How Financial Planning Transforms Your Marriage

How is your financial life going with your spouse? 

On a scale of 1 - 10 (with 10 being amazing), how would you rate how the two of you are doing? 

Send us an email [email protected] and tell us! We would love to know. 

The field of financial planning is rapidly shifting, and Healthy Love and Money is proud to be at the forefront of this transformation. Things are changing from a purely numbers-based focus to a total life and well-being focus. This includes the quality of your family and intimate relationships and how you navigate the financial world together. 

Research regularly finds that financial conflicts are a top stressor for married couples and have more significant negative impacts on marital satisfaction. The research elaborates that two domains are particularly problematic for couples: unfair relative contributions and perceived irresponsibility. 

As we work with couples just like you in Therapy-Informed Financial Planning and Financial Therapy, we see the issues of who is pulling more weight and issues around taking responsibility for family finances show up in the conversations. 

Zack had been endlessly frustrated by Adam (names have been changed) and his disengagement every time he approached him about the family spending. Zack spent all the time organizing and planning the family budget, while he felt like Adam would just do whatever he liked. Zach labeled this as being irresponsible. Over the course of months, both Zack and Adam were able to build mutual respect and compassion for each other's financial approaches and to see them through a new lens that allowed them to work collaboratively towards their goals.  

Knowing, understanding, and working with the complex intersection of money and couples gives couples increased chances for transforming their marriage and money life. 

Relationship Foundations For Transformation

From our perspective, the starting point for a couple's financial well-being is the quality of the couple's connection with each other. This is built on their attachment history. Each person's attachment history develops based on the quality of their early caregiving experiences and their adult life efforts to ensure that they experience healthy relationships. 

We know that every person has a deep and significant caregiving history that has shaped their sense of themselves and intimate relationships. The science of attachment theory has helped people globally. In Anne Power’s TEDx talk, she shares both the rapid growth of attachment theory (thanks to the help of social media) and its significance for our love lives. 

When couples struggle with their finances, they are also struggling with their relationship connection. These two realities do not exist in isolation. Working with and regulating our emotions that come up around family finances is essential to resolving issues of unfair contributions and shared responsibility for family finances. This ability is deeply impacted by our attachment history.

What do you notice coming up for you as you read this article? Is it a sense of affirmation and confirmation, or is it creating some discomfort for you? 

Our attachment system has developed to work automatically and unconsciously so that we can more easily move through our relationship interactions. However, when our relationship interactions are not satisfactory, we move from automatic and unconscious to deliberate and conscious interactions. 

Healthy, flourishing intimate relationships are developed and maintained just like our physical health. The great news is that we can change, and neuroscience helps us to understand how, including what types of relational environments facilitate change and which ones inhibit it. Different parts of our brain light up depending on our relational experiences. It also takes time for the wiring of our brain to change and develop; it is not quick or automatic. Just like we cannot develop muscles overnight, new neural pathways in our brain that let us know we are loved, safe, and accepted have to be developed over time and with repetition. 

Financial Foundations For Transformation

Seeing the forest and the trees is what financial planning is all about. It is very hard for most humans to see both the details of our financial life and how all of those details culminate into the big picture. 

Fortunately, Certified Financial Planners™ (CFPs) have a few advantages that help their clients to see the forest and the trees. 

1. We get formal training in all the major areas of financial planning including cash flow/budgeting, investment planning, retirement, taxes, insurance, estate planning, and education funding. We learn about each area independently and how one relates to the other. 
2. We get to look at the lives of many people and their finances. We see someone’s whole financial life, which is both an honor and a privilege, as most people don’t go around sharing all of their financial details with anyone else. This broad perspective helps us see the unique realities of each person's financial situation, along with common themes that emerge for clients.
3. Modern CFPs also ask clients about their hopes, dreams, and fears about their finances. Ultimately they are helping their clients align their financial decisions with what matters most to them. Who else in your life asks you about your goals, values, and the purpose of your life? 

At Healthy Love and Money, we add another dimension to the financial planning process. We want to know where you have had painful experiences around relationships and money. We understand that sometimes these experiences haven’t made us stronger, but rather left us feeling shame, anxiety, fear, and sometimes a desire to avoid talking about money. That’s when financial therapy can have a powerful and positive impact. 

