[00:00:00] Intro: We’re saying goodbye to the rigid numbers and strict budgets, and putting relationships back at the heart of personal finance. This is more than a podcast, it’s an invitation to reimagine your money story and journey with us through a landscape of intuitive strategies and abundance. Join a community that nurtures transformative financial mindsets.

[00:00:25] Welcome to Intuitive Finance. I’m your host, Dylan Bain.

[00:00:39] Dylan Bain: I’ve just quit my teaching job and I am really, really worried about money. It turns out that after I quit my teaching job, I wasn’t going to really bring in enough as a graduate student to pay the bills. And I thought that the best way to go about this would be to create a financial plan. And so I sat down with my spreadsheets, and I came up with what I thought was the perfect plan. And so I take it to my wife and I sit down with her, and I run through all the numbers with her and I say, okay honey, here’s the plan. Here’s what we’re going to do. And she flips out. She loses her mind.

[00:01:13] And I’m suddenly struggling because I’m trying to help us as a couple, like, what’s wrong with my numbers? Did I miss something? It didn’t work. And the more I try to talk to her about it, the more I try to get her to look at my spreadsheets, to look at my graphs, and all the different charts and stuff that I’ve prepared, the more unreasonable she seems like she’s becoming. Because at the end of the day, the numbers aren’t gonna work. And it seems beyond our ability to even have a discussion, never mind solve our money issues.

[00:01:46] Now in that story, ladies and gentlemen, I missed my wife. I didn’t see what she was concerned about at all. I had sat down, and like any good, dutiful man, had come up with a great solution. Honey, here’s the solution to all the problems. All we have to do is be disciplined and execute our way through this, and it’s gonna be fine. But I failed to see her and her concerns. And I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, that when you’re dealing with any other person other than yourself, and this includes yourself as well, you’re not just dealing with them, you’re dealing with their entire family of origin and everyone around them. It’s not a one and done type of thing, and so if you don’t see that, if you’re not a part of that, then you’re going to miss them.

[00:02:32] And when you miss them, you’re not going to be able to have the conversations you need. And I was failing to see my wife. I was missing her entirely. I did not understand her family of origin. I didn’t understand what was actually going on through her mind and in her heart. And the biggest thing I missed is she had just had our second child. My beautiful baby girl, my second daughter ,had just come into the world a month before and things were hard on her. She was a full-time graduate student. I was going back to graduate school. We no longer had stable income, and now we have not one, but two kids. And here I am telling her that we need to really tighten our belt and restrict our budgets. And she’s hearing, you’re going to starve my children.

[00:03:18] Now, I tell this story because the issue with finances is more often than not an issue with relationships. If it was all spreadsheets and it was so easy and simple that you could just budget your way out of poverty, or that you could budget your way to success without ever having to have a real, open, raw, vulnerable conversation with yourself and your people in your life, well then we would all do it and you wouldn’t be listening to this podcast. The reality that we face here is that money is emotional, and how we’re in relationship with money and how we’re in relationship with the other people in our lives are going to dictate a lot of the money story that we’re actually living out.

[00:04:00] Money disputes in relationships are all too common. And when we talk about relationships, it’s not just married couples. It’s also committed partnerships, long term boyfriend girlfriend, or other partner situations. Money relationships with yourself, money relationships with your parents. Money disputes in relationships are all too common. And when you actually start breaking down the numbers specifically for married couples, you see that money issues account for anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of divorces. And the reason you have such a range on that is because it’s far more common as you go down the generational line. And it’s — some people have said, well that’s because those younger generations, they don’t know what they’re doing. But you also could kind of look at it from the standpoint of well, the older generations are already divorced so they’re not really going through it a second time, but I digress.

[00:04:48] Money issues and financial stress is the second cause of divorce after infidelity. So the number one cause, of course, is somebody being physically, intimately infidelous to their relationship. But of course, financial infidelity is a thing too, and that can be just as hard on a relationship. Some of my closest friends and mentors have gone through this very thing. One of a very good friend and mentor of mine, he’s gone through a divorce where his wife had just run up tons and tons, six figures with a credit card debt. He said before, I would have rather her stepped out on the relationship than have done that because of the depth of betrayal and the amount of issues that were piled up on top of that.

