How We Money: Merging Financial Lives

For Heather and Douglas Boneparth, this isn’t just a money story. It’s a love story. Find out how these college sweethearts, who grew up with vastly different money experiences, overcame all obstacles to merge their financial lives — and how they’re using the lessons they learned to help others do the same.

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Transcript

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- When your financial issues become our financial issues. Welcome to "Common Cents on the Prairie." A podcast dedicated to helping you demystify the sometimes complex topic of money. I'm Adam Cox, head of Wealth Management for The First National Bank in Sioux Falls. We're a community bank based out of South Dakota. In this podcast, we share expert insights from around the country, and stories from our local community to arm you with the tools you need to make better financial decisions'cause the truth is, the more we talk about this stuff, the better off we're all going to be. Welcome to another "How We Money" episode on the "Common Cents on the Prairie" podcast. Today, I'm talking with Douglas and Heather Boneparth. Douglas is the president and founder of Bone Fide Wealth in New York City. He sits on the CNBC Financial Advisor Council and is a CFP Board ambassador for New York. He is also kind of funny on Twitter and Instagram, and definitely worth a follow. Heather is a writer and recovering corporate attorney who now runs business legal affairs for the firm. You can find her on Instagram or through her newsletter,"Our Tiny Rebellions," which searches for meaning in our little wins and losses. Together, they wrote their first book about millennials and money while on parental leave with their oldest daughter. Seven years later, they're working on their second book about navigating the power struggles over money in relationships. In the meantime, you can subscribe to the newsletter,"The Joint Account." I hope you enjoy my conversation with Douglas and Heather. Douglas and Heather, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.- Thanks for having us.- Yeah, super excited.- Okay, let's start this conversation where we start all of our conversations with couples. I'd love to hear more about your background with money. Heather, why don't you start us off?- I grew up, I'm an only child and grandchild on both sides of my family, so I have a lot of cousins, but not a lot of immediate family, and I think that that's relevant. My parents got divorced when I turned 13, and I continued to live with my mom, the two of us, until I went to college. I struggle to say, especially because of the work that Douglas and I are doing now, I struggle to say something like, money was tight, because I think that that's not a fair thing for me to say, knowing that I grew up ultimately having almost everything I needed, but money felt tight, right? And I think we're learning a lot about the subjectivities around people's thought processes and value systems around money. I became a bit of a pawn in a financial dispute between my parents in the formative years of my life. And it directly impacted my perception of money.- Sure.- I think that that is a good backdrop for my motivations professionally and kind of like how I came into my adult life having somewhat of a misguided approach to money.- That's really powerful. Thank you for sharing that.- You're welcome.- Douglas, how about you?- Different experience, to say the least. I grew up in an upper middle-class family in Boca Raton, Florida. It's a town that's known for its affluence, retirement capital of the world. So there's a lot of retiree money down there. And to this day now, a lot of new money, but a lot of old money, basically. And I grew up in an entrepreneurial household. My mom was a teacher for her whole career, but my father and his father always ran businesses. They always either worked for themselves or built something of their own. And that flowed through to both my brother. I have one older brother and myself. We were always building businesses too.- Moving and shaking.- Yeah.- Yeah.- The Boneparths were always moving and shaking.- Yeah, my grandfather, specifically, Shepard, was definitely a mover and shaker and always involving himself in whatever was the latest trend. He was the only grandpa I knew that was pretty proficient with a computer in the '90s.- Oh, wow.- Right, so yeah, that went on to be an edge that my brother and I would use to our advantage for some time and that we had a computer repair business throughout all of our middle school and high school years. So we were cleaning up on the weekends. It was pretty sweet and easy money.- And he still fixes our computers today.- And I'm still fixing everyone's computer today, but that, I guess, upbringing is responsible for almost every approach I've ever taken to a job. I've never really worked in corporate America except for a one year stint at Blockbuster in high school. And look what happened to them.- Yeah, you're the reason.- I'm the reason. My friends took a lot of candy out of the front, you know. I'm just saying, but that would flow through to how I would ultimately build a business of my own and have a career. I really didn't know any other way to do it than pursue that more entrepreneurial path. I had a good childhood. Money, you know, we earned. If we wanted something, we explained why we wanted it, and we did what we needed to do to earn it. And then at some point we just, my brother and I were working our own repair business and whatever we wanted we bought ourselves. It was our money. I had great weekends. I could fill up the car with gas. I could go to the movies. I could do whatever I wanted to do with my friends and not have to ask for a dollar.- See, and that's so interesting. I'm only going to chime in on that for one second.- Please.