, which you should not be fighting over stocks. It's so pointless. But I do love that they are talking about this stuff.

Let's see, when you're investing in stocks, you can be really risky, right? But you don't have to do that or you just put a little bit of money in different stocks. Me, financially, I'm not.

This reminds me of me when I was 22 years old. The body language is so horrible. The problem is that she recognizes how important it is to talk about money. He doesn't. And so what she's done Is she's doubled down. She's really getting really emphatic. She's leaning in. She's got a pen out. I think she's doing something on a whiteboard. And he's. You could see him just mentally checking out. This is where you stop the conversation and you go, hey, I don't think that we're connecting on this, and I don't want us to feel bad about money. I actually want us to feel really good about money. Can we take a break and come back and talk about this tomorrow? A partner goes, yes, anything to get out of this godforsaken conversation. And you come back the next day and you actually start off in a totally different way. You do something I call your first positive conversation about money. Hey, I gotta apologize for yesterday. I know that I came off a little strong. The thing is, I love talking about money, and I want to find a way for us to connect about money because it's so important for us. It's going to allow us to travel. It's going to allow us to eat great food. It's going to allow us to have a beautiful place and feel safe. So would you be okay if we try a different approach to our conversation about money? Partner goes, okay, that's getting a micro agreement. Notice what I just did. Would you be okay if we talk about money in a different way? Everybody's going to say, yes. Boom. Extract that concession. Yes. Take the win. They you go, all right, let's do it like this. Let's each talk about why we think this conversation about money is going to be really positive. Why is it going to be awesome? I'll start just to set an example. I think this conversation about money is going to be awesome because I love you and I'm so excited to build a life together, including where we live and how we spend our money and all the little treats we can buy for this cute little dog. What about for you? The partner goes, oh, we're not talking about, like, compound interest charts. Okay.

Okay.

I guess I'm excited to talk about this because I never really thought about money, and I can tell that you know a lot, and I think I need to learn, too. Amazing. Okay? And then the other person might say, I want to feel like we are actually doing this together, not like I'm getting lectured to, okay, beautiful. High five. I love you. End of conversation. You're not having the conversation about money. You're having lots of conversations about money. You would never have the conversation about kids. Okay? Never. You would have thousands of Conversations. And you'd have to find a way to make them fun and connected. That's how we do it. Same with money.

I don't have enough money to be high risk, high reward.

So I'm low risk, low reward, low risk, low reward. Why are you, what is she in her 20s? She's saying, I'm low risk, low reward. Why would you do that? I know why you would do that. Because you don't really understand how money works. Typically when people talk about low risk investments when they're young, they have learned just enough to be a little dangerous. Let me explain. Risk. When you are young, you have a lot of time, you have an appetite for risk, meaning you can afford if the money goes up or down in your investment portfolio. Because you don't really need your investment money for like 30 plus years. So what that means is you should probably be seeking investments with a long time horizon. That means investments like say, an index fund that tend to be primarily focused in equities or stocks versus what a grandpa would be investing in, which would be much more conservative. Grandpa can't afford to lose 20% of his money. But Hannah, she can afford to take a little bit of volatility in exchange for potentially much higher returns. Basically, I don't even know how much she makes or how much she has invested. But if she earns a median amount of income in America, she could be a millionaire, no doubt. No question. Multi millionaire, even. But she has to be understanding how risk and reward works. All right, let's keep going.

Like, is your 401k? Is that intertwined with stocks?

I don't know anything. I mean, I, I, I just never invested in stocks.

I appreciate the honesty. I don't know anything. I never invested in stocks. Now we're actually starting to get somewhere. One of the things you'll notice in money conversations is that people have these automatic responses. Like his response earlier was, can't you lose money in stocks? But when I talk to couples, I often just let them talk because, because they're doing. I call it this just automatic responses. It all honestly doesn't really mean anything. If you ask them 10 minutes later, do you remember what you just said? They'll have no recollection. Whatever. It's like if I were to say, what's a big waterfall? 100% of people would say Niagara Falls. Just boom. Automatic response. Okay. When you talk about words like stocks with somebody who doesn't know anything about money, first respond, well, can't you lose money? And I don't blame Anybody for it. This is complex stuff. Stuff to be able to understand the relationship between a 401k and stocks. Most people don't understand that relationship is quite complex. So I have to give a lot of grace. And you have to remember that Hannah's understandably frustrated because she's kind of dealing with the realization that my Future husband in 17 days doesn't know anything about money. And in fact he has a lot of poor beliefs about money.

I think like a bad habit that I have is I like things the way I like things and everyone else just can't do it as good as me.

Wow. Quite self aware. I mean, that's written all over this entire conversation. She kind of started off saying like, why don't you do this? Like, oh my God, you don't pay your own this and that. And on one hand I understand the frustration, but on the other hand, you're trying to build a marriage with your partner and this just makes him feel small. Now should he be taken out the trash without having to be asked? Yes. In fact, should he be more of an active participant in this conversation? Yes. But is she the more knowledgeable person about money? Creating a healthy culture to discuss money in this relationship? No. And I have to say this. The person who knows more about money, sometimes that is the person who earns more money, sometimes not. The person who knows more about money. It is your job to create a healthy culture so that your partner can open up and feel heard. You may know more. It may feel so rudimentary to have to explain the difference between a savings account and an investment account. Guess what? That's what you have to do with the person you love.

I think we're both like clean, which is important. You have a good and kind heart and so do I. It feels like we're best friends.

I've accepted you for who you are, but getting used to it a little bit more. But I'm a very good listener. Like I'm always going to hear you out. I know sometimes you don't think it, but I would protect you. I will.

I love the music. They always get me. I'm always like, just kidding. I don't cry at these freaking things. The best part of this was the end. Let me tell you why. Whenever you get stuck talking about money, you always go back to your North Star. What is our rich life together? What are we trying to create together? Notice that when they both were complimenting each other at the end felt amazing. You can never give your partner enough compliments. Never. It's like, you think somebody's going to eat one potato chip? In my case, tortilla chips. No, I'm not eating one. I'm eating 50. In fact, give me 100. You can never give enough compliments. I love that I can feel safe talking about money with you, even though I don't know as much as you. These are compliments, and your partner will never get tired of hearing them. Listen, that little thing in your brain when your partner compliments you in a really meaningful way, you know that little chill you get on the side of your head? You can give that to your partner.