[00:05:35] And it should be no surprise when we actually look at it that high debt levels and a lack of communication are frequently cited in divorce situations as to what the actual financial disagreement was. Because debt, we have a lot of negative connotations and associations with that. And of course, people don’t like to talk about this. We’re bad at communicating what we want for dinner, never mind what we actually want in our finances. And something so critical to our ability to continue to show up in this world.

[00:06:05] Often in a relationship, one party thinks the other is acting foolishly with money. And that can be with kind of going back then to those debt levels, but also with their spending habits, with how they’re earning income, career trajectories, investing opportunities, all of that stuff. What cars they drive, what clothes they buy, what food. Or why are you always buying the organic stuff? It’s just the same as the regular stuff. This is a common thing.

[00:06:30] And when we talk about money relationships outside of a committed partnership, your parents might actually be in this category too, where they look at you and they go, man, you’re just foolish with money. Well, at the same time, they are going out and being foolish with their money in your eyes.

[00:06:43] And these disputes don’t just come from nowhere. They actually are long standing disputes that we are carrying forward in our lives. So if you are in a partnership, and even if you’re not, when you look at yourself and your own relationship with yourself and with your money, understand that a lot of the dysfunction that you may be facing actually has its roots in your family of origin.

[00:07:07] Money is emotional. Relationships are emotional. Families are emotional. They’re part of the same type of material that creates our lives. And I’ve talked about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs numerous times, but this is the hierarchy of our needs. We start off with our physiological needs, then our safety and security, then relationships, esteem, and then finally at the top is self-actualization. Your family of origin is part of that, and money is what we take that entire pyramid and put it on is your financial situation.

[00:07:41] And so your family of origin, if they’re struggling to get their physiological needs met or to create safety and security — maybe you grew up in a home where there was precarious income, or your parents didn’t get along, or they had extremely moralistic expectations with money — well, you’re going to carry that forward because those people that were part of your life that have had that influence are going to go with you through your entire life. That family of origin and understanding what that family went through is critical to being able to look at what we’re dealing with right now and make different choices.

[00:08:17] I mean, I’ve shared before my issues with buying a pair of shoes. This was a huge thing for me. I had the money. It was a hundred dollar pair of shoes. They just looked nice and — for the new office job that I just had. And when I went to go buy them, my finger would not click the button. Well, that didn’t come out of nowhere. That came from interactions with my mother, who learned that shoes were like this entirely terrible backbreaking, budget-busting thing that kids needed. And of course, kids are always growing, so they’re always needing new shoes. And so you always buy the cheap ones, but they need to last for an unreasonable amount of time. And she didn’t just manufacture that out of the thin air. She picked it up from her parents, who picked it up from their parents.

[00:09:03] And you can see, we have this chain of causes that’s starting in the past and bringing us forward. And of course, the moralistic expectations are part of this too, right? We have — debt is this terrible thing. You shouldn’t be in debt. And we do have some radio hosts who talk about money quite frequently and always talking about — you’re a slave if you’re in debt. No debt! Debt! All debt is bad. And it’s like, okay, yeah, that’s great. But if I want to go to school, I’m probably gonna have to take on student debt. Have I committed something morally reprehensible by going to school? And that’s not for me to be saying one way or the other, but what I will say is that the idea that somehow there’s a moral expectation on the money is actually what’s starting to cause a lot of the shame and judgment, which is bypassing our ability to be able to have these conversations in a real way both with ourselves, but also with our partners.