- Because just to further illustrate the difference between Doug's childhood and mine. I had to ask, and the ask often didn't immediately result in receiving. The ask usually resulted in some sort of like, continued, like, prolonged and protracted negotiation and discussion between my parents and like, who would do it? Like, who would get it for me at the end of the day, right? And it became, yeah. This definitely, like, carried over into a time when Doug and I met.- Yeah.- Heather, I had no one involving themselves. And you'll see we talk all the time about how that also wasn't great, but I had no one on either parent. Like, oh, they make their own money. They'll be fine on their own. They just assumed we could handle it from 17, 16, earlier into adulthood and we were still kids. We actually still needed guardrails and advice, and stuff like that, which may or may not have been there.- And what you'll see in our story is how, like, the script gets flipped a little bit.- So, all right. I have so many follow-up questions with this, but, so, Douglas, did you guys talk about money, or did you talk about building businesses and just, was the topic brought up a lot? Or were you guys just kind of free-ranging it?- As kids?- Yeah, as kids.- Yeah, it all hinges I really think on early indoctrination to technology and computers. We were one of those computer households. There's that Bill Gates story of how he had the one classroom in all of California that had access to a computer and obviously carved the pathway. I'm no Bill Gates by any stretch of the imagination here, but having access and an early experience with computers led itself to, first of all, I just wanted to play the video games. So I got to give my brother a lot of credit for really tinkering with them. I would build them. I love the hardware side. My brother was equal parts hardware and software, but we both loved fixing stuff and building stuff, not just businesses, so. I give him credit, he started that. It was $5 an hour. My mom would drive him around to the neighbors or other developments to go fix a computer. And he taught me up and handed it off to me when he went to school.- But I'll connect that dot for you a little bit, and I've known Doug a very long time. We met when we were 18. So I've got some early intel on Doug too. I can connect that dot from your early love of technology. Like you were the first person I know who was using spreadsheets to track your finances. You were one of the first, at least out of people that we knew.- That's good to know.- He did use his technology and his skill to handle his money better.- My brother I, who I give a ton of credit to, only a couple years older than me, but him indoctrinating me into computers and technology, and despite my want to get entertainment value out of it, that turned into eBay and being able to sell. I mean, I think the hustler mentality was in all of us, but I took it to little niches and pockets. Like I identified that Japanese animation was coming over to America in one great big wave. And I was able to get my hands on certain series and be able to, I mean, here I am admitting bootlegging anime on eBay when I was in middle school and high school.- Such a nerd.- Hustler, he's a hustler, yeah.- That was the hustle versus your kids in Brooklyn selling fireworks illegally on the street corner. Like, you know, the cops are like, oh, let them sell their bottle rockets, right?- Oh, that's funny. Heather, going back to you. I'm curious, who did you ask for when you needed money? Who did you ask? Did you ask mom or dad?- I lived with my mom.- Okay.- My mom did not work at the time when my parents got divorced. My mom ended up needing to go back to work and restarted her career after my parents got divorced, but my dad was financially responsible for both of us at that time, but he was not living with us. So who I asked, I mean, she knew what I needed, but a lot of times it was when you see your dad every other week, which was when I saw him. Well, you're with him for an hour, two hours. Like, make sure that you get whatever you need during that time. And I think that that's kind of like where my perception of money, like, really got messed up because I didn't see my dad very often for a couple years there. And I felt like I had to use that time to always be like, asking for something. And it felt disingenuous to me. It wasn't how I wanted to spend our time. And it almost felt like it was turning our time together into, like, a business meeting.- Yeah, right.- Before I even really knew what that was. And I still to this day, hate asking for favors. I hate asking for things. Doug knows how, like, deeply, deeply this is ingrained. Like this issue that I have is ingrained and comes back from my childhood, right? Like, I still can't follow through with my parents on certain things because I'm so, like, proud that I don't want to ever be put in that position again to ever have to ask for something that I'm stubborn about it.- Yeah, hmm, that's good stuff. So you guys were 18 when you met?- Yep, we met freshman year of college.- There you go. When did you start dating?- Straight out the gate.- Yeah.- Freshman year of college.- Freshman year of college.- But I would say like, college years they're not real years, right?- No, no, no.- It's La La Land. You're not an adult. You're playing one on TV, right? Let's be real here. So we had a ton of fun. All of our friends were mutual friends. Like it was just a fantasy land and it was the best, but we both knew afterwards there was going to be like a crossroad in our life just based on Doug was planning to go. Yeah, well, like Doug was planning to go back to South Florida and work for his father at his father's firm. And I was planning to go off to law school at whichever law school I got into that I ultimately decided to go to, which ended up being one in New York City. And we kind of didn't know, like, where real life would take us. I mean, we loved each other, but we did not know where life would take us.