From Shame to Shared Values: Aligning Money Decisions in Military Marriages with Monica Kaufman

Episode Summary of “From Shame to Shared Values: Aligning Money Decisions in Military Marriages with Monica Kaufman”

Navigating finances in a military marriage often feels like walking through a minefield, where a simple conversation about a credit card bill can trigger a deep sense of emotional disconnection. In this episode of the Communicate & Connect podcast, Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky sits down with financial expert Monica Kaufman to peel back the layers of “money shame” and explore the attachment roots of our financial behaviors.

We shift the focus away from spreadsheets and toward emotional safety, helping couples understand that money is simply a “tool” that often carries the weight of our childhood imprints and survival strategies. This episode provides a gentle roadmap for aligning money decisions in military marriages by helping couples stop the cycle of blame and start getting curious about their partner’s “money mindset.” By moving from the reactive “6-year-old self” to the intentional “adult self,” you can transform financial friction into an opportunity for deeper connection and long-term security.

What You’ll Learn:
– The Psychology of Money as an Emotional Tool
– Childhood Imprints and the Formation of Money Mindsets
– Shifting from the “6-Year-Old Self” to the “Adult Self”
– Overcoming Shame within the Financial System
– Defining Wealth and Financial Freedom
– Building Financial Resilience in Military Families
– Strategies for Breaking the Cycle of Financial Blame
– Having Low-Stakes Financial Conversations

Don’t forget to check out 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.

Guest Speaker Bio – Monica Kaufman

I believe the mind is our greatest asset—and when we align it with intention, we can transform not just our finances, but our future. As a Certified Financial Planner™ with decades of experience at major firms, I’ve seen firsthand that true wealth isn’t just about income or assets. It’s about clarity, confidence, and the courage to make choices that reflect your deepest values.

At Harmony, I created a program that puts the power back where it belongs—in your hands—so you can rise above shame, shift old patterns, and build a financial life that supports who you are becoming. I’m a mom to two grown sons and two rescue dogs, and I bring my whole heart to this work.

Connect with Monica Kaufman: Website

Free Relationship Pattern Assessment

Many couples assume they have a communication problem when they’re actually stuck in a relationship pattern that keeps creating the same conflict.

Take the free Relationship Pattern Assessment to discover what pattern may be keeping you stuck and learn what to focus on next.

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Episode Transcript for “From Shame to Shared Values: Aligning Money Decisions in Military Marriages with Monica Kaufman”

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.

Welcome to the Communicate and Connect podcast for military relationships with your host, Elizabeth Polinsky, 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.

You’re listening to episode 74, From Shame to Shared Values: Aligning Money Decisions in Military Marriages with Monica Kaufman.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Monica, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I’m excited to have you here. Maybe you could,

Monica Kaufman: Thank you.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Oh yeah, sorry to,

Monica Kaufman: No, just thank you. I’m happy to be here, so, yes.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: yeah, maybe you could share a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Monica Kaufman: My name is Monica Kaufman. I’ve been in the financial industry for 20 years or so. Before that I did research. I am a proud mom of two, one of whom is in the Army. And for me, what I’ve learned over the years is that money’s just an extension, it’s a tool in your hands.

And so what goes on inside of you determines how you use the tool. And after all these years of working with people, I’m mostly interested in helping people out to learn the system so that they maximize their chances of achieving what they wanna achieve.

It’s really just a question of understanding that the system is big and this has been going on for a very long time, and so there’s no reason why people can’t have it.

They can’t get their hands around it. I’ve seen regular people master it and I’ve seen people choose not to, and there’s no reason to do that.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah. Great. Well, one of the reasons that I wanted to have you on the podcast was because money is often a huge hot topic for couples, and I was just curious like, why do you think money carries so much emotional weight for couples?

Monica Kaufman: Because money really is the tool that you use to provide for yourself and for your family. And so how you use it based on how you’ve been trained to do so and how you see money in your life affects not just you. It affects the people around you and the people who matter the most. I really do believe that a large portion of how we approach money is imprinted on us by our families and by the people around our families and our culture when we’re very young.

So the messages we get by the age of six largely then show up in the way that we approach money. And then on top of that, we have a problem and I’ve seen this in my own family. I’ve seen this all over the place. We don’t teach the skills and because we don’t teach the skills, we don’t teach a lot of it, and people come at it with fear.

