Your Money, Your Rules | Financial Freedom, Money Management, Scarcity Mindset, Budgeting, Financial Planning

116 | Feeling Like the Financial Parent? 3 Tips to Shift Your Relationship’s Money Management Dynamic

• Erin Gray | Spiritual Wealth Coach, Former Certified Financial Planner and CFO

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The emotional weight of being the “responsible one” in your financial relationship can feel overwhelming at times. If you're always the one initiating money conversations, paying bills, and planning for the future—while your partner avoids it all—you might be taking on the role of the financial parent.

In this episode, I share my personal story of navigating this exact dynamic in my own marriage—and how it left me feeling resentful, burned out, and alone.  What started as responsible money management quickly became a lonely job that I didn't sign up for.

In this episode I discuss:

  • Why financial parenting is so common—especially among women entrepreneurs and high-achieving women
  • How money beliefs from childhood shape your financial roles in adult relationships
  • The role of nervous system regulation in money dynamics and power struggles
  • How to stop “over-functioning” and start creating a true financial partnership
  • Why feminine energy, curiosity, and emotional safety are key to changing the pattern

Whether you're in a romantic relationship, a business partnership, or navigating both, this conversation will help you recognize your own patterns—and give you tools to shift from control to collaboration.

Want to learn more? Here are your next steps:

Step 1: Join my FREE Facebook Community.

Connect, share, and learn how to master your money with other women just like you.

➡️ Join here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/941450038160915

Step 2: Grab your FREE Human Design chart

Curious what your Human Design chart reveals about how you're uniquely designed to make aligned financial decisions?

➡️ Get your chart here: https://generatealifewelllived.com/receive-your-human-design-chart

Step 3: Ready to transform your relationship with money and build true financial confidence?

Let’s create a strategy that feels aligned, intentional, and empowering—just for you.

➡️ Schedule your 1-hour Money Mastery Call here: https://generatealifewelllived.com/11-support

Money doesn't have to feel overwhelming. Let's create a strategy that feels nurturing and custom to you.

From my soul to yours,

Erin

Erin Gray:

Are you the one in the relationship who always initiates the money conversations, the one making sure that the bills are paid, the money is allocated and the future is planned? If you've ever felt like the financial parent in your relationship, this episode is for you, girlfriend. Today I'm unpacking the emotional weight that some women feel for being the financially responsible one, because this used to be my own dynamic, and I'm going to help you shift out of feeling resentment and back into a real partnership.

Erin Gray:

Do you want to create a system to stop avoiding your money? Maybe you're feeling guilt and shame when it comes to your finances. Welcome to your Money, your Rules. I'm Erin, a former certified financial planner and CFO, and yet I used to avoid my money and had fear, no matter how much we had. I can't wait to teach you how I overcame my money avoidance and started consistently managing my finances in a really simple way.

Erin Gray:

It's time to get comfortable with money, and if what I talk about in this episode today deeply resonates with you and you're ready to work with someone who understands your situation, has been where you have been walked in your shoes and has come out on the other side, I invite you to join me for my one-on-one Master your Money coaching session. In this hour, we're going to dive into what it is that you're working towards, what keeps standing in your way, and then we're going to create a customized plan to help you to get where you're going to create a customized plan to help you to get where you're going. This is going to be some part strategy, mostly embodiment work. To schedule a session, you can use the link in the show notes or you can head over to my website, generatealifewelllivedcom, and schedule your session. I would love to support you on your journey. Okay, so I'm going to do this as a two-part episode.

Erin Gray:

This episode is going to be all about if you feel like you're the financial parent, and then the next episode that will be released on Thursday is going to be all about if you feel like you're having and I don't want to say the child, but if you're feeling like you're having to ask for permission from your spouse and regardless, whatever situation or wherever you find yourself in, I want you to know it's not a problem, nothing has gone wrong and it comes from our belief systems. So let's talk today about what, financially, what I call like financial parenting actually looks like. So you might be the one who sets up the budget, or what I like to call like allocation, like tracks the money. You might be the one checking the account balances. You might be the one researching big financial decisions, doing a lot of the planning, and when I say financial planning, yes, you might have your financial planner, but you are doing the one like the CFO for your family and meeting with the CPA, the financial advisors, the one like the CFO for your family and meeting with the CPA, the financial advisors, the attorneys, things of that sort. That might be who you are, and while all of the above, we can be doing this and we can not have any thoughts around it.