- Heather's been always more of the, definitely the more focused of the two of us. Her short-term planning is absolutely remarkable. Her long-term planning is good as well.- I'm ambitious to a fault. Like, I had a plan. His plan was like, it will all work out.- I didn't really know. And I just felt in my heart, she's like, how are we going to get back together? Like, where are we going to be? I'm like, I don't know, but it's going to happen and we'll figure it out in the meantime. You got to go to the best school. My attitude was you got to go to the best school you got into because that will provide you with the most opportunity. And I've always classically been at least throughout all of college, like pretty lost when it came to what I really wanted for myself. And I think my father picked up on that and was like, all right, let's give him a path. And I was like, all right, we'll walk down this one. Doesn't seem all that bad. It seems pretty comfortable and speaks to my, it was comfortable 'cause it spoke to my skills. And there was probably many other jobs and careers that could do that as well, but I just really wasn't putting in the kind of thought that Heather needed to put in because I maybe had more of a support system and foundation behind me from my childhood. I always thought things would be all right and Heather's, like, it's not going to be all right. It never was. I got to carve this out.- And that is exactly, like, the schism in our lives that we were, like, living through as we approached our adult life after college. I still, like, no matter how much we loved each other and had an amazing time together in college, like I'm still an only child product of divorce who has built-in cynicism around the ability of something to just work out. Like I deeply believe in, like, in planning and being responsible, in putting myself first at all costs. I didn't know how to be any other way because I think that, like, I was so, so obsessed with this idea of finding freedom for myself from the life that I, like, the relationship and the life that I kind of had experienced before I went to college that I didn't know where Doug would fit into that.- And I've never asked the question, but I'm thinking it now is what would've happened had I said like, hey, I'm moving to New York, too. I'll find a job up there based on the training I received. I mean, we don't need to spend much time on it, but I'll be thinking about that question for a little bit after today's conversation. Would it have worked out any differently? I mean, we struggled for a little bit even before and after I eventually did move up, what would've happened? I think this is just more out of curiosity, certainly not regret or anything, but what would've happened had I said, yep, I'm going up there too. You will go to law school. I'll work and we'll figure it out. I could paint a disaster. I could paint a fantasy story that works out, excuse me, a fairy tale that works out well in the end, I don't know.- Life isn't a fairy tale though. This is what we've got and we're still here.- Yeah, this is not quite a nightmare. I'm just kidding. It's real life.- Yeah, it's the grind, it's the grind.- It's real, it's real.- So the two of you obviously did work it out, you're married. You have very different money backgrounds, like, very different experiences, and maybe very different motivations. I'd like to know what it was like when the two of you got serious about being together and staying together and what that meant financially, like how did that go? Like, we could probably spend three days on this, I get it, but like, how did you merge the two of those things together?- I'll give just a little bit of backdrop on that, and then I'll let Doug jump in on this. I thought that I was doing the responsible thing by going to law school back to this whole thing of like, I need to make as much money as possible. That needs to be my focus in life. I'm going to go to law school. That was in 2007, okay? So I went to a very expensive law school. I was shown a million salary charts of how much money I would make coming out of law school. And then it didn't happen because it was recession, the Great Recession.- Yeah, not just any recession.- Not just any recession, don't call it any recession. And I graduated underemployed with more than $200,000 in student loan debt. So our money background, I would say to some extent was like, my money background was even like more disrupted by the recession because like, I really believed in my, like, in my soul that I was doing the responsible thing, even taking out that much student loan debt to go to law school. Like I really believed it was a calculated risk and that I was doing something responsible to invest in myself for my career. And so when that wasn't the way that things were panning out when I graduated, and I was, again, I was lucky to have a job at all. Most of my class was unemployed. I was employed because I was at the top of my class, but it was a way underpaid job. I could barely, I was making negative money if I was paying back my loans. Like, I mean, it was very scary and I just fell into a complete hole mentally, financially. I just felt completely, completely out of control. So if the recession had not happened, I don't know what, the merge would've gone very differently in terms of our financial lives, but because I was in such a bad place, and I was so disempowered and I was so lost, and so, like, I never really, like, I'm not a victim mentality type of person, but I just saw no way out, which is a very scary thing to feel in your 20s to really feel like there's no way out. Like hopeless is a scary thing to feel in your 20s. And Doug kind of like, not to give him, like, the male savior thing here, but Doug kind of saved me. And I don't mean financially because like you could hear a little more about that in the story.- Look what I had to offer.