This has been going on for four or five generations, so it’s nobody’s fault. The question is, what do you do to become aware of that sort of imprinting, that mental archetype around money and success? What do you do and then how do you shift to get to where you wanna be?

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah. I love that you’re mentioning that thinking about almost like a generational pattern, of handling money and then that way could be very different than what your partners way of handling money might be.

Monica Kaufman: Right, and also, here’s the thing. The generational patterns may have reflected truth back then and may have worked for the people who gave it to you. Like there’s no malice implied here. Nobody’s trying to hurt you.

It’s just that maybe it doesn’t work for the person you are, your situation, and when you have to deal with different things. So it’s a question of becoming aware and saying, how do I shift this pattern without anger, without ranker? How do I make it work so that myself and the people that matter the most to me are taken care of?

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: I like that it’s making me think about the idea of wealth what wealth looked like five generations ago is very different than what wealth looks like today. And I’m also thinking about this concept of having like a wealth mindset. And I was curious, maybe you could talk a little bit about like what even is a wealth mindset and is that important for couples when they are thinking about money?

Monica Kaufman: So the question is how do you define it first. Have you ever heard of the book, the Millionaire Next Door?

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: No, I haven’t, but I feel like I should read it.

Monica Kaufman: Okay. it was based on academic research done, back in the nineties. And they were looking at people who were financially successful, not counting their residents, their personal home. Okay? And what they found were certain patterns.

These were people who weren’t looking for approval, didn’t buy clothing items, house, car, any of that for approval. They weren’t looking for affirmation. They didn’t worship money. They didn’t see money as power. What they did was they saw it as a tool.

And so they were buying pickup trucks long before pickup trucks were $80,000. I can’t believe they’re this expensive. But they were taking a good car, taking care of it and driving it forever. They weren’t looking to project what people thought of as wealth and success. They didn’t care.

They were looking to build it because one of the things you have to accept is that income is not the same thing as wealth. Income is where someone pays you. Wealth is something you own that pays you.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Oh, how interesting. Yeah.

Monica Kaufman: Yeah, you have to really start and define your terms. And what I would say is most people crave what I call financial freedom, which is whether they work or whether they don’t, they can carry the load of what they need to to take care of themselves and the people they love.

And to get to that point, you have to build up enough wealth underneath you, to be able to generate that income, whether you work or whether you don’t. And then when you get to that point, you decide, “Hey, working is optional now. Every day is Saturday if I want to make it that way, but I can work if I want to.” And becomes, a point of personal freedom.

And just to step back, here’s the thing. When I first started working on this program that I’ve been doing about six years ago, I sat down in front of a big, huge, monstrous whiteboard. And I was like, okay, where is this coming from?

And for me, freedom means responsibility. I am response able. I can choose how I respond, I don’t have to do what I was programmed. I don’t have to do what other people want me to do necessarily, or what I think I need to do to fit in.

I get to choose my response and when I do that, okay, I can choose what is right for me. That we were all created to be free or to be responsible to make those choices. And I think it flows. That’s a spiritual belief on my part, but it flows into how you take care of your body, how you take care of your mind, where your emotions and what you think. You’re responsible for what you think. How do you take care of those relationships around you?

And then the money is the last piece. But if you’re not taking care of your body, you’re not going to be free at some point when your body breaks down, you have to take care of your mind so you can be free. You have to take care of what you think.

And money is just one of those things. It’s a personal self ownership thing because again, money is just a tool or a set of tools.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yes, and I’m seeing how you’re talking about it, it’s the mindset that you approach money with, right? Like, I need to be responsible for each area of my life. How do I make sure that we’re taking care of my family, but also me taking care of each area and having that flow.

Monica Kaufman: Yep.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah. I guess I’m just thinking about how this is so hard for couples to navigate. Like some of it is tools, like concrete tools. Some of it is undoing maybe programming from your family that may not apply to you and your situation and what the two of you want as a couple in the family that you’re creating, what your version of freedom might be.

Monica Kaufman: And that’s the whole problem. It requires communication. I’ll never forget the first time, it was about 20 years ago, I sat down with a new client. The wife had brought me in and the husband was there and they were so wildly divergent. They were literally on opposite ends of the spectrum on everything.

And I sat down and I said, “okay, we’re gonna talk about different things we’re gonna do risk tolerance. How do you feel about risk?” And risk is just really the chance that something could go wrong.

