Family and Finances: Episode 10, Part 1

- Well, welcome to the podcast, and it's always good to be with you. - Great to be here. - We always talk about stories of failure and success, and today is an area where many people fail. It's the topic of marital unity, financial unity, and really how to get together on managing your money. - Yes, it's a big deal. And for us, I mean, I was delighted to put my money with yours 'cause you had more than me. (laughing) - It wasn't much. - For the first time. We had a pretty good size checking account for awhile. - Yeah, our standards were pretty low. But fortunately, this is not an area where we struggled in a sense, I mean, we never lied to each other, and that's considered financial infidelity, and it's almost on par with sexual infidelity in terms of how much pain it causes, how often that it happens today. We get a lot of calls from people who are in crisis in their relationship because somebody was lying about the finances. - Right, I'll never forget the young couple that came to you for counseling. - Well, I won't forget it either because one of my friends who had performed their wedding called me and asked me to help this couple with their marriage. He sent them over to me and it was a disaster.

I don't know why I even performed the marriage because they were in such distress. This young couple, I'll just tell a little bit of the story you may feel in some of the detail, but they had only been married six months, and when they sat down in front of me, they couldn't talk to each other because she had discovered that, unbeknownst to her, he had purchased the engagement ring, the wedding ring, all the wedding expenses, all the honeymoon expenses, all the furniture they bought, everything they had done in the first six months of their marriage was on a credit card. - But you'd never know they had an issue. Remember, describe how he came into the meeting. - Well, they both were living like they were affluent. They both had new cars. I think he had a BMW, they had just bought a home in the best part of town. They had, what we found out is he had borrowed money from her father to buy the home, and then she didn't know he had a terrible credit score. She didn't know that he was actually cheating on his expense accounts at work just to pay some of their credit cards, and he got caught doing that, and he got fired. So he had no income, all this debt, and it was all news to her. And she no longer trusted him. She was livid.

- I can't blame her. - You would have been too. And so this pastor wants me to sort this all out. And unfortunately, I couldn't even get them to forgive each other and to start over rebuilding. It was, for her, it was just done. And he owed so much money. And one other interesting thing I remember, she had never talked about their credit score. She didn't know. He also had massive student loans. He got his master's degree with a student loan. That's where they met in grad school, and there was no indication from her point of view that he had any kind of issues with money. But he couldn't manage it at all. And unfortunately, that marriage didn't work. The best of my knowledge, they were never able to overcome that. Now let me flip it over for, and to give people hope. I had a call on radio one day of a lady who said to me, "I need help avoiding foreclosure." And I remember asking her, "Well, tell me a little bit about yourself." Because all she wanted to know was what number to call and who to talk to to save her house. And she said, "Well, I'm married, "but my husband has moved out. "I have a little four-year-old, "and I'm pregnant with twins."

I said, "Well, what will happen "if you get four clothes on?" She said, "I'll be homeless." And I said, "Well, what happened to your husband?" And it turns out we decided to talk offline. Because for me, it was no longer some radio show. This was a real life. And so it took the call offline and found out her husband had been deployed. And soldiers go through enormous financial stress. When he left, and he'd been gone about a year, their finances were in good shape. She told me they were in great shape. When he came back, they were in terrible shape. He had turned it over to her, and she had made a lot of mistakes. So suddenly, they were upside down, and he got angry about that. She got angry that he was angry, he moved out, and without his income, she couldn't pay any bills. And so what we were about to see was not only single mother with twins on the way. And I remember saying, "Can I talk to your husband about this?" And she said, "He won't talk to anybody. He's gone." And you know the rest of the story. I convinced her to get him to come to a conference call. And we just started talking about forgiveness and reconciliation and unity and love and respect. Long story short, after an hour of dead silence, which they had to listen to me talk the whole time because they wouldn't talk to each other or to me, I said, "Would you come back for another call?" And the second call when we called in the 800 number, she said, "Hello, Mr. Bentley." I said, "Hello. Is your husband going to call in today?" Because he was calling in from a different location. And he said, "No, sir. I'm not. I'm here at home. We've

been reconciled." And they put it back together. So what happens so often, Ann, is that couples start hiding decisions from each other. And they start not wanting the other one to know what they're doing. And why is that? It's deeper than just hiding the money. There's insecurity, there's fear, there's embarrassment, greed. Don't you think sometimes they've just never been taught how to get on the same page? And as one of our staff members said, as young couples married later in life, they're used to doing it on their own. And so they never have this sort of melding. And I think the data shows recently that millennials are more likely to, or there's a higher percentage of millennials who are keeping their bank accounts separate, which we believe creates an opportunity for this kind of division and a problem to a rise. Money, money, mentality. Yeah. So let's go through some things to help couples get unified. We've told them sort of the bad side of it. To me, the upside of it is phenomenal when you get on the same page and when you really do get unified. So we believe in having unified checking accounts, all of our accounts. So why don't you go through sort of how we do that? Well, you have your money deposited into a checking account. And then I put some of it in savings and pay bills. And we have one credit card. We have savings account. We have multiple accounts. But we both have access to them. Yeah. They're joint. Yeah. So we can look at them at any time. We both know all the transactions. And we talk about those transactions. You know exactly if I've gone off and made a purchase without talking to you about it, because you see it. Right. And what we realize is instead of me being on the defensive and not wanting to come home and I have to explain myself, we just talk about it in advance. And so one of the ways that we've learned to get unified is to our threshold. What do you think it is? I think it's around $200, $2, $250. If we're going to spend some money for you, it's even lower. Yeah. I, you know, if I need a new pair of tennis shoes, I'll ask you if I can get some. Yeah. And, or if I notice you need some, I'm on the lookout for some that are on sale. And so, but that's a constant dialogue. And we agree on how we're going to spend the money. And even invest. Well, it goes all the way through. Yes. We agree on our budget. We agree when we're going to spend money over $200 or we talk about it. Right. And we don't hide that from each other. But I agree with you and you, people start to hide it. Usually when there's a problem. What I've seen in

men is they get under financial stress and they don't want their wife to know and feel that stress. So they start to do things that they hope will recover. And I've actually seen them gamble on the side simply to try to provide for their family. Well, and then on the other side, I've seen women or I've known women who will open a count at stores so they can shop. And they don't want to tell their husband what they're buying. I've seen that as well. Now, we've never done that with each other. And I think part of it comes down to coming to appreciate what the other one brings in terms of helping to make the finances better. You are so good with being frugal, which as everybody knows, I don't like that. You're good at it. And so I let you be frugal and it helps me be frugal. I would never to me to be frugal. But I've learned you do it sort of naturally and it saves me time and it saves us money. So we're unified in that I like that you have a foot on the brake. I always want to put a foot on the gas. But by talking about it, we become unified because we need both of those.