Erin Gray:

We might actually enjoy some of these parts, the part that I think where it feels like the parenting is when we begin to carry the emotional weight too. So maybe that looks like you start to feel worry, that things feel maybe off track, or you feel like you know where you're not advancing quickly enough, which is all thoughts and belief systems, and we'll talk about that here in a bit. Maybe you feel alone because you feel like you're the one in the relationship that cares, and so, from your point of view, you view your partner, or it looks like your partner appears to feel avoidant or passive or just not that into money, and so you do what you know how to do, which is take over. So maybe in the beginning it came from this place of love and empowerment and now maybe it has morphed into like more feeling, like a necessity or a have to over time, and this responsibility starts to feel heavy. And so maybe some of the emotions you might be feeling is resentment, because you start to wonder why am I the only one who cares about our money? And I know this because this was me for the majority of our marriage, and I don't know if this is a term in the self-development world.

Erin Gray:

But the financial parenting I know. I have said numerous times to my husband I feel like I'm the mom here in the relationship. I don't want to be the mom, I want to be your wife, I want to be a partner. So I call it, financial parenting, call it whatever you want, but this is basically when one person carries the emotional and the logistical weight of the household finances, often without feeling supported or like that. There is shared responsibility. And I want to always say which I remember my first coach ever said which really pissed me off. She was like well, you created this, so how do you want to uncreate it or recreate something different? So when I say that you don't need to come from it from a place of judgment or shame, you could be like, okay, my beliefs did create this. Now what new beliefs do I want to create, to have a different experience? So this dynamic more often is typically created because we either have one belief, which typically not one.

Erin Gray:

It's probably several beliefs that you hold around money that you hold around responsibility it's not just money, it's about responsibility, it's about control, it's about, um, trust, so what you believe your partner is capable of like. There's so many different beliefs here that you could really dive into of why this is happening in your relationship, and I think a lot of this also really comes back to nervous system regulation, right, learning the roles that you know our parents if you watched your parents never talk about money. You develop some belief systems from that. If you watched your parents fight about money all the time, you develop belief systems from that. So we develop these beliefs from watching and learning and hearing what our parents did and or didn't do. So you may have learned as a child that money in your mind, right, you were taught that money equals safety. If you have money you're safe. If you don't have money, you don't. So you developed a belief or something along the lines, right, that you don't trust that you will be taken care of or that it will be taken like that you have to be involved in for it to, for you to be taken care of.

Erin Gray:

And here we go back to. You know there's several parts, I believe, as we are working through our relationship with money. There's the spirit side, the God source, universe, whatever you want to believe in. There is the mind, right, the mindset work, the intellectual mind, and then there is the body. And so when you don't believe that there is something that is higher power than you, that you are co-creating with God or spirit, whatever you want to say, then you form sometimes beliefs around like it all falls on me. And so then, what does that have you doing that? Has you going into control mode and trying to control things?

Erin Gray:

Or maybe you have a partner who learned that money equaled conflict, right, if? If their parents fought a lot about money, then they equated and associated money with conflict. So then they developed a belief system that they don't want to fight. And so then what is their action? They do the opposite. They just avoid talking about money because, in their mind, hey, I'm not going to fight because money equals conflict, so if I don't talk about money, then we won't ever have fights. Maybe they've learned from their parents to not talk about money at all, and so they're just, you know, patterning the way that they are growing up with.

Erin Gray:

So when we both of us right, you and your partner, when you come from different belief systems around money, you have two different nervous systems having different responses to money. The person who is more vigilant more often than not becomes the one who manages the money, and the one not because necessarily that they that they want to, because they feel like that they have to. So this might be you. You might feel like in this moment you don't have a choice because your partner's not doing it, but the reality is we live in a cause and effect world and the reason why you, your spouse, might not be doing the money is because you have that very belief, because I have to do it, because they won't do it, which may or may not actually be true. So, taking, you know, control, it might feel safer, it might feel easier in the moment, and I want to say it probably will lead to, or has already burnout, disconnection, controlling based patterns that don't actually serve either of you, and so this creates that what I said earlier, that mom-like role rather than a partner-partner role.

