Marriage & Debt: Are You Responsible For Each Other's Debt?

‘Til death do us part…

These are powerful words that come from our wedding vows. A modern version might be

‘Til debt do us part…

When we get married or enter an intimate relationship, we are also choosing a financial partner. Debt doesn’t have to be the death of your relationship. There is hope and guidance on how to move forward together so you can effectively handle your debt. 

To effectively address the question of how to deal with your debt, you must first become comfortable with financial intimacy. Financial intimacy is the experience of being fully open and honest with your partner about your financial lives. This includes all the different account types you have, how much you owe, and the wide range of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors you have related to money. Financial intimacy is not binary (i.e., you either have it or you don’t). Rather, it exists on a continuum. 

Financial intimacy is the antidote to the fear and shame around debt that block many couples from talking openly and honestly about money. 

Are Married Couples Responsible for Each Other's Debt?

To address debt with your partner you likely will come across several articles addressing what to do practically, like setting up a budget and how to consider legal ramifications if you are in a community property state. 

These are important factors to consider, but even more important is the quality of your relationship. If you struggle to understand each other emotionally and relationally, then working through your financial responsibilities to each other will be challenging. A 2024 study by Fidelity Investments confirms this reality—communication is an essential part of financial well-being. 

There are three broad positions to psychological responsibility for your partner's debt. Each has real relational and financial implications: 

1. Not my debt, not my responsibility.
2. Your debt is my debt, and I will take care of it for you. 
3. Your debt is our debt, so let’s work together to figure out a solution together.

The first two have a high likelihood of leading to resentment, disappointment, and relationship imbalances. The last option requires a couple to collaborate to find workable solutions for both partners involved. 

Marriage & Debt: What Happens When You Tie the Knot?

By getting married, we enter into a legally binding relationship with another person. The state laws that govern marriage determine your responsibilities to each other. 

While our wedding day is a single event in the course of our lives, the process of becoming married is an ongoing psychological and physiological experience where we come to learn, anticipate, and react to each other's financial values, attitudes, beliefs, emotions, body language, and behaviors. These experiences get encoded in our memories of what it is like to be with our partner financially, and the quality of interaction matters. 

How Marriage & Debt Impact Your Financial Future

Some people are highly attuned to their future financial needs. They are connected with and sometimes very concerned for their future selves, and this drives a lot of how they think about and approach money. They may take extreme and ongoing actions to ensure that there is enough money to meet future needs. Many of these folks restrict spending to get rid of debt as fast as possible. 

On the other hand, some people can be so discouraged and hopeless about the future that they feel like it is futile to save. “Why bother” exemplifies their money mindset. Debt becomes a dominating force in their lives. 

Regardless of where you and your partner fall on this continuum, I advocate for not taking an all-or-nothing approach to debt. This helps couples with differences not alienate each other and find a way to manage their finances together. 

There is no doubt that debt can influence how much money you have available to build your investments and wealth as a couple. At the same time, we know from economic research that many people start their younger years in debt to springboard into adulthood. Over the course of forty years, they will pay off debt and build wealth. While this is a general trend, this is not always how it plays out in reality for people who have a problematic relationship with money. 

Joint Accounts, Marriage & Debt: What You Need to Know

Getting financially naked with each other can feel more vulnerable than getting physically naked. Just the idea of splitting finances as a couple can send shivers of anxiety through our bodies when we have seen adverse outcomes to splitting finances (either in our own lives, in statistics, or in the lives of others). This can trigger the instinct to “robe up.” 

When a partner starts to ask questions about account balances and spending patterns, it can evoke shame. This leads them to want to manage some or all of their money separately. The reaction adds complexity to managing household finances and makes it easier to build up unmanageable debt, which is even harder to bring up months or years later. 

Being financially transparent may be a completely new experience for the two of you. If you have a family history where one or both of your parents explicitly told you “You can’t trust a husband/wife with financial information,” you will need to work through this. 

Even more often, I help couples work through implicit messages they have received about sharing money and having different account types. If you grew up in a family where a father and mother divorced, acted irresponsibly with money, or avoided taking financial responsibility, it can understandably leave you with a level of mistrust about sharing your financial life with your partner. 

How To Handle Financial Responsibilities Together

Learning to manage your finances together will take personal reflection and asking yourselves some hard questions. 

The discomfort of looking in the financial mirror can at times feel unbearable, and yet when we are willing to look inward at our experiences with money, we can find greater financial flexibility and freedom for navigating a wide range of money topics. 

The psychological skills and abilities you use to tackle the debt together will be needed to help you on your wealth-building journey. 

Try this exercise:

Set aside a short amount of time. Open the conversation as an invitation, and listen with empathy and curiosity to the following questions:

1. How did you see your mom, dad, or step-parent manage money?

1. How did those experiences impact you?

1. How would you like things to be different based on those experiences?

What do you notice for yourself as you imagine yourself as asking your partner these questions? What do you notice about imagining having your partner ask you these questions?

Managing your financial responsibilities together will require you both to become more self-reflective and thoughtful about how you interact with yourself and your partner when it comes to money. 

Navigating Marriage & Debt

Taking the time to do the deep work of self -and couple reflection is so important to paying off debt. Without doing the deeper work first, efforts at paying off the debt will likely backfire. 

When we put a debt pay-off plan in place without relational buy-in by both partners, the plan will most likely fail. What one person does or does not do with money impacts the other. Paying off debt is a team sport. Even if one partner is solely responsible for paying off their debt, that has an influence on how much money they have available to contribute back to the relationship. 

Tips for Financial Intimacy

Financial Intimacy comes from practice, learning, healing, and growing as a couple. Each of you brings a host of experiences and expectations to the marriage and money table. At times, those experiences and expectations will put the two of you at odds with each other. It is how you handle those differences that matters. Here is some of my best advice for handling these differences in an empathetic, productive way.

• Give yourselves time to practice financial intimacy. When you are feeling the stress of debt, I know it can feel like a life-or-death emergency that needs to be addressed. 

• Breaking the cycle of chaos, rigidity, fear, and shame around debt is a process. It takes emotional and relational safety around money and relationships. 

• If we criticize ourselves or are criticized by our partner for where we are financially, it will sabotage our long-term efforts to pay off our debts and build financial security together as a couple. 

• When we set our first plans for paying off debt, start with the expectation that there will be setbacks and misunderstandings along the way. This is part of the learning process as a couple. 

• You don’t know what you don’t know. Figuring out the pacing and coming up with the money to pay off the debt will go through iterations until you get to a place where you both feel good about the progress and process you are using to pay off your debt. 

• Bringing in outside professional help can help the two of you have a safe, collaborative place to talk about your shared financial life. 

Hiring a Healthy Love and Money professional can make all the difference. Learn more about the help available to you here. 

Wishing You Healthy Love and Money,
Ed Coambs - Founder