70. Seven Reasons Why Combining Finances Strengthens Relationships

In this podcast episode, Laura Sexton discusses the importance of combining finances in a marriage. She addresses common excuses for not combining finances and provides insight into when it may be appropriate to keep finances separate.

Take a look to see if you are using any of these seven excuses to keep your marriage money separate.

In this episode we’ll discuss:

.     Shared vision and accountability

.     When to seek professional guidance

.     Changing pronouns for teamwork

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Transcript

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Laura 0:02

Hello and welcome to the Accelerate Your Legacy podcast. I'm Laura Sexton, your trusted financial coach and money mindset specialist. Join me as we explore the world of money and money mindset while also paving the way for a lasting legacy that extends far beyond money. Together we'll eliminate stress, amplify freedom, and ensure you stop paying for your past so you can start saving for your future. If you're seeking peace in your finances, more margin in your budget, and a legacy that inspires generations to come, you're in the right place. Hey, accelerators. Today I'm going to talk about one of the pieces of advice that gets me the most frustrating comments. And that is to combine your finances. I get a lot of pushback for this. And, Honestly, I don't understand why and today we're going to talk about some of the most common excuses that people give me for not combining their finances. And I'd love to hear what you have to say about this topic too. Please feel free to share with me your thoughts. 95 percent of the time. My advice to you is going to be to combine your finances and we're going to talk about combining them. And when to do it and when not to do it today, because I am going to tell you there are caveats. There are no hard and fast 100 percent of the time rules here. Also, there's no judgment here. So, whatever it is that you choose to do, it's up to you. But I'm going to tell you what I think is the absolute best thing for you to do because I love you. And I want you to win with money. 95 percent of the time I say, combine your finances when you are married, the pastor says, and then you are 1. You're done. You are one union. Man and wife. You are not a business venture. So, yes, combine your finances. You need to have a shared vision with your money. You see, this can be a place where I'm going to go off and do my thing, and I'm going to go off and do my thing, and we're just going to live together. That's called roommates. I don't know about you, but I've never had great success with roommates because roommates can just leave whenever they want. But if you and I are working together, and we have a shared money vision, we have a common interest, and we have an end point that we are going on together, we have to work together to get to that goal. That is going to help us accelerate Great. Our legacy, see what I did there. You do not need an excuse to hide things. When we have our accounts separated, there is a higher chance of financial infidelity occurring. I don't want that for you. You don't want that for you. But if I am able to have my money over here, I'm able to hide things from you. I have my own account. Yes, your name is on it, but you probably don't. Ever check it, you probably don't have the login information and the reason you don't ever check it is because you don't want me checking yours. So if I don't check up on you, you don't check up on me. I can go do my own thing. The problem with that happens with my money is separate. So you're not paying attention to what I'm doing. I can go run around and do whatever I want. That may not be physical infidelity, but it sure can be financial infidelity. And it's something that you definitely need to be aware of. We don't do these things because we dislike the other person. We don't get married because we just like the other person. We get married because we love that other person. But sometimes. When we're separate, and we're left to our own devices, we make dumb choices and you probably are a person that would never, ever, ever cheat on your spouse. But do you lie to them about what happens with the money? Do you hide purchases? Are you doing something with your money that if they knew about it, they would think it was questionable? Now, I said 95 percent of the time we combine finances. What are the other 5%? Well, the other 5 percent are the cases of addiction and abuse. If either of those are occurring, yes, it makes sense to keep your money separate. Again, there are no hard and fast rules, but 99. 5 percent of times, if there is an addiction, that person will have financial struggles. I don't like it. You don't like it, but that is pretty much the case. If they are addicted, they're going to do whatever they can to obtain the substance of their addiction. If that's a spending addiction, if that is a substance addiction, they're going to use any available funds that To make purchases, so if there has been addiction in the relationship, that person needs to let go of the ability to spend the money. So that may mean giving up the debit card for a while. That may mean, you know, shutting down any lines of credit. They cannot get Access to funds. The other instance is the case of abuse. I personally know someone that I am very close to who left a domestic violence situation and she left with her baby and the car. No money, the clothes on her back and that was pretty much it. So, in those instances, do I want you to have money separate? Yes, I do. I want you to be able to leave an abusive situation if that's what it is. But if you just want. Money, because something might happen. Are you just creating a self fulfilling prophecy? Horrible transition, but here we go. What are some excuses that are keeping you from combining your finances? One of the ones I hear most often is, We just haven't gotten around to it. That was me. That was me and my husband. When we first got married, we had been on our own doing our own things, spending our own money, how we chose to spend it. And we just didn't think about it. It just wasn't top of mind, wasn't top of priority. We just waited. We had separate finances until the day that we decided that we have a shared vision. We had a common goal. We had a common dragon to slay and we needed all of the armor in our arsenal to take it down. We combined our finances when we