- You had to offer financial knowledge that I didn't have. And a way to really understand how to wrap my hands around what was actually in front of me and not just be so afraid by a number, and by my bank account that I couldn't function.- Get rid of the paralysis.- You never lost control. You are in control and here's what we have to do, and here's what that'll look like, to, like, set ourselves up to start working on it. So we merged it. Like, I needed the help and he was there to help.- I also had, and still have, you know, unfortunately, for Heather she'll say, I'm like, wow. I'll say to her like, you're being pessimistic. And she'll say something like, no, I'm being realistic and her and I will disagree on that because I'm the other way, right? I'm rose-colored glasses she would say all the time. And I would say, no, I'm being realistic. You're being overly, and she would say, you're being overly optimistic.- Sure.- And you'll see this constant extreme ends of the spectrum in our lives really be one of the things that makes it work. Whether that's an opposites attract type of thing, or just we're getting two completely different views and can tolerate each other enough to find common ground.- Our outlooks definitely complement one another, and balance out. I mean, balance is really the key, right? So that both people's perceptions and outlooks and sentiments are recognized.- Yeah, a hundred percent.- That's what you want.- But there's still an extreme take here coming out of my camp. It is not necessarily a moderate take to walk away from your family business with four boxes shipped to a random roommate's apartment in New York City that you met on Craigslist to give it a go.- Well, that's what he did. Wait, just because he hasn't said that yet. Doug eventually declared his love for me and said,"I love you. I'm coming to New York City."- Yeah, your big gesture.- There's a little more nuance to it, but yeah.- He put a box over his head.- Yeah, it is a love story at the end of the day, you know, among many others, but I burned my boats, right? And moved to New York City walking away from quite a bit with debt. I had to get rid of my car lease. And I owed CarMax some money, in turn owing my mom money who covered that for me. And I was reimbursing her month-to-month. I had student loans from undergrad. All I had really was a salary to be a financial advisor and work in some other advisor's practice. And this was October, 2008. So Heather and I do share a very interesting recession story in terms of how it has shaped our careers. And I would argue our lives. I mean, I moved up with no money and the hope. I moved up with negative money, four boxes.- A duffel bag and a dream.- Yeah, it was, it's cliche, right? I went to Sleepy's on Fifth to get a 0% credit card to buy my mattress, which was 600 bucks. Why I even took out the card, we don't know, but I needed something to sleep on in this room in Murray Hill. So my story obviously has a lot of extreme components to it before it would just constantly get ironed out, but the point was I moved up wide-eyed with that sparkle of a dream. Heather was already a downtrodden legal student in an abysmal job environment and is pondering how the hell she's going to pay back.- I was like, welcome to hell.- She's like, I'm screwed. And I'm like, you're not, you're not. She's like, what do you have other than none? I'm like, I don't have any money here, but I can chart a course that will get us where we need to go. It's just make 10 times what we're currently making. No, it was how do we do that?- But this was a couple years after he moved up. I mean, like, we moved in together a couple years later when we knew we were giving it a go for the long run, and so at the beginning, we both kind of just triaged it for a couple years, but then when we moved in together was when we really started.- That's when advisor skills kicked in a very formal setting to bust out spreadsheets and cash positions and what cash flow would look like. I would have to show her what growth in my business would look like under many different scenarios. I'd have to show her where she could take her skill set as the economy started to recover. And we would need to navigate this brick by brick, step by step. And we would need to ultimately get her emotions controlled around the student loan debt for years. And a very long time after that, the amount of guilt and shame that Heather would put on herself for making a decision that she thought was right and would free her only to find out that she now has a different master, a different financial master, right?- Shame is the right word.- In the form of loans. We'll carry the story forward and get to the point of how we do take control of that. Thank you, low interest rate phenomenon, but also thank you to building strong credits. To working hard and building up income so you could approach an institution and say, hey, how can we better our situation? Which doesn't look awesome and looked horrible, at least to us, or to Heather, but arguably didn't look great when we just started out 2010 and moved in together.- Yeah. I've officially torn up all my other questions because we have so much in common. I came out of school in 2008 in the fall and had all those same feelings. I also had more than $200,000 in student loan debt. I also had an incredible amount of guilt. And all the things you're talking about have really hit home for me. So Heather, I'll ask you, how did it feel when your problems, your financial problems became our financial problems?