Couple Finances

Episode Summary of “Couple Finances”

Hello, and welcome to the Communicate & Connect Podcast, your go-to resource for building stronger relationships through effective communication. I’m your host, Elizabeth Polinsky, a dedicated military marriage counselor located in Norfolk, Virginia. Today, we’re launching into a topic that often serves as both a challenge and an opportunity for many: couple finances.

In this episode, we’re uncovering why conversations about money are crucial for maintaining a healthy and long-lasting relationship. Studies, like the one conducted by Ramsey Solutions, have showcased that financial disputes are the second leading cause of divorce, right after infidelity. This makes understanding and resolving money issues more important than ever for couples who wish to sustain their bond.

We’ll explore various methods for handling finances that cater to different types of relationships. Whether you prefer joint accounts, separate accounts, or a blend of both, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. The key is having open dialogues and creating transparency about how money is managed and spent. This transparency not only strengthens trust but also ensures that both partners are equally involved in financial decision-making, reinforcing the concept of teamwork in marriage.

Moreover, we’ll guide you through the importance of setting and balancing a budget together. Many couples overlook this step, but establishing a clear budget can alleviate stress and provide a roadmap for shared financial goals, whether that’s saving for a house, reducing debt, or planning for your future.

By the end of this episode, you’ll have actionable insights and tools to start meaningful conversations with your partner about finances. Plus, don’t forget to check out our Show Notes, where you can find a downloadable budget template designed specifically for couples.

So, if you’re ready to transform how you and your spouse handle finances and thereby enhance your relationship, stay tuned. As always, I’m here to provide you with the best strategies to communicate and connect with your loved ones. Enjoy the episode, and let’s start the conversation about harnessing your financial power as a team!

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Episode Transcript for “Couple Finances”

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:00:02]:
This podcast is sponsored by Communicate and Connect Counseling, where we have a team of therapists who provide individual, couples, and family therapy services, all tailored to meet the needs of military and veteran families. To learn more about our services, visit www.communicateandconnect.com.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:00:28]:
Welcome to the Communicate and Connect Podcast for Milit Relationships with your host, Elizabeth Polinski, a military marriage counselor. If this is your first time listening to the Communicate and Connect podcast, please take a second to go, rate, review and subscribe to make sure you get all our future episodes. We also really want to know what it is you love about our podcast. And if for some reason you’re not loving it, we want to know that too, because we’re committed to providing the best quality content to help you improve your relationships.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:00:58]:
Foreign you’re listening to episode 25 on couple finances.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:01:14]:
Hey there.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:01:15]:
Welcome back to the Communicate and Connect podcast. If this is your first time, then I just want to say hi. Welcome. My name is Elizabeth Polinski, I go by Liz, and I am a military marriage counselor in Norfolk, Virginia, which is where my husband is stationed with the Navy. And right now I’m going through a series on how to get ready for marriage.

Starting off your marriage well, and if you haven’t had some of these conversations, even though you’ve been married for several years, then you might find these, these things helpful as well. And so today we’re going to be talking about couple finances. So there was a study done in 2017 by Ramsey Solutions, and they found that money fights were the second leading cause of divorce, just behind infidelity.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:02:12]:
Now, if you look at different research, other research might order causes for divorce differently. This is just what this one study found. But they found that for couples where there was a high level of debt, as well as a lack of communication around money, led to a lot of stress and a lot of anxiety and caused more fights. One of the things that they found was that the more a couple had in debt, the more likely they were to say that money was one of the top issues that they fought about.

So debt is a huge stressor for relationships. And they also found that about half of the couples who had $50,000 or more in debt would say that money was one of the top reasons for their arguments. And if you compared that to the people who said that they had a great marriage, the people who said they had a great marriage were almost twice as likely to talk about money on a daily or weekly basis compared to those who said their marriage was just okay, or if their marriage was in a Crisis. And so being on the same page with money is a really big deal for your marriage.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:03:37]:
And there are a few different things to think about when thinking about couple finances. One of the first things to think about is the way that you and your partner want to handle money. I suppose there are three, three ways. One is you could have a joint account together where all of the money is collectively yours as a couple. You could have totally separate bank accounts, or you could have a mixture of individual accounts and couple accounts. This is the one that I tend to recommend. Or at the very minimum, at least having one joint account. Especially for military couples, if you want everything joint, that’s, that’s fine too.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:04:20]:
But for military couples, especially with deployments, having a joint account is helpful. So that way the spouse who is staying at home can make sure bills get paid. And if there are, if anything happens, they can access the account and make sure everything is taken care of. So having at least one joint account, I think, tends to be helpful even when, regardless if you have other separate accounts or not.

