223 | How to Get Your Partner on Board With Managing Your Money Better

Most people take the wrong approach when they want to get their partner on board with managing their money better.

There’s a lot of talk about what we have to do and how much we need to cut back. And it typically backfires.

Rather than telling your partner what you need to do and all the cuts that need to be made, let’s try a different approach.

In this episode, let’s talk about the approach I recommend for getting your partner on board with managing your money better.

• • my experience with telling my husband what we needed to be doing to manage our money better

  • the implications of not thinking about the long-term impact of the way you manage your finances on your life
  • the more productive way I approached my husband about our finances
  • the advice I give about getting your partner on board with managing your money better
  • balancing what you want in the short term and long term

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You’re listening to Wealthyesq. We are a community of lawyers who believe that true wealth is having control of our time. I’m Rho Thomas, and as a busy wife, mom and former Biglaw associate, I know all too well the tension between the culture of the legal profession and pretty much everything else you want to do in life. That’s why each week, I’m bringing you the information and tools you need to improve your money mindset and manage your money to create true wealth. Because ultimately, it’s not about the money. It’s about the freedom and flexibility the money affords.

Hey friend. Welcome back to the show. I hope you’re doing well and having an amazing day so far. Today, we are talking about what to do when you want to get your finances in order, but you manage your finances with a spouse or a partner, and they are not interested. This is a question that I got recently at a speaking engagement that I had, and I thought that it would be applicable to a wider audience. So here we are. So this person said that they have been wanting to get their finances in order, but their partner is just not interested. They are fine with the way things are. And this person was asking how to get their partner on board. Like, what should they do? And this same thing happened with my husband. So we got married my first year out of law school and his last year of med school. So I was working, and he was in his last year of school. And I had learned a little about personal finance at this point from my experience in college, where I used to spend until my account literally got down to $1 before payday, and I would have to, like, wait and not do anything until I got paid again. And so I started learning about money, and I was telling him, like, oh, we should do this. We should do that. We should have debt, all these things that I was learning about, but he wasn’t interested. The majority of our debt was student loans. And for him, that was fine, like he was basically, everybody has student loans. We’ve been in school all this time. I want to enjoy the fruits of our labor. And the way that I approached it was all wrong. I did exactly what I now tell people not to do, and what I told this person at the speaking engagement not to do. I was very much like, you know, this is what we should do. We need to cut back. We need to pay off our debt. If we do this, that and the third, then we can be done. This article says this, that article says that, like, just telling him all these things that I was reading about, and he did not care. And I didn’t have a strong reason for why I wanted to do it at that time. It was just I was learning that these things were good to do with your money. But it wasn’t a huge issue because we were managing fine. We weren’t running out of money. We were able to pay our credit card off every month. We were able to do the things we wanted to do. There wasn’t any stress around our finances or anything like that. And so when he wasn’t interested, I didn’t push it, because things were fine. But I think when you are not thinking about the long term impacts of managing your finances, then you end up in a situation where it’s a lot of fun in the short term, but then you get to you get to a point later where you want to make a change in your life or you want to do something different. You want to be able to have more options, and those things aren’t available to you because of your financial situation, and that’s exactly what happened with us. When our first son was born, I wanted to drop down to part time at work to give myself a little breathing room and not have to bill so many hours and have more time to spend with him. But we couldn’t afford to take a pay cut like that. And at that point, I was able to put into words the why behind all the things I had been telling my husband we should do, like managing our money better, getting out of debt, saving, all of that was important, because if we didn’t have all this debt, if we had more in savings, if we had our finances in order, then we would have been able to do that part time program. So this was the point that I started approaching that conversation more productively, and the way that I now teach my clients, and what I told the attendee at the sneaking engagement. So my husband and I started talking about what we wanted in life, and just dreaming about how we wanted our lives to look. And I was telling him about how I want it to be able to go to our kids events once they got older and not have work hanging over my head and not have to worry about catching up on hours and all of that kind of stuff. And we both wanted to be able to do what we wanted to do for our family without having to worry about work or about money and all of that. And we both had these ideas of how we wanted to be as parents, but we had never thought about how to make them a reality. We never thought about what we needed to do to be able to be those kinds of parents that we saw ourselves being and I think it’s one of those things where you just think it’s going to happen, you think it’s just going to fall in place, but it doesn’t happen that way. And so having that conversation about what we want it for our family and the life that we envision for ourselves, and being able to travel more and make different decisions, all of that resonated with him much than what some article or expert said we should do. And so then he was on board with getting our finances together and getting out of debt, because he could see how that would lead to the life that we dreamed of. So the advice that I always give people now when they want to make a change with their finances, but their partner isn’t interested, is to get about what you envision life looking like, where you want to be in five to 10 years, what that looks like for your family, the kinds of things you’ll be able to do for most people, the kinds of dreams that they have for their lives, for their families, are a lot different than the live cap now, and getting out of debt and having more money in the bank only helps to get there. It opens up more options. Yes, there might be more than money involved in making those things a reality, but having your money in order makes it a lot easier. And so I always tell people to start with that, what’s the vision that you two have for your life and what needs to change with your finances to help you get there? And one of the things that I also tell my clients, because people are often using their money in ways that don’t align with their goals and dreams. So I always tell them, every dollar that we use for one thing is $1 that can’t be used for something else. So when you’re talking about a goal, like getting out of debt, like saving, like being able to work less, or work a job that pays less but is more fulfilling, or being able to retire early, or travel the world, or whatever the dream is for you and your partner, every dollar that you spend on something that’s not that dream is $1 that can’t be going toward getting you to your dream. And to say that every dollar has to go to the dream, but I want you to make sure you’re being intentional and keeping your dream in mind as you’re spending so that might mean being willing to put things off, or maybe do things on a smaller scale than you’d like in the short term to be able to get to that long term dream. So an example of that in my own life is our vacations. While we were working on getting out of debt, we still took at least one vacation, and usually two every single year, but we went to smaller, more local places that we could drive to. So I live in Atlanta, and we went to Nashville or we went to New Orleans. I don’t recommend driving to New Orleans. It was a really long drive, especially with young kids, but that was a trade off that we made down cost of our vacations. So we still went on vacation, but we did it on a smaller scale. That way we had more money available for our goals. And now, since we’ve paid everything off, we took the boys to LA and to Orlando to go to Disney, and we’ve been to Puerto Rico, and we’ve been to the Virgin Islands, and now the boys have their passports, so we’ll we plan to do some international trips too. But all that to say, when you want to get your partner on board with managing it, don’t go telling them Rho said we should do this, or this article said that, or I read this book, or whatever else. They don’t care. They don’t want to hear that. They don’t know me. They don’t know who wrote the book or the article or whatever else. But when you dream together about the life that you could have and the things that they want and that stuff, then we can back into the money conversation about how we can get there when we get our finances in order. So that is it for this week’s episode. I hope it’s helpful for you. Please share this episode with a friend who’s trying to get their partner on board with their finances, because sharing is one of the best ways to support this podcast. It helps us to grow, and I greatly appreciate it. As we close out, friend, I pray that you take the information you learn here, apply it in your life and open up to the realization that wealth is available to you. As you do that consistently, week after week, you’ll continue to take steps to regain control of your time, build wealth and live the life of freedom and choice you deserve. Talk to you later.