- I don't remember where we were, like the specific memory of this, but like, there was a moment where Doug basically said to me, well, like, this isn't just your problem. This is our problem now. Not I'm going to pay off your debt and like, whatever. I mean, I was earning more money in the early stages of our career, but it wasn't about that. It was about the notion of like, this is our mountain to climb together, and you will not ever be shamed by me for this. You will only be empowered and we will attack it together. That's what a team does. That's what a marriage is all about. And like, the fact that he has always approached it like that, I mean, to me, especially, like this again goes back to these issues like when you're a product of divorce and you're an only child and somebody says to you like, there was no greater testament to Doug's commitment to me like literally almost more than him proposing to me was him offering to tackle the student loan debt to me. Like that is how co-mingled love and money were to me at that point in my life. So that was like, there was no greater, there was no greater, like, offering he could ever give me than just the trust. Like the trust that I gained back and his willingness to tackle this with me told me everything I needed to know about him and our relationship and how successful we'd be together in a partnership.- I figured the only real way to get Heather to move beyond a lot of the financial baggage that was created, not just from law school, which was the current one, but a hope of addressing the real trauma of childhood. And you've heard it from her around divorce you got to create fairness. Heather's all about equity and she'll make that very clear how important that is to her. So you got to follow suit with that. And I figured, I can actually tell you when the moment was, I was like, hey, we need to do this. The first one was we had a child and we wanted to buy a home. And that was proving to be threading a needle in 2016. And I think one of Heather's biggest fears was, oh my God, we took on all this debt. By the way, I would go to business school and take out another $120,000 in student loans on top of that, so there's more to the debt story than just Heather's.- More debt.- Yay, go us, but in the consistent, you know, proving that we come from different sides of this, if Heather is a cautionary tale, I'm showing you how to do leverage right. I mean, I don't regret for a second going to business school and I turned that into a moneymaker before I even had graduated. And I was like, all right, that went according to plan. Like that was thought out because I knew I could not do that. I couldn't just go on a whim and double down on some of the mistakes. Heather didn't go to law school on a whim. She went there with purpose. Should you imagine if I did that on a whim, took out this debt and didn't have a plan. I mean, it would be like, get away from me. Like you did the exact opposite of what I needed to feel good about the decision that I had made. So here we are. I remember being able to refinance my graduate loan debt, at a very attractive rate from a bank that no longer exists today, probably for the very reasons of giving that loan. Rest in peace First Republic Bank. You're a real one.- Love them.- Love them, truly love them. Shame to see them go. Part of the problem. No, it was their problem. I was the benefactor. I had refinanced to something that was less than half of what the original rate was. I mean, it was a game-changer, it really was. Just from the terms of the loan. And we were trying to buy a house and we did, here it is. And we were very hesitant to do the same deal for Heather's loans. I was the small, I was one half of her amount. She was more than double the loan pile. And I said, look those income-based repayment plans and crutches that the government allows you to have access to despite paying a much higher rate. We need that. We need that crutch, right? We're not ready to let go and walk on our own here, but as we gained stability and things continued to get better and better, and the business grew and Heather's career grew, even post house purchase, which we figured out, then came the no-brainer move to be like, we are together. Not only are we married, but we have a child. We share a home. That final step here to really prove that this is forever, and this is no joke whatsoever, is we got to now make the entire debt load one. I didn't need a co-signer to do mine. They wouldn't let Heather refinance hers. So what Heather's talking about when she means Doug taking it on, I said, I don't care if I have to co-sign or not. Like the deal is great. Look what it does psychologically for us.- But our discussions of that happened many years before too. Like you in sentiment were always helping.- Yeah, that was on the table for a while before it actually happened. She trusted me to understand where we were financially and what risk tolerance we had around'cause, look, she's a lawyer. She wasn't handling the day-to-day affairs or some of the more macro business concepts of where I was in my business. She would say, hey, if I lose my best client and we hit a recession all at once I told her like, it scares me. Like that would worry the pants off of me. And she's like, well, what do we do? I'm like, well, we either accept the risk or go live with your mom. I mean, there's really no option here. We accept, are you okay with accepting the risk? And she's like.- But the one thing I'll say is I think what makes our situation unique, but also what has made us so successful up to this point in our relationship, I mean, is that we've had all these, like, undulating dynamics at play, both financial, right? Like we each had this, like, our own individual load, like, student loan debt. We've got careers that were wildly dynamic and different, right? Like the way that Doug grew his career starting out as an employee of another advisor and kind of going out on his own and building his own business while I held down a corporate law job to kind of create that stability in our relationship. And each one of these things, the financial, the professional, the emotional, like, they were all kind of like, we were always kind of recalibrating them so that we both felt comfortable. We moved the ball forward.- We still are.- Collectively, yeah, we still do.- Even more so.