Now, another thing to think about is, so if you have separate bank accounts, what percentage or amount of your income do you want to be dedicated to? Couple and family expenses versus being just for you individually. And so there are different ways to do this. You know, if you have separate separate bank accounts with one joint account, you could always take an agreed upon amount or an agreed upon percentage and put that into the joint account and then have your joint expenses withdrawn from the joint account. That is certainly a way to do it.

Joint vs. Separate Bank Accounts

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:05:39]:
You, if you are more on the side of wanting to start off with joint accounts and not really wanting to have separate accounts, you could go the opposite way. You could say, okay, what is the amount or percentage that we both agree on that can be used for personal use? And you could withdraw that from the joint account just for your individual personal use outside of the marriage. My personal opinion is that it’s a good idea to have a mixture. I tend to think that having a separate account or at least being able to withdraw money for personal use is really nice.

Because what if you want to get your partner a surprise gift or, you know, Christmas gift, birthday gift, you don’t want them to see necessarily that transaction on the bank account. But at the same time, you want to have a feeling of transparency in how money is being used in the relationship.

I would say transparency is maybe the, one of the biggest communication skills that’s needed for marriage across the board, even outside of finances, but especially if you’re not being transparent about the money, then that can really get heated in a marriage. Additionally, outside of just having the transparency, I mean, that transparency allows and it helps build up trust between the two of you.

Teamwork in Marriage: Financial Strategies

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:07:10]:
But additionally, it also feels more like a team effort, which is really what we want. We want your marriage to feel like you and your partner are the board of directors of your relationship and of your family. So that way you guys collectively together are a team, making the decisions, knowing what’s going on, and then after you’ve decided together, you could delegate the tasks out however you want them to be done.

But the initial step is for you guys to be a team, including being a team in regards to your couple finances. So another thing to think about is how you want bills to be paid. There’s no right or wrong answer for any of this. It’s just pros and cons of different options and ones that I think tend to work better for helping your relationship feel like a team and promoting transparency and the teamwork. But the next thing to think about is how you want to divide bills.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:08:13]:
So one of them, one way is to have a joint account that all the bills come out of. Another option is to divide which which bills each of you pays for. Again, no right or wrong answer. As long as it is a discussion that’s talked about and agreed upon between the two of you. The next thing that you should probably be deciding is at what point do you want the discussion to be a joint decision making process for how much you spend? So everyone is going to be different on this.

Just for, just to use easy numbers, let’s say that over $100, that might be high for some people and that might be really low for other couples. But just for the ease of the conversation, let’s go with $100. Let’s say up to $100, you can just spend on whatever you feel like spending on and you don’t need to check in with your partner.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:09:20]:
But then after $100, you guys are needing to be in agreement that that’s an okay purchase to buy because it’s more than this amount. That is what you want to decide on together as a couple. At what amount of money should something be a joint decision that the two of you make together versus one person being able to decide on it on their own. The next step in getting your finances in order as a couple is to decide on a budget together. So many couples don’t do this. And I’ll be honest, like my husband and I didn’t do this at first. And then when we Did. We were so relieved.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:10:02]:
At least I was very relieved. Maybe I can’t completely speak for him, but I think he’s on the same page with me there. Deciding on a budget together is important because the two of you may have very different sponsors. Spending and saving styles. This is something that maybe you could discuss when you’re determining your relationship values.