[00:09:52] Priorities are another cause of this. What are your priorities? What is the thing that you’re actually trying to accomplish? What are you saving for? What are you earning for? What does your life look like? If you were suddenly gifted with five million dollars, what would your life look like? Priorities in income. And I’ve seen this and I’ve experienced this in my own life. When I was a teacher, I brought home 1,400 a month. That was my pay. And my rent was 850. And so most of my paycheck was going to rent, and that left very little for the rest of everything else. And trying to support my wife through graduate school, and raise one daughter, and then eventually two. This is why I had multiple jobs. This is why we were still on welfare was because, as a full time teacher, I wasn’t making enough. So when looking at it, one of the big, frustrating points in my marriage at the time was my wife telling me, we need more margin. She used to say this to me, if only we had more margin. If you could just give us more margin.

[00:10:53] Well, part of what that is is her looking at it and going, yeah, I know that you really want to be a teacher, but why are you not prioritizing more income for us so that we don’t have to have as much stress heaped upon our shoulders? And eventually my priority became — make more income. And I’ve talked before, that’s why I quit teaching. I quit teaching because my principal asked me to commit fraud, but also because I was really sick of being poor and on food stamps despite having a full time job, having no health insurance for my kids. My priority became get into the room where it happens. It became, let’s build a life that I really would like to live, where I have abundance, and I have material wealth, and I can send my kids to summer camp, and go on a vacation, or take my wife to dinner, and not just sweat bullets the whole time, thinking about how expensive this is going to be, and how I’m going to pay it all off.

[00:11:47] And it took me, from 2015 to now to increase my income by 97,000 a year, but I’ve done it. That was my priority. And so was that priority always my wife’s priority? Does she still want me to be continuing to increase my income or have those priorities changed? You’re not going to be able to know unless you’re actually able to have that conversation. The same thing with debt. When my wife and I were still very poor, debt was a huge thing. Like credit card debt — like the thing that killed us every single month was this unknown thing like, oh, I’m doing so well on the budget, but now the car needs new tires. And we’d have to carry that on the credit card and desperately hope to pay it off, or that I could pick up some extra work and get that debt paid off. But it would just like, drive my wife insane. Her priorities were no debt at all. At the same time, we’re taking on student debt because it’s the only way we’re keeping our head above water.

[00:12:44] And there’s always the disparity here sometimes in relationships where one person is out earning the other. And that power disparity, whether real or imagined, starts to impact the relationship in a negative way. And I have had couples who’ve come into the coaching practice and have, I had to I always start by coaching the couple, but eventually there’s a lot of times where I’m saying, you know what, I just need a conversation with this one person so that we can really get to understand what’s underneath here.

[00:13:13] And I was sitting with this woman, she was a stay at home mom. And as we’re talking, I say, well you have a lot of priorities. You have a lot of ideas of how you want this to go. Why don’t you tell your husband? She said, because I don’t earn the money. I don’t have a right to. It’s like, but you manage the household. The economic benefit of you staying home and raising the kids and cooking meals and cleaning the house is well over six figures worth of value that you’re generating into the relationship. You have every right to discuss the money. And she said, no, because I do that for love, not out of necessity. She views it as a disparity in power because her husband is earning the money while she’s making the home. She views any money issues as his domain and his domain only.

[00:14:05] And this is true with debt too. You might be coming into a relationship where your fiance is loaded up with a bunch of student debt and you have none or very little, and you look at it and go, I don’t want to have that in my life. And now I’m really worried about it. What happens if we get divorced? Does that mean I got to take on all the debt? I don’t want to do that. Or to say, well no, I was able to get through school. I was able to create my hook in the sky and advance my life without debt like, and now, we’re back to those moralistic expectations around debt. We’re judging this other person and looking at them in a negative light because of their financial circumstances without ever looking at the rest of the human.

[00:14:44] And of course, there’s also a disparity in knowledge. I’m a CPA. That’s what I do professionally. And my wife has said to me before like, well, you know how all this stuff works, so can you just take care of it? Well that’s tempting, but it also would lead to more conflict in my life and a less robust marriage for me.

[00:15:05] So I want to share with you four strategies for financial harmony. So when we’re looking at all of these causes, when we’re looking at a relationship with money inside of relationships with other people, how do we actually create financial harmony in our lives? How can we go about creating the conversations and the ability to hold space with this other person so that we can actually have our finances be a value added to our life rather than a source of stress?