Everything was just radically different between the two of them. And what I said to them was, you know, that’s okay. The question is how do you talk to each other? How do you decide what you want? You gotta decide what you want, and then you’ve gotta come up with a plan that works for the two of you. And this was the first time they had ever had anybody sit down and talk to both of them at the same time.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah, especially about money.

Monica Kaufman: Yeah, about money. It was absolutely the first time.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Wow.

Monica Kaufman: And there are times when people will say, you know what the money is, I’ve earned it. This other person has it. We’ve never had our money commingled. There’s all of that. You have to figure out where people are, and then find a way to help them talk to each other.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah, and I’m just thinking about couples who are in couples counseling in our practice, and usually they’re the couples who are struggling more with the communication piece. But I also think that it seems to be like what we know from research, it’s money, sex, and kids, the hardest conversations to have.

From your experience working with couples around money, what makes it hard for them to talk about money?

Monica Kaufman: One, because there’s a shame factor. Okay, do I know this? Do I understand what I’m dealing with? Do we have enough? All of that plays in. There’s another thing of what do I know? What do I not know? There’s a lot of bad information out there. But the other piece is even if you wanted to find all the good information, that doesn’t mean you’re going to implement change.

So there’s a lot of steps into this that tie into the identity. I’m very clear on is that whatever happened in the past happened in the past. One, we can’t change it. And two. I really do mean it when I say according to the industry, 80% of the population really doesn’t understand how the system works and how to navigate it.

And this has been going on for four to five generations, so it’s no one’s fault. It’s not your parents’ fault. It’s not your fault. What is in your hands is what we do today. Okay, how do I help you learn this today? And what I have found with people is that when people decide that they’re going to do it, it gets done.

And I’ll never forget many years ago, I got two referrals around the same time. One of them was a high powered couple, husband had been a doctor. They had children, he had had a stroke. The other one were two regular normal people. One was a business person who had sold businesses when their daughter was born profoundly disabled, with profound challenges.

And she worked as a paralegal. And the two of them came in roughly at the same time. The high powered couple had not taken hold of their money and then, even though he had had a tremendously high income, when he got sick, if it wasn’t for the disability insurance, they would’ve had a problem.

The other couple made made a decision at the beginning part of their marriage that the only death they’d ever have would be the house. They lived in a very modest house. And they lived off one salary and they invested the other. Any money that came in, inheritance, something happened. Some money come in, not a lot. And when they retired involuntarily in their fifties, they had a lot of money that rolled over for management. A lot.

So it’s not about education. It’s about learning and processing and saying, okay, we’re gonna manage it. And by the way, when their daughter was born. They sat down, met with attorneys, and said, okay, we need to take care of this.

The Special Needs Trust got set up. They bought life insurance, fully funded it. They signed guardians. Okay? They did everything, got it organized, and they had it on their calendar to update and review annually, and then every five years the estate documents were reviewed to make sure they were still validated in place.

Everything they needed to get done, they got done. Okay. Whatever it was, they faced it. So one of the things about the book, the Millionaire Next Door, is based on the research, they describe certain things and by the way, most people don’t inherit money. Most inherited money does not last.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Okay. I didn’t know that.

Monica Kaufman: So most people who are millionaires or above didn’t inherit it. They made it. So the question is, what are these characteristics? These are people who start taking care of themselves. They take care of what they think about. They’re involved in their communities, but they’re not looking for flesh. They don’t need it.

Like one of the quotes was something to the effect of, you can get involved in a lot of things in your community without spending real money. You can spend a lot of time with the people you like, without spending real money.

There was this one situation, this one young advisor that I mentored a few years ago.

He was engaged and he sat me down and he said, Monica, what do I do about this? And I said, what do you do about what? And he told me that he and his fiance wanted to set themselves up so that they could buy a house. And I said, okay, so what’s the problem? Because both were working. And he said, well, the problem is that we spend a lot of money.

I said, where do you spend a lot of money? They said, well, when we’re going out with our friends, but we still wanna maintain our relationships with our friends. I said, okay, so you’re going out to bars and restaurants? He said, yep. Alright, tell me about your friends. Are they at the same stage of life?

Are they doing the same things? And he said yes. And I said, okay, so why don’t you do this with them? Sit down with them and said, look, I really love you guys. We really love you guys. We wanna stay with you, but we need to save money because we wanna buy our first house. So what we need to do, and what I suggest we do is that we meet at somebody’s apartment or home every week.