And so that I talked about determining your relationship values in episode 24. So if you haven’t listened to that, go back and check it out. But your values around saving money versus spending money or even investing money, what are your personal values? And then together as a couple, you should decide how you want to collectively together, differentiate how much you want to spend, save or invest.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:10:53]:
Again, this is all about being a team in your marriage and being a team in your finances together. You also, in my personal opinion, should be balancing the budget together. Some couples really delegate this to just one partner and not the other one. You can do that if that is what feels right to your relationship. If you did do that, then you just want to make sure there is some sense of transparency and that the partner who’s not really involved with the finances at least has an idea of what’s going on and they’re not totally out of the loop.

But if you’re doing them together, then I tend to think that once a month it’s good to balance the budget together. You can make this part of a monthly check in meeting, which I talk about in episode 23 on marriage meetings. So if you haven’t listened to that, that is maybe my number one tip for couples to be doing is having at least monthly relationship check in meetings to talk about how things are going in the relationship.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:12:05]:
And this is a time where you could go over finances, you could balance the budget, or you could make it a separate meeting if you wanted to. But again, this helps keep transparency between the two of you. It also helps you both be working towards financial goals together. So let’s say you want to buy a house. You guys are there together knowing what you’re trying to save, how much you’re saving for a down payment.

Let’s say you’re trying to get debt free, right? Because we just learned at the beginning of this episode that high amounts of debt are a common cause of conflict for couples. So if your goal is to pay down debt, then you guys can check in about it and see how that’s going. And for sure, balancing the budget together will help both of you know what’s going on and make sure that you actually have more money coming in than going out.

Joint Budgeting for Financial Goals

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:13:00]:
And then I think lastly, another reason to be doing setting a budget together and then balancing the budget together is that it allows you to decide together when you want to modify your financial priorities. And so this might happen when there is a change in your life circumstances. So example, when you’re buying a house, you want to save for a house, maybe you’re not investing as much, maybe you’re spending less because you want to have the down payment or maybe you are moving and so you know more of the money is not going to be saved this month because you’re going to use it for the moving costs.

But then you want to go back to saving that amount again once the move has been completed. That’s another way. It’s just a way for you guys to be talking about it and be on the same page with how money is being spent and making sure you both are have a say in how it’s being spent and are a team together. I think the other example I have for that is maybe when you have kids, so maybe you were investing in like stocks or something.

I don’t actually know that much about investing, but you’re investing in something and then maybe you have kids and you want to change the percentage that you’re investing in stocks or whatever to also investing some of that instead into your kids college fund.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:14:39]:
Like a they have these investing things for kids where you can invest the money, but it’s then for their college whenever they’re old enough. Again, I am not a financial expert. I don’t know that much about investing, but I know about relationships.

And so if you are doing a monthly budget meeting together, financial meeting together, this allows you to talk about your finances and decide do we want to switch things up because we are having this change that’s happening in our family. So let me just recap. Money is a big cause of arguments for couples. And the more you communicate about it the better. Because the people who had great marriages, at least in the study by Ramsey Solutions, we’re talking about money at least weekly, if not more.

“Budgeting Tips for Couples”

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:15:35]:
And it’s there are a lot of ways to decide how you will handle money in the relationship. Again, no right or wrong answer. As long as it’s a discussion between the two of you and there’s transparency, you both know what’s going on and there’s a feeling that you are a team together in making decisions. And then I tend to recommend that you make make a budget together, that you sit down and do that together and that you balance it once a month.

And so my action item for you today from this episode is that if you have not done this and not made a budget together, I would go grab your partner and put it on the schedule, put it on your calendar somewhere to sit down and make a budget together. If you want a template to use, then go see this episode’s Show Notes where I provide a budget template for couples that you can download and use if you’ll find that helpful. I hope you enjoyed this episode and make sure to message me find me on social media if you have any questions or ideas on topics that you want me to cover on this podcast.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:16:59]:
I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If so Please take a second to go rate, review and subscribe so you get all of our future episodes. Make sure to check out the show notes to sign up for our FREE 10-week relationship email course.

This email course is really designed for people who are maybe having trouble with communication or connection in their relationship and helping them develop some quick wins right away to start improving it. While I am a therapist, this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not considered therapy and it should also not be a replacement for therapy. If you think you need a professional of any kind, you should definitely go find one. Until next time.