[00:15:32] Number one is a partnership business meeting. When I haduewey Freeman on the podcast — link to that in the show notes — but if you had listened to the podcast, he tells the story about a couple. They were lawyers, they were high powered lawyers and together, they were bringing in about a half a million dollars a year. Now, when you look at their marriage, with a positive cash flow, the top line revenue is 500,000 a year, that’s a small business by itself. Never mind all the rest of the arts and crafts. But they’re running a small business.

[00:16:06] And here’s the catch, ladies and gentlemen, you are too. Even when I was a teacher, and I was — my very last teaching contract, the most lucrative one I’d ever been offered, the one that I turned down, was for 40,100. Even at that meager cash flow, I’m still running a business. It is Husband and Wife Incorporated. And sitting down with my wife and actually having to hash out what is the business part of our relationship — because that’s what we’re running. We have employees, we have HR concerns, compliance issues, forward planning — so that’s FP&A, financial planning and analysis. We have mergers and acquisitions. If we’re going to go buy a house, we’re going to bring on another business. In my current relationship, we rent out one of my rooms, right? So now we have a third person in the house. That’s not part of our marriage, but they’re definitely part of the business of the house.

[00:16:56] And so, sitting down to have a partnership business meeting, that’s one in which it’s not a check in where you sit there and go like, oh yeah. How are you doing? I’m doing good. Great. And you walk away. No like, sit down and be like, all right upcoming this week, I’ve got X, Y, and Z coming, and I’m going to have to be spending money here and here. I’m also expecting bonus at work. And she says on the other side of it, like, oh that’s great. I got to go grocery shopping. We’ve got Thanksgiving coming up, so I’m going to be heading over to Costco. That’s going to cost X amount. So that was already in the budget. So great. Oh, by the way, I had a recruiter reach out to me. I’m thinking about changing jobs. Okay, cool, honey. Let’s talk about that. Oh, we got to get the kids to BJJ. We gotta go to this parent teacher conference. Sit down and actually talk about the business, because then it’s not a surprise. Then you’re actually on the same page.

[00:17:44] And there are times when my wife and I sit down and she’s like, oh, I got this and this and this and this. And I’m like, well, I don’t got anything going on a Tuesday night. Let me, take that off your plate. I got that. She’s like, oh, that’s great. Or she says, well I want, I would love to go to this, networking happy hour, but I can’t because the girls have this going on. Okay, cool. I can take that. You go to the networking because your career is important to me too. You see how this is working? Now, suddenly we’re on the same page. We’re actually working in the same direction with the same goals in mind, and it’s an opportunity for me to actually look and see my partner. To get on the same page, but also to get to know her better. To see these other parts of her, the professional business woman that I married, the mother, the wife, the friend, the person who worries about money. All of those things together are part of this partnership business meeting.

[00:18:34] So that’s number one, partnership business meeting. Number two, put aside the judgment and expectation. When somebody is sitting with you and they say to you, hey, I would like to be able to buy this, but we don’t have the money and I just want to put on a credit card, but we can pay it off before we have any interest with the first paycheck from next month. Now, the temptation might be to say like, well, why would you do that? We got to wait. And like, you have this judgment of like, well — there she goes again. She’s just going to spend it all on a credit card, or he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. This judgment is going to cause them to not talk to you.

[00:19:10] The judgment isn’t going to get you anywhere. Stop and think about it in your life. Has it ever happened where somebody said, yeah, these people, they just judged the living crap out of me, they made me feel terrible, they just loaded shame on my shoulders, and I’m a really fully integrated person. I love my life. I feel like I live very freely and, that I’m relaxed in my life. Have you ever heard that? No, of course not. Because judgment and shame do the exact opposites of that. There’s also a lot of expectations.