Erin Gray:

So, with everything, we always have to ask ourselves what belief is actually creating this behavior. I mean, if you want to know the keys to your life forever, which is so simple and yet life's work, right. If you were to always look within, which is so simple and yet life's work, right. If you were to always look within, which is not so fun, right, like this has been something that I've really had to um work through because I always thought it was everybody else's problem. I'm not the problem, everyone else is the problem. Well, no, we're creating everything in our life. So if you can always come back to and you're always, you know you're going to be in your human sometimes, where you know you are going to want to blame, you are going to want to, you know, have that victim mentality. It's fine for the short lived moment, let your ego have its thing and then get back to okay.

Erin Gray:

You know someone who is empowered and takes control. When I say takes control, I don't mean like controls a situation, but like takes ownership of their thoughts and their beliefs and their feelings and their actions and their life. So what is the belief that's creating the behavior that is creating, ultimately, the experience that you are having with you and your partner? And I know I said this episode was going to be all about. You know how we, how we, you know, are financially parenting and we think that we want to. You know what it's going to be is how to get our partner to change. But it's actually about noticing what are our belief patterns. What is it within us and our nervous system that is creating the relationship with money in our partner that we currently have? So does this mean that our partner is completely off the hook and has no responsibility? No, that's not what I'm saying. It just means that we don't need our partner to change in order for us to feel better and to respond to money differently. And I think that is ultimately where empowerment comes. You know, like that is ultimate empowerment when you don't need anyone else or anything else in your life to change for you to feel better, like, hmm, that is so good. So let's talk about what's actually happening here.

Erin Gray:

So what I would do, like I say, with everything, is awareness. Right, start with creating some time to journal about why you feel like you have taken on this role of managing your money. Just write it all down. And I haven't had this belief, but I have had some people say to me like, oh my gosh, well, if you journal, are some people going to read your journal? Well, I never even thought of that. But if that is a fear for you, one, you could just change the belief. And or two, if it is, you know, if you don't want to change the belief, okay, well then you could just write it. And then you know, burn it, shred it, whatever, but get it down out of your head into paper.

Erin Gray:

You know what are the beliefs that I've had that have have me managing all the money? What beliefs have created this? So get really clear on this, because if you are not clear, you are going to go talk to your spouse before you have understand your why in your belief systems and you're just going to create more of the same. So we've got to work on you first, and when I say work on you, what I mean is evolve your belief systems. So what are the beliefs that you have? What are the feelings that you were chasing that originally created this dynamic? And when I say chasing, what I mean is what are those beliefs that we're chasing that originally created this dynamic? And when I say chasing, what I mean is what are those beliefs that we're? After that, we want to feel a certain way, and that's why we're doing the thing. So what are the feelings that you are feeling now? What feelings do you want to feel? And the feelings always come from our thinking and our belief systems. So getting clear on what we currently are thinking, that is going to be imperative.

Erin Gray:

So what do you actually want your relationship to look like? And our relationship with our spouse is not between us and our spouse. Our relationship with our spouse is between us and our mind and our feelings towards our spouse. So think about what kind of relationship do you want it to look like when it pertains to you and your partner with money. Like, if you're currently thinking that my partner never helps me, you, that creates some feeling and then that is the feeling and the vibration that you show up in. And so, because we live in a cause and effect world, when you show up to your partner that they don't help you, that is what we create. I mean, if you think about how you probably meet them with, even the conversations around money from that place, if you're not helping me, it probably isn't coming from the lens of love and compassion. So really start to get clear on what do I want my relationship to look like? You know, so often we think like I'm going to give you the 3d part, I'm going to give you the tactical. We think that we want 50, 50, like you want someone to help you sit down and do all of the money.