started paying attention and when we started working together, we started conquering our financial situation. And if you know anything about us, we paid off 372, 347 dollars in debt. Could not have done that. If we hadn't been working together and we hadn't had a shared vision. Another excuse for not combining finances is that combining finances will cause a fight. Yes. You're married. You're going to fight about things. I bet there are other things you fight about too. If you fight over how you load the dishwasher, do you just not have dishes anymore? We just, oh, we're just not going to have dishes so we don't fight about it. No! That doesn't make any sense at all. So why is it with money that we're willing to keep it separate so that we don't get into a fight about it? If you are willing to share your DNA with somebody and create a child, And you have conversations about how to raise that child, you should be able to have a conversation about how you spend your money to take care of that child. If you cannot get past the money fights, though, and we know money fights are the number 1 cause of stress, and the number 1 cause of divorce in North America, money fights and money problems. If you can't get past it, You need to bring in a mutual bad guy. You need to bring in somebody like me. You need to bring in a financial coach, or maybe a marriage counselor. If it's really, really bad, if it's about fights about things that aren't money, but if it's about money, specifically bring in a financial coach, somebody that is going to be your mutual bad guy. Somebody that is going to help you make decisions, have conversations, be the third party, be a mediator to help you have those tough conversations. I have one couple that I work with and they're like, the first thing you say is Laura, I was going to call you. And I told her I was going to call you. And then she changed her mind about how she was spending her money. And it is the funniest thing because they love each other so much. It is a joke to them. We're going to call Laura all the time. It is my favorite thing. Is my favorite thing barb is going to call you, I was going to tell you what he did, but he didn't do it. He chose right? Because we've had those conversations together. It's not that I'm making the decisions for them and they're not actually calling to tattle on their spouse. It's just a running joke. So please take it that way. I know this is that conversation that's going to cause some problems and people are going to say some things. So please hear my heart when I say. This couple, they're hysterical and I love them so much. And they will say things that I'm their mutual bad guy and they will call and tattle. Yes, combining finances is going to cause fights until it doesn't anymore. When you have common money language, a shared vision and a common money language with your spouse, it's no longer a fight. It becomes a joyful conversation that you get to have. You guys are working together to slay a dragon. And I promise you, eventually, when you get into the habit of spending the money together, those conversations are going to be uplifting. I don't fight with my husband about money anymore. We have conversations on a consistent basis, we have a shared goal, a shared vision, and we make our decisions together. Do we still have spending money? Yes, we do, but we make our decisions together. And this has only strengthened our marriage. It has not caused problems. Another common excuse for people not combining their finances is the question. What if something happens? What if I have to leave is what you were actually asking. And I have to leave. To wonder why you're setting yourself up for failure. Do bad things happen? Yes. But if something bad were to happen in your marriage and you were to need to get a divorce, there are laws in place to cause that to happen fairly. There are legal resources that you can use to help you dissolve a marriage, if that happens. I don't want that to happen. I want the exact opposite. I want you, when you are married, if you're with the person that you're supposed to be with, and there's no abuse and there's no addiction, I want you to be in that marriage until the end of time. I would never wish a divorce upon a person. Not on my worst enemy. It's awful. It's no fun for anybody involved. So don't allow that to be part of your marriage. Another common excuse for not combining finances is this desire for independence and autonomy. Did I become not a person because I share my money with somebody else? I'm not my own person. I cannot make my own decisions because I share my money with somebody else. That makes no sense. My friends, I am my own person, a hundred percent through and through, but I chose to get married and I choose to have a relationship with this person. And I choose to make decisions with them. I am independent. I am capable of making my own choices, but I have chosen to be married, to be linked with somebody, to be in a covenant relationship with somebody. I don't understand this desire. I'm going to be independent except for when I want to be married. No, my friends, you're either married or you're not married. You see, being married doesn't mean that I'm not my own person. Doesn't mean that I don't have my own autonomy or decision making abilities. Being married means that I have somebody to make decisions with. I have somebody to lean on. I have someone to be joined with. Why would I want to let that go? No, I still have freedom to make choices. I still have freedom to buy gifts for him without him knowing, for him to buy me gifts without me knowing. These things are still possible. We don't have to give up our individualism, but we chose to get married. We chose to be If you want to be autonomous, you want to be an individual, you don't want to be joined. Why did you get married? I don't want to sound harsh. Sorry. Uh, but also I'm saying what I'm saying and I mean it. Another common excuse for keeping money separate is when we have different habits and different goals. You're going to have different habits. That's just true. You. Are going to be 2 different people because you're 2 different people and 1 of you is going to be a free spirit and 1 of you is going to be more conservative. That's. How most relationships are, there's usually a yin and yang. The opposites attract. They just do if both of you were exactly the same, 1 of you would be redundant. So, yes, you're going to have different habits and you have to learn to work together because