- But we've always just been not only conscious of each other, but like we've considered it all collectively. I called it, like, there is a level of collective ambition. Like it was never me in spite of him or him in spite of me. It was like, where is he right now? And can that allow for me to do what I want to do?- What's the greatest complement to what either person is doing at the moment? Sometimes that's one person stepping aside, or limiting themselves from an earning capacity, or a fulfillment versus, and we'll talk about that, you know, versus it being the other way around, which lends itself to the ebbs and flows of support that we offer one another. What's not being said here enough is you just heard Doug saving the damsel? No, that ain't it, you know. In my mind, as much as I knew plugging into Heather that way would alleviate pressure, burden, shame and guilt, to allow her to sit more comfortably in herself, what you need to understand is what Heather was doing for me for an extremely long period of time, which was allowing me to grow my business. And the flippening of our, if that's flippening of our incomes, is a direct result of the support that she gave me. And would lend itself to a very different dynamic that we've only just in the last few years had to bring our experience in communication and understanding where we are to get to the next thing. So I really want to drive this point home. You know, Bone Fide. Heather is a lawyer, my co-CEO and co-founder. It is displayed nowhere on a card, but I will tell that to anyone because the story is not complete without, and, of course, a parent and mom, here's my wife working at least three full-time jobs, right? The invisible load of motherhood being a huge factor.- We were growing his business together at night since we were in our late 20s.- Writing that first book together, so I could build a platform around a specific area of knowledge. The countless number of times of should I make this move? Should we invest our money here? Should I focus on this type of client? And she'll tell you like, I've been ripped new ones. And be like, no, you will not go down that road. This is the road. And through that you got to be strong there because at some point you begin to realize, oh my goodness, the advice that I've been receiving from my partner here is usually the one that works out very well. How do I keep my ego in check and not crumble before her and realize that, yeah, I might have to listen to things I don't like, but if I execute on them, I might get a better outcome than had I gone with what my thought was. So you got to give it up to Heather here for doing all of these things. And I think most notably, providing the support. The benefits, the stable earnings, all the headaches she inherited and stuff she had to deal with being in the workforce, not just as an attorney, but as a woman. These are real things.- It wasn't a great decade in corporate law.- There you go, you heard it right there. And here I am having a blast. Like I will tell you, I am having a lot of fun, not just currently, but over those years, I mean, she's like, oh, great, my husband's on TV today. He's on a podcast today. He's being given an award in his industry. And she's like.- No, you know what? It's not like, oh, I sought a piece of the limelight too. Like, it's not that. It's that, like, we had known that this was our dynamic for a while. And Doug got to a point where he was achieving an objective level of success in terms of, like, objective, but also, like, his own subjective ideas about what he wanted to achieve, but it kind of felt like I wasn't given that same chance. I had held down different jobs in the insurance industry, in-house legal work. And when I think about, like, I was proud and happy, especially with the years of, like, having young children and everything to kind of like, hold down this safe corporate safety net for Doug to grow his business and to kind of be able to take risks and about not worrying about aligning with every single prospective client that comes across his way. And to really try and grow with intention. And like, I was proud and happy to provide that level of support and comfort that I could for our family during those years, but then COVID hit.- Yeah.- And then I think that you start to kind of question, and I know I certainly questioned during that time, like, what am I really doing here? And when do I get to be emotionally honest about what I want? When do I get to be the one taking the risk? I felt like it was my turn and it was his turn for a really long time.- Yeah. Is that when you two decided to work together?- Yep.- Yep, like, formally, formally, yeah.- Yeah, I mean, yeah. So I spent the majority of COVID continuing with my former company. I was in the general counsel's office at a Fortune 100 insurance company. And it was great and I don't know if I ever would've left. It was a safe job, it was safe, but they wanted me back in the office four days a week. It was a little abrupt. I didn't want to go back. And I felt like I just saw so much potential. We had spent so much time physically now working side by side for three years that we knew we could make it work. And we had goals and ambitions and dreams for what the next iteration of Doug's brand would look like and Doug's mission would look like. And a lot of that involved me. And so when they wanted me back four days a week, we both looked at each other, we're like, this is like a sign, you know. This is one of those moments where it's maybe I wouldn't have done it. Maybe if they didn't say that I don't know if I would've ever left because it was, yeah, it was comfortable and it was comfortable for him. If I didn't advocate for the fact that it was time. I said, "This is it. If this is not it, I don't know it will never be it." Kind of like swing for the fences and take a shot at this.- Well, I can also imagine, too, that sense of comfort, given your career arc, and where you started in the Great Recession, I'm sure it felt pretty good to have a good stable, comfortable job.