Recently, I got to meet with an old client who shared that our work led to a major turnaround in their life both with love and money. When I met with Mark and Madison (not their real names), they could hardly look at each other, let alone think about talking about money lovingly with each other. 

Mark shared that one of the most impactful parts of working together was my ability to “hold space for them.” This is a favorite therapy term, which means we offer a space of empathy and non-judgment for our clients. We let them go at a pace they feel comfortable with in talking through their finances. This feeling of being accepted builds on the foundations of secure attachment and sets a secure base for clients to explore, reflect on, and start to make new financial decisions knowing that they will still be okay and acceptable even if they make mistakes. 

Mark and Meredith have now paid off over $100,000 of credit card debt and $50,000 in tax liabilities. They have stabilized and grown their income. They even have $100,000 invested and are excited about taking the next steps in their financial life. 

Financial foundations are about putting sustainable and long-term patterns into place around your finances that will nourish your life now and in the future. This includes getting clear on where you stand today and with all of your financial information. Having someone help you organize this information and communicate it in a meaningful way to both partners sets the stage for what changes to make. 

Many couples get stuck trying to get their partner to make financial changes they don’t want to make. This happens in large part because they see money differently than their partner does. A neutral third party can listen to both sides and understand what both people value and are hoping to accomplish. This creates space for the couple to experience working on their financial life together, which leads to the couple clarifying together what will work for them.

When Life Interrupts Your Growth as a Couple

Let’s name the elephant in the room: life can be complicated and often doesn’t go as planned. Our ability to form, maintain, and flourish our meaningful relationships can be adversely influenced by things that happened long before the two of you brought your life together. As humans, we can be incredibly resilient and experience post-traumatic growth as well as have other positive influences that help us live life fully. 

As a couple, you have to navigate different phases of your marriage relationship. There is not one perfect model or descriptor of the stages of marriage, but this can be a helpful way to think about your marriage. Just like kids, marriages have developmental stages with different needs that serve different purposes. 

One of the biggest challenges we see when working with our clients is they are either unaware or have used a combination of psychological defense mechanisms to protect themselves from seeing how their past impacts their present and future realities. 

As a spouse, you are not responsible for what happened in your partner's past, but you will be learning with your partner how those experiences have shaped their expectations of themselves and of you. When it comes to your financial life it is especially important to be aware of how past relational experiences around money can negatively impact your ability to be trusting and collaborative now. 

One tough pill to swallow is that if one partner has life challenges, then it is very likely the other does as well. Psychologically speaking, couples tend to marry at similar levels of psychological differentiation, which is a fancy way of saying couples share similar levels of emotional maturity and health, even if their presentations are very different. 

Transformed Love and Money Life

The transformed love and money life is one of courage and vulnerability to learn, heal, and grow. By its very nature, this means that the two of you will be doing things differently than what you were exposed to in your childhood in your family and community. 

A transformed love and money life means that you can look lovingly at each other and engage in any money topic that is relevant to one or both of you. There can be a place of authenticity and honesty about your needs and the needs of others impacted by the financial decisions you make. 

Money is managed in your life in a way that honors each person's needs, wants, and desires. It is full of tradeoffs and compromises that are mutually agreed upon, recognizing that reciprocity is the name of the game. 

Everything from how you earn money, manage cash flow, make investment decisions, and handle taxes has a clarity to it that helps both of you feel empowered and free to pursue what is meaningful to you individually, as a couple, and as a family. 

Between chaos and rigidity is where the transformed love and money life lives. In a simple model, most couples when struggling with their love and money life are too far out on either end of the chaos-rigidity continuum. Their joint task is to discover the collaborative middle that helps them feel like there is enough clarity and direction they can count on, and at the same time, the plan can evolve and flex with new understandings of themselves and each other. 

Schedule a free 30-minute consultation today to learn how the Healthy Love and Money team can help the two of you.

Wishing You Healthy Love and Money,

Ed Coambs MBA, MA, MS, CFP®, LMFT, CFT-I™ - Founder