Financial Bliss

A couple’s guide to merging money styles and building a rich life together

By Bambi Holzer

Adapted from Financial Bliss: A Couple’s Guide to Merging Money Styles and Building a Rich Life Together. Copyright © 2007 Bambi Holzer. Published by AMACOM Books, a division of American Management Association, New York, NY. Used with permission. All rights reserved. http://amacombooks.org.

FINANCE IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

Our Individual Money Styles

Betty and Joe are a fairly typical couple when it comes to money discussions. They either don't talk about their finances at all or only do so when circumstances force them to. Invariably, they end up arguing or with hurt feelings. Buying a car, deciding how much home they can afford, how lavishly they can spend on a vacation, and how much and where to invest are all discussions that happen only when the occasion arises. Too often, their discussions degenerate into emotional outbursts and one of them either storms off or quietly acquiesces. Decisions never come easy. As we mentioned earlier, studies have shown that money issues, either directly or indirectly, are a leading cause of divorce. And greater riches don't immunize you from problems. In fact, they may make problems worse.

As we've seen, for many of us, money is as emotionally charged a subject as sex and just as mysterious and taboo as we grow up. Many times, we can't discuss it because we really can't put into words why we feel the way we do and where those feelings come from. Hopefully, chapter one gave you a foundation for understanding how and why you make some of the decisions you do. [Here], we will build upon that foundation to show how you present those financial predispositions to the world through your money personality.

As children, we get random signals from the way our parents respond to our requests for things and some of the conversations we overhear about the family situation, but rarely are any of these overt, consistent, or well thought out. We never seem to understand the true reason we can't have that toy we so desperately need or why mom is going back to work. We haphazardly learn about the social and emotional value of money, and we rarely learn how to handle it wisely. As therapist Jacqueline Schatz points out, "Parents often believe they are protecting their children by not discussing financial issues with them. Yet, when these children become adults themselves, they may be left with an immature understanding of money and no real tools for handling finances or for knowing how to communicate about finances with a partner." So how do we have this kind of financial communication with our children? What do we do in a world that is materially obsessed? This is a frequent problem for many of my clients who live in affluent communities. No matter what values they espouse at home, what they see on television, and how their classmates and friends conduct themselves, sends a contradictory message.

I do have one client who was born and raised in the Midwest and subsequently moved out to Los Angeles, where he lived in an affluent neighborhood devoid of ethnic or economic diversity. He didn't want his children raised in that kind of isolated environment, so he searched high and low for a home in a more ethnically and economically diverse neighborhood where they could attend public school. He wanted to keep his kids grounded rearing them with Iowa values and experiences.

A MONEY TEMPERAMENT QUESTIONNAIRE FOR COUPLES

Let's face it, you wouldn't be reading this if you and your partner were in perfect agreement on all things financial. That you don't have perfect congruency is to be expected. Jacqueline Schatz shared a story with me that nicely illustrates how different two couples can be:

I once worked with a newly married couple who both came from families in which the fathers were in charge of all financial matters. This couple assumed this was the way to do things and naturally repeated the pattern in their marriage. They came in to see me because the wife discovered that the husband had gotten far behind on the bills. She was confused as to why her husband was not handling the bills better, as her father had, and she was scared for their future. In exploring their personalities, stark differences were revealed. The husband was an artist. He was extremely creative, thought "outside the box," and was not interested in the day-to-day details of money and time frames. In contrast to her husband, the wife (a nurse), was realistic and detail oriented. She was able to juggle multiple tasks with accuracy; however, she was not as imaginative as her husband. I helped the couple to take on their financial decision making and bill-paying tasks as a joint venture, utilizing both their different temperaments and skill sets. Eventually, they learned to create a new family model, different from their families of origin, their own version of a successful union.

It's my hope that if you and your partner both take this assessment seriously, that you'll be able to recognize the important temperamental differences and use them to their best advantage.

We need to be honest with ourselves and our partners about our relationship with money what tools and information we use to make money decisions. Without such self-knowledge and sharing, we will always have money fights and self-inflicted money problems. At the very least, we won't deal with issues well and reduce the chances of reaching our goals.