- Correct, correct. And I was proud of where I worked myself up to. I mean, it's not like I wasn't proud of my job. I mean, the fact that I was in my mid 30s working in a general counsel's office of a huge company. I mean, I'm incredibly proud of that, and I don't want to diminish that in any way, but I did kind of feel like, you know, maybe I'm just inspired by Doug and I've learned a lot from Doug about how, like, I love the way that Doug approaches money and success and entrepreneurship and I wanted a chance too. And I worried that that time wouldn't come and I didn't want to wait. One thing COVID I think taught us is that you don't want to wait if you don't have to.- Yeah.- Yeah, you know, I needed her and there's no question of that. As I said a little bit earlier, the advice that I would receive from Heather on any major decision usually broke out extremely well, so. I always say like, Heather's my muse sadly, and it's okay. I am not hers and that is more than fine.- I thought do you expect me to jump in? You'd be like, no, no.- No, no, it's not the case.- No, I did not expect that at all. It's just the fact and I knew at some point, you know, I think something that's interesting that happens to Heather and I quite a bit is our hand gets forced into the things that we want to do because I'm sure if I was left to my own devices, I would persuade Heather to continue holding down a steady job. I mean, the compromise would've been fine. Go find a legal job within a five mile radius of where we live in New Jersey. And I'm sure there would've been plenty of those jobs to find, and I'm sure I could have swindled her into believing she was upgrading her career and doing more support for the family, and she wouldn't need to commute and get paid more money. The real thing here is like, how far would that go before the same inevitable conclusion would've been had of I need my time to show my worth in what we've built. And I would be lying to myself to think that that moment a year ago now, or a little more than a year ago now, wasn't that thing, and what I needed to do and what I've been focusing so hard on, and Heather will pat me on the back for this, is getting comfortable with a lot of things that seemed horridly and wretchedly uncomfortable to me then. And probably even a little bit today, if I'm being honest, but this is the first time now in having a year under our belt where due to that team work together, but I'll say a lot of individual work on myself that there is no doubt in my mind that what we're doing now, just in maybe the last months, dare I say, see it. You know, see a better, more clearer picture of what we were talking about because I think seeing and doing, talking and doing are very, very different things. And now we're deeply, deeply into the doing part of the things that we said we're going to do and the fear of taking that leap. The fear and the anxiety, the anxiety is always there. Heather more, Heather's like, we got to get it done now. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. You can't apply court time deadlines in your career.- My sense of urgency from corporate America does not translate to Douglas at all.- Yeah, I'm doing this 19 years.- But I won't let up.- You know, a decade of calling shots in your schedule. I would argue it was more convenient in her corporate job where it's like, here's the deadlines to the cases and you can't mess around with it. You got to answer the court.- It was a tough transition for me. You would think it would've been like the ticker tape parade, it was not.- Yeah, like a relief.- You control my time now. And it's like a real struggle for her to do that. A lot of frustration around that. Why are you waiting 'til the day of for this? I'm like, because that's the lowest thing on the priority. I needed to do A, B and C.- I don't think it's just that. I think that, actually, and this is relevant, I think that when I left, I think that we exposed the remaining baggage of my issues around money when I left the job, which I was not expecting. I thought that leaving was like leaving corporate America to work with Doug would be, like, the crown jewel.- Liberation.- Like the big achievement was that, and that, like, it was all gravy after that. Like, no, the minute I left it just brought back so much insecurity around money and I realized that I completely still commingled my self-worth with how much money I earned. And so when I gave up my corporate salary, I found it really, really, really difficult to feel like I was adding value because my idea of value was directly tied to money and how much I earned. And I felt, I mean, and that manifested in a million different ways over the course of the last year. And I think only now it's so crazy. Like, we started interviewing couples for our book just recently. We just started diving into our couples interviews. And I feel like only through these conversations am I even willing to admit what a struggle I had over the last year. And I'm like, I am so guilty of all of that.- Yeah, well, let's go there. I want to hear about the book project you have'cause obviously we have a big passion on our show about talking to couples about money. It's a conversation that's long overdue. We'll talk about so many things in society now without even question, but we still don't talk about money and relationships and the power dynamics and the struggle. So let's end with this. Like, I want to know why did you start this project? And what are you learning about yourselves? And what do you hope other people to get out of this book?- I'll start.- You go, you can start.