[00:19:39] And this is something I think really comes from our family origin, where our parents are like, well you should be married at this point, or you should have a house at this point. Or, great example for my personal life, my wife and I have been talking about putting an addition on our house, right? We have two growing girls and right now my daughter share a bedroom. It’d be nice to have an extra room so that they can expand and they can have a place where they can shut their door and actually have some alone time because for better or for worse, both of my girls are kind of introverted. So sitting down with that and saying, okay, we’re going to do that.

[00:20:10] Well, I had the misfortune of sharing that with my parents. What did my parents say right off the bat? Well, you should just sell your house and buy a new one. That’s how you get on the property letter, Dylan. I said, well yeah, but I’ve got a 2 percent mortgage on my house right now. I’d have to pay an 8 percent mortgage to move that doesn’t make any sense. There’s no way I’m doing that. But my parents have an expectation that this is for lack of a better term, the way things are supposed to be. Well, that’s not encouraging financial harmony. That’s, in fact, encouraging me not to speak up, to not say what’s on my mind and in my heart, not to put my cards on the table. So now we’re in a place where to avoid the judgment, shame, and expectation, what I’m doing is I’m being sneaky about it. I’m not being truthful, and I’m not being honest, and a lot of times I’m not even being honest with me about what my wants and needs are.

[00:21:00] All of that is going to be underlying every interaction you have, and now suddenly you start feeling fake to your partner. Your partner is starting to lose trust in you because you’ve lost trust in you as well. And you can see how this can cascade.

[00:21:12] So number two, put aside the judgment and expectation. Number three, have a joint financial vision. Having a joint financial vision, it is really hard to overstate the importance of this. Having a joint financial vision that you and your partner share. And if you’re a single person, having a financial vision for yourself. If you’re ever going to be in a partnership or potentially could be in a partnership, you want to be able to walk into that partnership business meeting and say, here’s my North Star, what’s yours? And if you don’t have one, let’s figure that out.

[00:21:48] A joint financial vision should be something that is palpable to both of you. Because remember, money is emotional, so this has to hit home. You have to be able to visualize what that looks like for both of you. Saying, well, I’d like to go on vacation. That’s not enough for a joint financial vision. Paint me the picture. Where are you? What vacation? Where? What does it even look like? Oh, I want to go on an all expenses paid resort trip to Mexico and I want to sit on the beach, and I want to drink pina coladas, and I want to not think about anything for a full eight hours. Okay, cool. I like that. Me, personally, not exactly my financial vision. But for a lot of people it is, and it’s fine.

[00:22:31] But you and your partner have to be on the same page as to what you’re actually doing. Where you’re planning to go with this. What you’re actually building. Why are we saving? Why are we budgeting? Why are we having these conversations? What’s actually going on underneath the surface for us when we’re doing these actions? Do we understand our why?

[00:22:50] And I’m going to speak directly to the dudes here, but this applies to women as well — but guys have a tendency to want to try to lawyer this. Do not lawyer this. Here’s what I mean by lawyering this. When a guy sits down and says, all right honey, what do you want? And he badgers her into saying these things. Well, if you’re badgering somebody, if you’re putting stress on them — again, go back to number two, putting aside the judgment and expectation. If you’re judging them or you have an expectation of what they’re supposed to say, the game for them becomes not should I reveal myself and actually get on the same page with this person, but just to tell them what they want to hear so that they will stop badgering them and stop judging them and they can stop feeling bad.

[00:23:33] You’re talking about something intensely emotional and you’re talking about creating a grand vision that you’re both going to share badgering that person into what you think it should be is a recipe for disaster. So you don’t want to lawyer this. You don’t want to just get them to agree to it as if they somehow were to sign the contract. Now they’re bound to it forever and now they have to be happy because they signed it. They signed it under duress.

[00:23:57] Joint financial vision needs to be something of hope. It is emotional to both of you where when you look at it, you say, honey, this month has been really hard. And she says, yeah, and I’m still looking forward to that beach and in Mexico on an all expenses paid vacation where we drink pina coladas, and look at the ocean, and think about nothing else for eight hours. That is powerful.