We trade off I think that’s six couples or seven couples, fine. Every two months you go out for dinner. But this way, when you meet at somebody’s house, everybody brings something. And he wound up talking to his friends and discovered they had the same problem. They were trying to find a way to spend less. And so when they did that, they all went down that process. 12 months later, he bought his first house.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah.

Monica Kaufman: Okay?

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Wow.

Monica Kaufman: And the big thing is like, one of the things I say to people is you have to curate your environment. So a lot of people get a dopamine hit from buying stuff.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Mm-hmm.

Monica Kaufman: Okay. So one of the things I’ll say to people is, you know, I’ll go to the mall and walk, that

I will go first thing in the morning when the stores aren’t open.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: To prevent it from being like a coping skill or just a thing that feels really nice in the moment, but then is not helping you with your goals.

Monica Kaufman: So you curate your environments and one of the things that the Millionaire Next Door people found is, or the researchers found, is that to become successful, you have to curate your environment and choose to spend time with friends who reflect the same values as you.

So if people are not willing to make a shift and say, okay, instead of going out for dinner, every weekend, we’ll make the shift so we spend less money. It turns out they wound up having more fun spending less, achieving their goals, and they reinforce that they shared values, and that’s what you’re looking for.

You’ve gotta curate your environment when you make a change. Like alcoholics and addicts can’t hang out with the same group of people unless they’re changing too. It’s the same thing here. I mean, with people who have addiction. That’s a bigger issue.

Much bigger issue, but the same lesson holds. If you wanna change the actions and the behaviors, you’re gonna have to be very specific with your environment and see how the systems inside of your environment move you towards either what you want or what you don’t.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah, I really liked that you were talking about values because I was thinking there’s kind of actually a lot of skills and a lot of steps that are going through this process. Even in the example of the couple that you just mentioned, where they wanted to change the dynamic of the friend group so they could buy the house.

Because the couple first had to be brave to have difficult conversations around money and then had to compromise and figure out what their values were to some sort of joint values together in their couple dynamic. And then they had to rock the boat a bit and be brave to do that with their friend group.

And then thankfully their friend group also had similar values.

Monica Kaufman: And here’s the thing too. People who are financially successful, who hit that financial freedom point, learn to not be afraid to set up boundaries. These are my values. This is what I want. I may love you and care about you, but if I can’t afford you because you’re undermining my values and my ability to protect my family, that’s a no go.

We’re not gonna cut you off. We’re gonna create some distance. We’re gonna create some space. It’s hard to do the first few times. It still is hard for me to do on certain issues. But it’s not optional. It’s a required part of adulthood.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah, the boundary setting. But I’m just thinking like for couples who are just even starting out, trying to get on the same page with money. How do you talk to them about starting to get aligned in their values and figuring that piece out of where they wanna go?

Monica Kaufman: Okay, so it’s funny because I’ve had people say, well, you know, you sit down with them and you help them figure out where they’re going and what they’ve done, and the reality is people aren’t interested in doing that. But there’s a cheat. There’s a deal.

A lot of times what you can do when you look at somebody’s bank, there’s usually a tab where you can flip a switch and see by category where the money is going, unless they’re pulling out cash.

If they’re using a debit card or they’re using their credit cards, you can do it across all the accounts and see where the money is going. By category, then you can look at that and say, oh, wow, I’m spending 20% of our disposable income on restaurants. Okay, I have a Starbucks habit.

I’m gonna admit that. That’s a problem. I waste money there. But I’m willing to give up going out to eat to maintain the ability to go in, in the middle of my workday and not look at a screen and just to take a break. You see the opportunities for saving. The second thing that I do after looking at that, is what I will say to couples, and once they do that, they usually find, oh there’s opportunities we can give and take. We can give and take.

The next thing that I say to people is, look and track your spending. And instead of you doing it personally, let the system run. Put all the accounts and have that switch on and see what happens for about two months and see where you are. And when you look at that, I say, okay, one of the things you need to do to have a financial foundation and I cover this in the course, is you need to do two things at once.

You need to pay down debt and you need to build up an emergency fund. And an emergency fund needs to be more than what Dave Ramsey says. Dave Ramsey says a lot of good stuff, but this is what I fundamentally disagree with him on.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah.

Monica Kaufman: I also think it has to reflect a certain period of time where the two of you don’t have income. What would happen if your income got turned off tomorrow? How would you pay your bills? And so that emergency fund exists to help do that.

