How To Stop Fighting About Money

Just starting to think about money fights is enough to activate our nervous system and sound the alarm bells or shut down signals. So let’s take a deep breath together. 

I want to be honest with you from the beginning: Learning to stop fighting about money will be challenging and take practice. The good news is that this is a skill that can be developed over time and refined with reflection. 

Take a moment to reflect on your experiences of financial conflicts currently and, more importantly, from your childhood and when you first started dating your spouse or intimate partner. 

What themes do you notice emerging for you? Maybe you’ve experienced some of the following: 

• I never saw or heard any money fights
• One partner dominated the other
• Both parents/step-parents fought viciously
• One or both partners would talk openly and empathically about their money differences
•  

What Causes Money Arguments?

At the tip of the iceberg, money arguments look and sound like concerns about 

• How much is spent on shoes, clothing, trips, beer, friends, family, food, etc.
• How controlling or careless someone is about money

But that is just the tip of the iceberg. 

What actually causes money arguments is the absence of pro-social, emotional, and psychological skills and abilities. 

The absence of these realities is found in various combinations of mental and relational health conditions. 

At the base of the iceberg of many mental and health conditions is often a lived history of abuse and/or neglect experienced in childhood.

This is why it is so important to get to the root of the issue. To survive painful, traumatic, rigid, and chaotic environments, humans make a wide range of adaptations, many of them not consciously or intentionally. 

In my work with clients, one of the first things we start to talk about is their childhood experiences with different family members. This is when the stories of angry and abusive stepfathers, absent biological fathers, “irrational” mothers, or dismissive stepmothers start to show up.  (These are examples — any experience can be paired with any family member.) 

Money arguments are about money and its meaning. They are also about relational safety and acceptance. The science of attachment theory helps us understand how foundational our attachment relationships are and also about our mental and relational well-being. 

One of my favorite new books on attachment is Secure Relating: Holding Our Own In An Insecure World. If you are struggling with financial conflicts, working on your relationship health is an imperative place to start. 

How Fighting Over Money Impacts Your Relationship

Fighting over your money can have adverse effects on your financial life and future financial security, as well as the quality of your relationships. 

Before you get the wrong idea, I am not against money differences and advocating that you always agree on what to do about money. That is people-pleasing and likely connected to anxious attachment styles, where you worry that if you bring up your true concerns you will be rejected or minimized. In healthy, vibrant relationships, there is room for money differences to be talked about openly, lovingly, and with empathy. 

There is ample scientific evidence that among the issues that couples fight about, money is likely to be more intense, problematic, and remain unresolved. 

Learning to fight fair about your finances and in a way that helps you as a household to build wealth together is essential. There is a growing trend of couples in intimate relationships not fully pooling their resources, and that can have its own significant, negative effects. 

I have seen time and again from my clients that their families' personal experiences of financial conflict set the stage for how and why they approach their household’s management of money the way they do. 

Divorces and the negative financial effects of those experiences are some of the primary reasons I hear clients describe why they feel anxious about their financial future with their partner. 

How To Stop Fighting About Money 

Starting at the highest level, stopping fights about money requires a learning, healing, and growth journey for you and your partner. This is not a one-sided journey. It is not the man’s problem or the woman’s problem. It is an opportunity to put the issues in front of the couple and to say, “How as a couple are we going to solve this?” 

Said another way, you’re on the same team, and the opponent is your financial conflict. How can you win the game as a couple? Perhaps one of you is the offense and the other is the defense in the game against the financial conflict. 

Are you ready to practice a few de-escalating strategies for money conflicts? Here are 5 ways to help you get started:

1. Identifying Conflict Styles

Identify your conflict styles, and then start to learn the tools of healthy conflict. What we think is a healthy or helpful approach to conflict is not always the case. 

The Five Conflict Styles Are:

1. Competing
2. Accommodation
3. Avoiding
4. Compromising
5. Collaborating

Each of these conflict styles can show up in the many different money decisions couples need to navigate. I find when one spouse uses a competing style of conflict resolution, they are often partnered with someone who is accommodating or avoidant in their approach. Both need to recognize how their approach to conflict impacts the other person. 

2.  Share A Joint Account

One of the top questions I get asked is about shared accounts versus separate accounts. Like most money realities, there are general principles and there are exceptions. First, I like to see what the research says.