Erin Gray:

But sometimes, when I talk to clients and we really start digging into this, they don't actually want that. They want to still be able to do some of the money, but they want some of the bigger decisions for their partner to be involved with and and maybe not so much of the day-to-day stuff. So do you want them to sit down with you weekly? Do you want you know like? You've got to be really clear on what you want and also, how are you feeling towards your partner? And, first and foremost, you have to feel into a different vibration with your partner before you go and request this stuff. Because when you go and request, hey, I want you to help me with these bigger you know bigger vision items, but you still think they don't help you or you're coming from that vibration of he's not helpful, then he's going to pick up on that energy. So, changing your belief system and your vibration around how you are talking to them. And then the third tip that I would give you is to invite, not demand.

Erin Gray:

When we are in that place of frustration, resentment, we come from a very you need to do this mentality, I think, versus what do you want, what would you love, what kind of relationship would you love to have? So this doesn't mean that everything needs to change overnight. It just means having a conversation that includes something like you know, once you have changed the way that you want to be with them, you start to maybe approach them and say you know what I know in the past that I've been the one that handles money and I've pondered this and I want to create some changes. I want our relationship to look like X, y, z as it pertains to money, and I've come up with some ideas and you can just throw them out there, you know what are your thoughts on that and leave it open. You know, is that something that feels good for you? Is this something that you would like to look at? Um, you know you have to be in the vibration of curiosity and love when you ask these questions. You know, if this was your best friend, how would you talk to them? What conversations would you have with them, versus coming from the energy that you might want to come from? So sometimes, you know, when we've been in a relationship with someone for a long time, we take on these roles. Have you ever heard like? You know someone else might notice something else about your partner that you just completely overlook because you are just with them all the time? If we want to create something different, we have to be different first.

Erin Gray:

I've helped so many clients do this along with myself, and I thought initially my husband needed to change. If he just changed about the money, I would feel X Y Z, but what actually happened was I changed about the money and then he followed, not because I told him to do all of these things, but because my vibration changed. And what typically happens with our partners and our spouses is when we change our vibration, they elevate to the vibration that we are in. I want you to know. I think it's so powerful. I think, as women even though I have full body chills as I'm saying this even though all of us right, men and women both have masculine and feminine energy I think women in our households have, can have such beautiful feminine energy from a masculine place, and what I mean by that is more of a leading. When we are soft and we lead from power, from love and compassion, we show our family, our spouse, our kids how to do that and it's kind of like a backdoor way of masculine right. It's. It's not sitting over here saying you need to do X Y Z. It's saying I am who I am now, from an empowered, loving place and from that place they see that and then they do that as well. It's a very soft but empowering energy and I think as women, we have such an opportunity to mirror this for our spouses and for our children.

Erin Gray:

I do want to say, when you do have the conversation with your spouse, is detaching from the outcome. So if they don't want to participate in the beginning, it's okay, it's fine. I want you to notice how attached are you to them changing or to modifying their behavior from a place of they have to versus they see the difference in you and they want to. So really starting to pay attention to just inviting them detaching and seeing what happens and if this is hitting home for you, if you're ready to move out of this control and into co-creation with money and with your relationship with money, I want you to know it is possible for you. I've helped so many women it's been so fun move from this feeling of resentment and argumentativeness and burnout and to moving to grounded and empowered money leaders in their families and in their lives.

Erin Gray:

And this is some of the work that we do inside my one-on-one coaching sessions regulating your nervous system, rewiring your money mindset, releasing some of these old patterns and creating new ones so that you can show up as your most vibrant, authentic and freest self. If you want to schedule a call, you can head over to my website at generatealifewelllivecom, or you can click on the link in the show notes. Either way, we'll get you there. I would love to support you along your journey. You know, let's be honest, it is so much more fun to do this work when you have someone else cheering you on, when you have someone else to reflect in you the amazingness that you already are. Else to reflect in you the amazingness that you already are when they see in you who you truly are, not who the world has told you that you should be.

Erin Gray:

So thank you for tuning in today and for sharing your precious time with me. My intention for you is just to take one piece from this episode and from every episode and go implement it and embody it so that you can create real change in your life. And if you have a friend or business bestie that could benefit from listening to this episode, would you mind sharing it with them? You know the world really. I truly believe this. The world needs more women who feel safe, they feel empowered and they feel like calm in their bodies, with money, so that they can go out into the world and be their most authentic selves. Okay, I'll see you next time.