The next thing I say to them, when you look at this and you look at debt, whether it’s credit card, student loans, doesn’t matter, car loan doesn’t matter. List it, and I want you to list it by the amount owed, the interest rate, and the monthly payment.

So when you look at your monthly income after a couple of months and you see what’s disposable and you see what you can pull from and make changes on. You then have to decide how you’re going to allocate it.

And remember I said risk is the chance that something can go wrong. That percentage, okay for that interest rate is your risk rate. So what you wanna do is you wanna pay off the highest interest rate first, okay? That’s the fastest way to pay it down. And it’s also the most responsible. This is where you’re considered the most risky. So you wanna pay that off first.

The next thing that you have to do with all of this is you need to say, how do I wanna live? What does this look like? What’s the money going to be used to do beyond that? And it’s a question of really just getting intentional and saying, I have this pile of dollars, where are they going?

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah.

Monica Kaufman: One of the things I do with people is if you have debt, if you have loans, if you have a family member, the first thing that I want you to do. In the military, it’s not so much a problem for the person who’s in the military, but for the spouse, when they get a job, if their employer offers it, I want them to buy disability insurance.

Group disability insurance is cheap, and what it does is it replaces usually on an after tax basis, your income. Why do I want you to do that? Because what that’s doing is that’s replacing the income in the event you can’t work through no fault of your own.

And that means that if there’s something that happens and we have a 70% chance of having something happen, the money thing isn’t the first thing on your mind. It’s not adding stress to the situation. And then, it’s really just a question of getting proactive about it.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: So this is the type of stuff that you cover in your course.

Monica Kaufman: Yeah. One of the things we do in the course, we start talking about the mindset. Okay. We start off with a sprint, which is free five days, five minutes a day. If it’s more than that and it doesn’t fit into your life, you’re not gonna do the work. Okay.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah, I like to hear that it’s five minutes because that’s me. If it’s like, if it’s too much, it’ll sit on the shelf.

Monica Kaufman: Right, and the reality is we’re all like that. We’re juggling too many marbles, and marbles are slippery. If I make this too big a marble or if I make this too slippery, you’re gonna drop it. So what I do with this is it’s five minutes a day for five days, and after that you’ll see where the money archetype where there are issues and why things are difficult for you.

After that, we have a small workshop where we walk you through what the antidote is to it and it’s aspects of the millionaire nextdoor archetype that we’ve seen. And then after that, the program works on the idea that we talk about changing the mindset and how to do that from a behavioral standpoint.

We use Nate Zinzer method and I’ve adapted it for money, but then after that we’re also talking about building up financial defenses. So I look at this as a journey. You’re on a path from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. And what I want to do is I wanna put up defenses.

And those defenses are like resilience points, so that if something happens, you either don’t get knocked down by the wind that blows, or the water that comes down. Or you get back up really quickly so that you can keep going.

You’re not getting knocked off the path, you’re not getting stuck in a mud pile on the path, you’re moving forward. Those things are defenses. Another thing I talk about, and I mean this, having seen this, like it’s funny, my son, when he got his commission, I posted a picture just of the rank insignia.

And then all of a sudden I started getting weird friend requests from bizarre people claiming to be US military in all sorts of countries. I was like, you’ve gotta be kidding me. Okay. you’re shaking your head.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Well, I just, I’m thinking about like same thing happens with all the ads. Like you Google one thing and then that’s the floodgates of everything finding you.

Monica Kaufman: Right? So it’s kind of funny and I went to a seminar on identity theft and the FBI representative talked about the fact that there are a lot of people who look and they’re like, oh, if that’s a single woman in her fifties, okay, she’s an ideal target for us to take advantage of. I’m like great.

I looked at this and I thought, all right, you’ve gotta maintain your identity and you’ve gotta be very clear about that. And so what does that mean? That means antiviral software on your electronics, VPNs, where you can on your electronics. Good clean hygiene with the electronics. Okay? Don’t download files, don’t download trackers, all of that.

But then also it’s a question of having a password vault where you can keep track of your passwords and not storing them on the computer. All sorts of things that you can do to make sure that you protect that identity and you protect your money, but also your credit, your social security number, your security clearance. You.

