Mixing money and relationships

Posted by Muhammad Siraj on April 4th, 2019

When a couple is flush with money, it’s easy to overlook the little differences in attitude towards the finances and that little bit of credit card debt. But the recession has changed all that. With salary cuts, redundancies and a credit squeeze, for the first time many couples are forced to confront their different attitudes to money at the same time as trying to cope without having much of it.

For example, one person might be a spender and the other a saver, or one partner might be very financial savvy while the other one knows nothing about money at all.  Either way, each partner is on opposite ends of the money spectrum and often it leads only one way; debt.

Interestingly, the actual debt is not the reason why many couples have problems or split up. Most of the time, the stress of having to deal with creditors and payments, especially when money is tight, is a huge contributing factor. Many people do what they can to keep on top of the situation, which might involve drastically cutting back on spending, taking a second job or selling off possessions to keep up with payments, but eventually there comes a point after a few years when one or both partners begin to feel worn out or ground down. This becomes particularly acute if one partner doesn’t appear to be either pulling their weight or are making the situation worse by refusing to accept the gravity of it and continuing with behaviours that contributed to the creation of the debt in the first place.

At the heart of these differences is a lack of understanding about what money means to different people; freedom, security, fun, a terrible responsibility, a corrupting influence, power and status, or respect. People’s feelings about money stem directly from what they saw during childhood or from experiences of previous relationships. The problems come when both people in a relationship have completely different ideas about money and have no appreciation that the other partner’s ideas about money are as valid as theirs.

Corinne Sweet, author of Stop Fighting About Money, has several suggestions to help couples that seem to be operating on a different wavelength about their finances.

• Swap notes on how you were taught to handle money by your parents and previous partners.
• While having a joint bank account for housekeeping money is a good idea, it’s important to have some discretionary spending money that both partners can spend as they please
• Each person’s contribution should be valued, whether that’s financial or not
• If you suddenly find you are at each other’s throats about money, look at whether the power balance in your relationship has changed recently. Financial roles change through having children, redundancy and sickness and this can turn comfortable behaviour patterns on their head.
• If you find that debt is grinding you down, get information about how to get out of it as quickly as possible. Be ready to have a compete rethink about how you are approaching being debt-free

The last point is a very salient one. Just as both partners will have their own ideas about money, so too will they have very firm ideas about how to become debt-free. One partner might be adamant that every single penny of the debt must be paid off while the other believes they should be offering less to the creditors in full and final payments to reduce the debt and help get it paid off quicker. Or perhaps one partner might want to embark on a debt management plan for a long time as a kind of punishment, while the other partner wants to make life a little easier and explore the option of a how trust deed works, which could be more affordable, complete in only a few months and see a proportion of the debt written off.

When both people in a relationship understand their own financial personalities as well as their partner’s, they can learn how to diffuse conflicts about money and create a workable financial strategy that supports their life.