- It's interesting that years and years ago after we wrote our first book, which was definitely more of a platform builder and business card for me. We had no social media platforms worth talking about. Maybe some media exposure, but it takes a lot more than that to put forth an extremely successful book by sales, which is a goal of ours, is to really put something out there that changes the lives of, hopefully, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. That's a very ambitious thing to say, but we're going to put that out into the ether because I think we can do it. Heather and I are approaching this book from two totally different, well, our joint efforts are creating the same product. Heather will share with you what her vision is, or her reasons are. Mine stem from, as you could guess, that being a practitioner, and providing people with tools to communicate their finances with one another. Adam, you mentioned it, like, we don't talk about it. We don't even talk about it with our spouses, and where to begin and how to do that. How to enter an uncomfortable territory. As Heather just mentioned in conducting these interviews, she's probably getting all the therapy that she needed around her stuff, which is probably one of the coolest things that personally, I think, to come out of this. I get to come up with a framework of how people are actually going to be able to improve their lives, improve their marriages. Make sure things like what Heather experienced as a kid don't happen. That's my mission on this one. And from a business perspective, we've evolved as millennials, right? The narrative and the first-mover advantage that I had in building my brand was helping our generation at a time when nobody was willing to help us because 2008 and 2010 shaped us. And no baby boomer or a generation above us really was too interested in helping us chart our course and our path. So the evolution of where we are in our lives. And while this book is not written for millennials, it's written for anyone who wants to discuss money in the context of their relationship, this was the logical progression as to where we were heading with growing our business. And even growing ourselves. We're talking about personal growth here as well.- Yeah.- So I approach it from a different angle. And, again, what Doug was saying before something that's beautiful and I think that is really the ethos of this book is that you bring to a relationship your own value system and your own money identities that are built off who you are. They're built off your past. They're built off your family dynamic and your socioeconomic disposition. Like these are the things that you bring to a relationship and trying to merge them together is very, very difficult. So a lot of people just stop trying. Whether or not money is the most fought about conflict in a relationship, our research has proven it's the most pervasive. It's the most recurrent, and it poses one of the greatest risks to the long-term health and success of your relationship. I think that we have to do the work, right? We have to look at this like it's taboo, and it's icky and it's hard to discuss, but there's so much to be gained, I mean. And so I approach this, which I think wouldn't come as a surprise to you after this whole conversation we've had together from a place of equity. I want women to have a seat at their own dining room table that they may not have had. Claudia Goldin who just won the Nobel Prize for her work on gender pay equity in the workforce had said something. And I'm like very loosely paraphrasing about how we will never achieve gender pay equity in the workforce if we don't have couples equity at home. And I really, really believe that our empowerment and our kind of like progress forward as a gender is directly linked to our willingness to advocate for ourselves and to be seen at home. So to me, this book is not just about like prescriptive advice on how to merge a bank account. This is about validating feelings and about people feelings seen, and understanding why your spouse comes at something, comes at a money decision from the place that they do, listening on both sides. So we're really like, I believe we're approaching this in a way that no one has ever approached this before. And I think, especially for women, I mean, like, that's my mission, right? Is to bring us to the table and to kind of, like, move the ball forward here in a really meaningful way.- Love that. We could go on for hours. I hope that you guys will come back when the book is done, and tell us everything you learned about it, because I am just so thankful that you two have put a stake in the ground and said, "We're going to have this conversation, and we're going to help people have these conversations'cause no one is equipped to do it." And so from professionally, personally, everything, I want to thank you for doing that. Looking forward to the end product, obviously, but also I'm guessing you guys are going to learn a lot about yourselves and each other and everything else along the way. So we'll end there. We've got all of your links in the show notes.- [Heather] Can I also?- Yeah, please.- Can I also, sorry, plug one more thing. We are always looking for couples to still speak with us for the book. We're continuing on with this. So if there's any listeners who would like to participate, we're very fun via Zoom. It's like being on a double date, I swear.- I love it, I love it. Thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate the conversation.- Thank you.- Thanks.- Thanks for having us.- [Adam] I hope you found this helpful. If you did, please subscribe and share with your family or friends. If you have a topic you want us to cover in future episodes, send us a note through our website. And if you're at the point where you want an expert opinion on your finances, reach out and we'd be happy to start a conversation. And remember, any comments, insights, or strategies discussed on this podcast are intended to be general in nature, and, therefore, may not be suitable for you and your situation, whatever that may be. Before acting on anything we discuss, please consult with your attorney, CPA, and/or your financial advisor.