you're 2 different people that are now joined. If you have different goals, though, I'm going to ask you to seek counsel on that. Because if you are trying to get to 2 different places. You cannot do that together, and that is going to cause a rift in your marriage if they're long term goals. If they're short term goals, you know, maybe you can, but if you have 1 person that's trying to quit smoking and the other 1 is in the house smoking cigarettes all day long, chain smoking them, it's going to be very difficult for you to stay together and reach your goal. You have to be moving in the same direction. That's not to say if 1 abuses a smoker and the other 1, decides to not be a smoker anymore, you can't be together. That's not what I'm saying. It's just going to make things more difficult. And I happen to know 1 person in particular that I'm thinking of that she is in my head and in my heart, her and her husband decided that they were on different tracks. And so they were going to split their money and that way she could handle her money her way. And he can handle his money his way. And they had a joint account that they would pull money in to pay their shared bills. And she credits that day is the day that her marriage ended. The day she decided to pull her money and do her own thing, she said, we never got back on track together again, because they were going in 2 different directions and they did not have a shared end point. They didn't have a shared goal, shared vision anymore. I cannot stress enough if you have different habits, yes, you're 2 different people, but if you have different goals, you need to sit down with a financial coach or with a marriage counselor to help you get to that same goal post. For Help you define what your future looks like together so that you can reach it. The last excuse that I'm going to give you today for not combining finances is having unequal income or assets. I hear this a lot, actually, like, I came into the marriage with this. Asset and you came in with this debt and so there's a division there. Unequal income is not an excuse to keep your money separate. I, at one point, was a stay at home parent, so I made 0, and my husband made six figures. Does that mean that we don't combine Incomes and I don't put anything in, so I don't get to have any spending money because I don't make any money. No, I'm financially contributing to this family by not having to hire childcare or a chauffeur or a chef. I'm not having to pay for laundry to get done because I'm doing that. So I'm still contributing, even though I'm not adding anything into the bank account. If you were to say that I was not allowed to spend money because I didn't bring anything in, you would think that that's wrong. I don't know anybody that hears that and goes, no, no, that's right. You didn't bring anything in. You don't get to spend any money. So why is it that I make 5 figures and you make 6, so you get more spending money or you get more control over what we do or do not do with this. With our money, you get more control over what kind of house we buy, you get more control. No, that wouldn't be fair either way. And having unequal incomes dictate what you do and do not put into the business of operating this family, that doesn't sit right with me. And I'm sure if I say it that way, it doesn't sit right with you either. So I'm gonna close out today with, a CNBC article that I read the article stated that combining money can make or break a relationship. We know that we've talked about it. Combining money could be the catalyst to strengthen your relationship, or it can be the catalyst to break it apart. If you do not communicate correctly, which is what CNBC went on to say, is that couples who communicate openly about money tend to feel that they are on the same team. This promotes relationship satisfaction. In fact, they had an expert say that Communicating openly about the finances promoted relationship satisfaction. You will be more satisfied in a relationship if you communicate openly about your money. They said one way to go about this is to change your pronouns. I'm talking about going from a mine yours pronoun, a my yours, to an us we pronoun. Instead of this is mine and that's yours, it's all ours. We are making this decision. This is us doing this together. This is our money. Changing the way that you talk about money allows you to feel more like you're on a team and being on a team increases your satisfaction. And I promise you, if we are in a situation where you're struggling with money 9 times out of 10, it is because this is my money. This is my problem. This is my, and that's your, and you're doing this. That's the dynamic. When you have a problem in your marriage, You should not be fighting with each other. You should be fighting together to solve the problem. The problem, be it debt, be it, um, you know, an income problem, whatever it is, the problem is what you're fighting. You should not be fighting each other. And if you need help, if you need somebody to come in and be that mutual bad guy, be that third party, help you team up against the dragon. Instead of fighting each other first. Give me a call. I want to be that person for you. I want to be the financial coach that is in your corner, helping you have a happier marriage because you chose to communicate openly about your money. You chose to combine your finances. Whether you combine your finances or not. I will still be your friend. I can still coach you to have better conversations about your money, but I'm going to tell you combining your finances is Leads to happier marriages. And in fact, there was a study that came out last year that said that couples that combine their finances lived four years longer. If you want to live longer, all you have to do is call me. I will help you do that. All right, my friends, that's it for this week. Go out and make a difference. Thank you for investing your time with us today on the Accelerate Your Legacy podcast. Remember, your legacy isn't just measured in dollars and cents, but in the tools, habits, mindset, and reputation you leave behind. Don't just listen to the show, but take action on what you've learned. Share this wisdom with a friend who can benefit and help us spread the word by rating and reviewing the podcast. For questions or encouragement, reach out to me on Instagram at Accelerate Your Legacy or explore the resources listed in the show notes. I will be back with you next week. Until then, build your legacy with intention.