The money is there to serve you. You gotta protect you. And the other thing that I do is I will talk about, you need to have letters of instruction. You need to have power of attorneys, medical and financial. Because when something happens, you do not want your family member to step in and say, I had a situation where somebody was injured and I didn’t have a power of attorney on them, and I was with them at the hospital, and thank God that person was awake.

But if they hadn’t have been awake, I couldn’t have done anything for him.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Wow. So your program’s pretty comprehensive, like the things that you do in that. Yeah.

Monica Kaufman: if you don’t use the system to protect yourself while people are getting used to the change, while people are getting used to the ideas of what they need to do and understanding what risk is, and understanding where the mindset that they were given through no fault of their own or through no fault of anybody else, isn’t working for them. And I’ve said to people it’s like, look, you know what, the mindset that’s currently running your money is the 6-year-old you. I want the adult you to be in charge. So let’s talk about how to make that shift.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah.

Monica Kaufman: I said that to a woman a few weeks ago and she just looked at me and said, how did you know that? I was like, that’s okay.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Isn’t that life in general? That’s right there. Yeah.

Monica Kaufman: And it’s a challenge. But the program walks people down this path because I’m not gonna ask you to make major changes with the cash and start paying down the debt and building up the emergency fund, until you’ve got more support around you. And until you’re not gonna get knocked down.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah. Could you share a little bit about like how people could find you and how they could be part of this program?

Monica Kaufman: Okay, so I will give you a link that they can do to start with the sprint to see if my approach makes sense. Because look, I’m happy to have anybody from the military and I will give you a code so that they get a significant discount.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: We’ll have that there in the show notes for anybody who’s looking for that. Yeah.

Monica Kaufman: So I will have a link for that, and that’s the gateway. You start with that, and then once you start with the sprint, if you think it’s a good place to go, we walk you through the workshop and when you’re done with the workshop, it’s the course. There’s two different courses. Each one has four or five modules, and the point is the modules are four weeks.

And you’re literally walking through process, but every day you get a small task. You get a five minute video, five days a week, and you get a small task. Okay? And one of the things I’ll say to couples is when you do those, what I want you to do is schedule a time once a week where you’re gonna sit down and I want you to habit stack it.

I want you to do something fun, then I want you to do this, and then I want you to do something fun, okay? I want you to reward yourself for this. Why? Because I know it’s hard. I want you to sit down and just review your progress. Where are you? The other thing that I will recommend people do if they can, I have dry erase boards that are calendars. And what I need to do again ’cause I need to restart it for myself, is you put up the days and you track so that you can see you did what you needed to do.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah. Make sure that it gets done and to help build the habit of making sure you’re doing it. Yeah,

Monica Kaufman: And it takes time. You know, the idea that you’re gonna get your habits down or changed in 28 days is nonsense. If you’ve been doing something all your life 28 days, now you need to give yourself a little bit more grace and a heck of a lot more support. So I don’t want people to rely on motivation ’cause motivation fails. Today is national quitting day. It’s when everybody who said they were gonna do their resolutions on average quits.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah, because we’re on, we’re January 9th right now as we’re recording this, right after the New Year’s resolutions.

Monica Kaufman: Right. And so I look at people make a resolution, you’re gonna do this. I’m like, okay.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Yeah. Okay. So we will include the links to all of that in our show notes for anyone who wants to do the sprint and then like go through your courses and work on this program.

Monica Kaufman: Yep.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: I’m wondering if you have any last words of wisdom that you would want couples listening to this episode, what you’d want them to know.

Monica Kaufman: Okay. I want them to know that A, it’s not their fault that we live in a culture that does not send the right messages about what wealth is. We send the wrong messages. We value the trendsetter, we value the influencer, and we don’t necessarily send the right values that everybody here can do this.

If you can make it through basic training and you can be a responsible member of the US military, you can manage this. You’ve manage things that are way harder. Okay? So trust me on that. I know that this is difficult to have these conversations, but really when you take it away from the idea that this is a sign of grace or this is a sign of acceptance or status or power, no, it’s just a stupid tool.

It is a tool. I’m using a computer with a microphone, with a camera. So are you. We’ve mastered tools. This is just a set of tools you can master. That’s really what I want people to understand. You can do this.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Well, Monica, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I’ve really appreciated this episode and I’m hoping some people go through your program.

Monica Kaufman: Well, thank you. I appreciate it and I wish you and everybody watches us the very best. And thank you. I know that it’s a sacrifice, but I’m grateful. Thank you.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Thank you.

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