[00:24:23] Number four, deal with and address reality. Now, this one kind of seems obvious, but I will tell you when it comes to people’s money, they don’t do this. They want to address something else. This is where you find a lot of excuses of like, well, I have to have this thing. Oh, I don’t make enough money. Oh, it’s the whole system is out of whack. They’re not dealing with or addressing reality. So a lot of times, when you look at your income and your expenses, a lot more people have an income problem than they have an expense problem, particularly at lower levels of income.

[00:24:56] When I was a teacher — this is a great example — I really believed at the time that we had an expense problem. But that wasn’t actually the deal. The deal was that I wasn’t making enough money. And when I came around to that, I had to address that thing. I had to come to terms with this career, teaching, something that I loved. And not a day goes by. Here we are eight years later, and I still think about being in the classroom with my students almost every day. I miss it. I miss it a lot, but the reality is it was never going to pay the bills. The reality is that I would have to pay such a high premium at this point, a 97,000 difference to be in the classroom. And I’m not willing to pay 97,000 a year to go teach.

[00:25:40] That’s dealing with and addressing reality. You have to look at this dispassionately. You have to be very clinical, not critical about what’s going on. Where you’re at, what’s going on in your marriage, what’s going on in your neighborhood, what’s going on at your job. If you’re sitting there thinking like, oh I’m bulletproof, they can never get rid of me. Trust me. There are thousands upon thousands of people who have been laid off who thought they were indispensable. You might even think of it like, oh, I’ve got this big thing at work. They would never kill that project. I will promise you they will. The second that the accountant can make the spreadsheet look good, if you’re not there, you’re gone. If you get hit by a bus tomorrow, they’ll have your job posted. If they’re going to even backfill at all. Before your body’s even cold. That’s reality. You have to deal with and address that. You have to be able to look dispassionately at it.

[00:26:31] And sometimes that means looking at it, and like an example at the top of the show, looking at my wife and going, the reality is she is breastfeeding our youngest daughter. That’s consuming an absolute metric ton of calories, and that’s taking it out of her body. She needs to eat. She needs that grocery bill not to be smaller, but in fact to be bigger because she’s actually creating life support for not just herself, but for an entire another human. That’s reality. And the reality is that’s a season of life. Obviously here we are eight years later, and my wife is no longer breastfeeding our youngest daughter.

[00:27:12] And I’ve been able to take couples through this in my coaching practice.

[00:27:16] For example, I sat down, I have was a husband and wife team where he worked. He was an engineer and she stayed at home with their four kids. She homeschooled them. She cooked all the meals. And we were sitting down and we’re having this conversation and she’s just getting quieter and smaller the entire time while he’s talking about well, we got to have this percentage here and this percentage here, and on Reddit they said this and Dave Ramsey says that and blah blah blah, and he’s going on and his engineer mind’s got a hold of this. His engineer teeth are so firmly in this that he cannot even comprehend that anybody would have a different opinion, because it all makes mathematical sense. That’s his engineering brain, but his wife is a mother and a homemaker, and this isn’t working for her.

[00:27:58] And I stopped and I said, hey tell me what’s coming up for you. And he said, well, but it’s — I said, no, this is not about you right now. We’re going to talk to her and I want you to turn and I want you to look at her. And I told her, I said, you look at me. You’re talking only to me. He’s observing, but you’re talking to me. Where are you at? What’s coming up for you? And she says, I don’t live on percentages. I don’t live on percentages. And she immediately goes into a shame spiral. Well I know I’m supposed to, I know I’m supposed to. And I stopped and I said, who says who? Says who? She goes, well I listened to this podcast. We took this course from this other guy, and he says that no more than X percent should go to groceries, no more of X percent should go here. And I looked at her and I said, that’s because he’s got his head up his ass.

[00:28:49] She bursts into tears. Tears of joy and relief that somebody just saw her enough to be able to say, I’m not going to tell you that you must live under the tyranny of percentages. If your grocery budget is 40 percent of every dollar that comes in, then it’s 40 percent of every dollar that comes in, if that’s what’s going to help you make a home. And her husband looked at her for the first time and went, Oh, honey, I’m so sorry. And it was, a beautiful moment in coaching practice to watch them hug each other and actually have to acknowledge they had been missing each other. They were now dealing with reality. They put aside the judgment and expectation and they were willing to have that business meeting. She was not willing to talk to him about money, but they’re now willing to have a business meeting.

