5 Tips For Talking About Money In A Relationship

Did you know that money is one of the top three things that couples fight over or even break up over?

Hi, We're Vanessa and Zander Marin. We're married. We've been together since 2007. And our mission is to equip you with the tools you need to create an extraordinary relationship inside the bedroom and out.

In this video, we're going to be giving you our top five tips for how to talk about money in your relationship. So, for most of us, money is a really taboo topic, and it has been for probably our entire lives. It's just not something that we are taught to openly discuss and even from a very early age. But we are here to help you break down these barriers and start feeling so much more comfortable and confident talking about money, especially given that it is such an important topic to talk about in your relationship. So at the end of this video, you are going to walk away with five simple, practical steps to open up a conversation about money with your partner. Get comfortable talking about it, even if you never talked about money before, and just create a deeper, more intimate connection with your partner.

Yeah. So most of us are taught actually to not talk about money, and it's either direct or indirect. Like, we're given the message that money is a taboo topic, but once we get into a relationship, we realize that you can't really not talk about it. Like, there's a lot of financial conversations that need to be had.

Yeah, there's so many different things that come up. Are you going to combine your finances or keep them separate? If you are, when's the right time to do it? What if one of you entered the relationship making a lot more money than the other one did? Are you going to split your expenses evenly or not? Are you going to tell each other about all of the purchases that you make? What if a friend or a family member asks to borrow money from you? What if one of you spends a lot more money than the other person does?

Yeah. And then, of course, the current global health crisis is bringing up all kinds of its own money challenges. Are you guys still making the same amount of money? Do you have a financial plan to get through the crisis? Is one of you making purchases to try to soothe their anxiety and the other one wanting to save, like, every penny? It's more important than ever that you and your partner are crystal clear about your finances. So that brings us to our top five tips about money in a relationship.

Tip number one, have a conversation with yourself first. So if you've never talked about money with your partner, or it's just generally a topic that you try to avoid. It can feel super intimidating to have to hit the ground run. But what we recommend is before you even think about opening a conversation about money with your partner, to try to get clear on your own relationship with money first. So a lot of us never take the time to think about our relationship with money, but this is a really big mistake. You have to understand your history with money in order to make good financial decisions and be a solid teammate to your partner. So there are a bunch of questions that you can ask yourself to help you dig more into your history with money. So what were you taught to believe about money? How did your parents handle money when you were growing up? What direct or indirect messages did you learn about money? What have been some of your major money milestones throughout your life? Do you have any major money accomplishments or challenges that you've dealt with? What was your pre coronavirus crisis relationship with money? And what's your relationship with money like now? So we highly encourage you to take some time to think about these questions, do a little bit of journaling, jot down some answers, but try to get a better sen of what your relationship is with money.

And these questions, they can bring up some big feelings. So we'd also encourage you to think about what is the relationship that you want to have with money. Just because you have a certain relationship with it now doesn't mean that it always has to be like that. And the more that you reflect on what you learned about money from your family and what your own life experiences have taught you, you're going to start putting the pieces together around why you have defined the relationship that you have. And once you have that kind of awareness, it makes it way less scary to actually talk about it. And it makes it way easier to start making changes.

Absolutely. So now tip number two is to start talking about money with your partner casually. So again, money is this intimidating topic for us to talk about, and a lot of us feel like we have to dive right into the deep end and start having all these detailed in depth conversations. But you don't have to jump right into debt and budgets and what to do with your money right away.

Yeah, if you haven't talked about money yet in your relationship, just start small. Ask questions like what's the most enjoyable thing you've ever spent money on? Or what are some things that other people like spending money on that you prefer to save on?

So what you're doing here is you're just making money feel like a Topic that you can talk about. You don't have any agenda. There's no specific motives yet. You're just bringing it up as a topic and having these conversations that don't need to feel super intense. It just feels like a casual conversation that you. You're having.

Yeah. So then tip number three is share your personal money stories with each other. So next you can dive a little bit deeper by sharing your money history with each other. So if you start talking about your individual relationships with money, that makes it feel a lot less threatening than starting with talking about how you treat money as a couple together.

Yeah. So we're giving you tons of baby steps to just ease into the process. And this is another one. So you can approach your partner and say something like, you know, I never really thought that much about my relationship with money, but I watched this video and it had all of these interesting questions in it, and it got me thinking about it more. Would you be open to having a conversation about money with me? I'm curious to know more about your relationship with money, and I want to share some of the things that I discovered with you. So I definitely recommend picking a specific day and time to have this conversation. It can be a challenging topic for a lot of people, so it's nice to just create a little bit of structure around it.

Yeah. So then the fourth tip is share your financial goals with each other and then develop shared ones. So this is a fun, low pressure way that you can open up a dialogue with your partner about finances. So many of us think about money, and we immediately go to this negative head space. But money should be used to create excitement and joy in your life in reality.

Yeah. So you can ask your partner questions like, you know, what are your biggest financial dreams? So maybe your partner wants to own their own home one day. Maybe they want to retire early. Maybe they want to buy their parents a new car. So whatever their financial goals are, it can just feel a lot less intimidating to start talking about these positive goals rather than any sort of negative things about money. And you can also talk about shared goals that you can create together, depending on how far along your relationship is, of course. But maybe you want to save up and buy that home together. Or maybe you decide that you want to be able to take a lavish vacation together every single year.

That sounds good.

It does.

All right, so tip number five is start talking about being a money team.

A money team.

From here, you can start talking about how the two of you handle money together. The goal being that you're trying to figure out how your unique relationships with money fit together.

So here are some questions that you could consider asking each other. Where are our relationships with money similar, and where are they different? Because they're gonna be differences. Since you're just two different people, you can ask, what do we need from each other when it comes to money? What role do we want money to play in our relationship? And how can we feel like more of a team in dealing with money together? So that teamwork question is an especially important one, and I want to share a personal story about how this came up for us. So in one of the conversations that we had about money a long time ago, we realized that without the two of us ever really discussing it, that Xander had defaulted to being in charge of our finances. So what was going on at the time is that I had gone back to grad school. I wasn't bringing in any income. I was racking up a ton of student debt, and Xander had agreed to support me financially. But I was feeling so guilty about being able to accept him providing for me. And I reacted to my guilt by withdrawing and kind of like trying to bury my head in the sand about our financial situation. And I really told myself that I didn't have an. I didn't have the right to have an opinion about how we were dealing with our money since I was creating all of this financial burden on our relationship. But this actually created all of this pressure for Xander to make all of the financial decisions in our relationship, and he started feeling resentful of me for not being more involved. So it was really interesting because here I was thinking I was being polite and respectful, when actually what I was doing was creating a ton of pressure and stress. So talking openly about money, even though it was super challenging for us, it allowed us to realize these unspoken dynamics that were creating a lot of strain, and it helped us regroup together as a team and take a totally different approach to money going forward.

All right, so those are our top five tips for how to talk about money in your relationship. If you like this video, give it a like. Or better yet, leave us a comment down below about which tip resonated with you the most. How are you going to put it into action? And if you want to keep getting more free resources like this, just subscribe to our channel. See you next time.

Bye.