Research completed in 2022 finds that couples who pool all their finances experience greater relationship satisfaction and are less likely to break up. This is a great case for looking at going all in together. 

I understand if you're not of this mindset; there are some likely very good reasons why you are not there. Do couples split finances is a real question to dig into, so please don’t just rush in and force your whole financial life together with someone. You will likely need some professional help to get comfortable with a financial arrangement that works for both of you. 

3. Appreciate Your Differences

When we talk about appreciating your differences, that can mean different things to different people. What differences are we supposed to appreciate? I would like to offer two very important types of differences you want to appreciate and learn how to navigate as a couple. 

First is your attachment history and experiences. This shapes your experiences and expectations with relationships. In my book The Healthy Love and Money Way: How The Four Attachment Styles Impact Your Financial Well-Being, readers get a deep dive into their attachment history and how it plays out in their financial lives. 

The second is about your relationship with money. Yes, you have a personal relationship with money. There are different ways to describe and understand your relationship with money. One way that many of my clients are finding helpful is through the work of Dr. Scott Rick and his incredible book Tightwads and Spendthrifts: Navigating the Money Mindfield in Real Relationships, which is written with a great combination of humor, empathy, and scientific research. 

4. Schedule Budget Nights

Having regular budget and financial planning date nights might not be your idea of a great time — yet. That’s completely understandable. If it is not enjoyable to talk about money with your partner, why in the world would you want to plan time to do that?

I get it. 

This is why you both will likely need to work on your emotional and relational intelligence. There are some foundational skills you need before having regular money conversations makes sense. 

In my signature program The Couples Guide to Financial Intimacy, the first module is all about laying the foundation of effective money communication. It starts with financial empathy both for yourself and your partner. 

5. Embrace Your Money Goals Together

Healthy couples have shared and individual financial goals that they are pursuing. They can talk openly and candidly about the goals. They take it deeper than just stating what the goals are; they share the emotional and relational meaning of the goals with each other. Each partner is genuinely interested in their own goals and those of their partner. 

As an example, a husband and wife have been married for 23 years. They both grew up in poverty and financial insecurity, one in an inner city context and the other in a rural environment. They both dreamed of a better financial future for themselves as children. They are now both in their forties and have achieved relative financial stability and success in ways they could only imagine as children. 

The wife wants to vacation with her husband and their two kids, but he does not want to go, always citing how expensive vacations are and that they need to save more money. 

Through the process of Therapy-Informed Financial Planning, they find a new way to relate to each other and their different goals, which have real financial implications. The wife learned to start by connecting and empathizing with her husband before inviting him to consider taking family vacations. The husband learned to ask open-ended questions of his wife about the emotional and relational meaning of vacation. 

They learned that they are on the same team and trying to create a fundamentally different experience for their kids than the one they experienced during their childhood poverty. 

Stop Fighting About Money For Good

By now, you have likely come to appreciate that there are a number of steps to take to get to where you no longer feel like financial fights are hurting your relationship. 

Healing from past painful experiences around money is a powerful way to move from destructive to constructive money differences. 

When we leave unaddressed money pains from the past, they will continue to pop up in our financial lives now and in the future. 

Our brains and bodies are full of memories intended to help us navigate our social and financial worlds. Just because we leave one social and financial world does not mean those memories leave us, we have to learn to continually distinguish between appropriate responses for our current reality and responses that were appropriate for our past lives. 

In the case of our previously mentioned couple, the husband can now realize and reflect that he is responsible with money, and that a little bit of relaxing and enjoying spending money will not turn him into his father, who spent every dollar he made. The wife can also learn to recognize that money will not be taken from her like it was in her childhood by her drug-addicted mother. It is safe now to be financially transparent with her spouse.

Healing through our financial traumas is not the easiest thing to do, but it is so worth it. On the other side of working through our financial traumas is financial freedom and relationship satisfaction. 

You don’t have to make this journey alone, or even just as a couple. That is why I created the Therapy-Informed Financial Planning process — to support couples just like you. You may not have had helpful role models on how to do money together with a spouse growing up, but it’s not too late to find and emulate them. 

Let’s schedule 30 minutes for a free consultation to learn more about how Therapy-Informed Financial Planning can support you. 

Wishing You Healthy Love and Money,
Ed Coambs

MBA, MA, MS, CFP®, CFT-I™, LMFT