[00:29:40] I’ve also seen a wife who was engaging in retail therapy. Husband comes in and he starts off immediately telling me, well, she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth and she just spends money like there’s no tomorrow. And as I’m talking to the couple and helping them and trying to get them to talk, she would sit there and tell me all sorts of stuff. And her husband would look at her like, oh my God, I’m upset that she’ll say this to you, but she won’t say it to me. And I said, okay, well, let’s ask her. And I turned to her and I said why is that? Why do you tell me stuff that you won’t tell him?

[00:30:12] She says, you don’t judge me. You sit there and you listen. Try to understand why I’m buying this stuff. I said, well, why are you buying the stuff? She goes, because then I feel like the world’s okay. This goes back to Duey Freeman’s developmental model. It starts off, is the world okay? She’s dealing with her family of origin. And as we talked more and her husband says to her, I think this relates to your house. And she says, yeah, it does. I don’t want them to judge me. I don’t want — they expect us to have a Range Rover. They expect us to have a nice car and they expect us to be always buying a bigger house. They judge me.

[00:30:53] It was like, ah, here we are. She’s not engaging in retail therapy because she doesn’t she doesn’t want to be disrespecting her husband or that she’s a bad, naughty, wrong person with money. She’s doing it because she’s afraid of her aunt’s judgment and they spend all their time on the weekends around these women that don’t serve her. And I said, okay, what are you gonna do about it? And she says I just think I need to stop going to see ’em. I said, good. When I checked in with them six months later, they had stopped. You know what else had stopped? Her retail therapy. She was no longer just buying stuff on Amazon to numb out. She was actually looking at what she had and going, I don’t need another set of pants. These ones are fine. And I don’t need to drive the Range Rover because I barely go anywhere.

[00:31:41] These are sixries of success for money with these couples where they’re looking at it and they’re saying, we got to have a business meeting. We got to put aside our judgment expectations. We have a joyful financial vision and we need to deal with an address reality. Even when it’s hard, even when it makes us have to question our family of origin, even when we have to look inside of ourselves and figure out what’s making us tick? Where is the feelings here?

[00:32:06] I remember going to my wife and sitting down with her, telling her, honey, I don’t know what’s going on, but I know I want to be in this with you. And so I created these spreadsheets, but I don’t want to talk about them. I want to talk about what, are you scared of? What did I say that was, upsetting? Because I want to make sure that I’m here for you and you know I’m here for you. And that’s when she told me, you say we need to reduce groceries, I’m hearing you’re going to starve me and my babies. Okay well, let’s figure out what number we need to have the groceries. Let’s fill the rest of the budget around that.

[00:32:39] Ladies and gentlemen, that was hard. That was real hard because numbers didn’t work. The problem was I didn’t have enough income, but it did mean that her and I were able to start sitting down and having a partnership business meeting. And in that process, there were a lot of ups and downs. There were places where I wasn’t being honest with her and she wasn’t being honest with me. And we had to have those conversations. But the important thing is, we had those conversations. And despite all the ups and all the downs, in the end, that business meeting carried us through a lot of hard times. From job loss to moving cities and states. Having changed our girls’ schools multiple times. Even when the marriage felt like it wasn’t gonna survive, the business case for our relationship always remained, and that created more than just financial harmony. It created marital harmony for me.

[00:33:35] I’m proud to say that I am still married to my wife, coming up on almost 15 years. And that’s incredible. That’s incredible because we were able to create financial harmony.

[00:33:49] Outro: Thanks for listening. The conversation doesn’t end here. Please share the show with friends and make sure you keep up with all the latest updates on Instagram and Threads @TheDylanBain, and dive deeper into the world of finance with me at DylanBain.com where you’ll find insights, resources, and strategies to reimagine your money story.