4 Fights Couples Have About Money and How to Get Out of Them

Is there a time of year more perfectly formulated for a blowout fight with your significant other than right now? The holidays bring higher levels of financial stress, travel, family obligations, wine … If you haven’t yet experienced the bracing, icy quiet of a long silent treatment or the rush of an excessively cutting retort, I envy you. (I also don’t entirely believe you.)

For the rest of us, there’s a new book that can help: Ramit Sethi’s Money for Couples, which offers relationship and financial advice for people who love each other and pay bills together, for better or for worse. Sethi also authored the 15-year-old best-seller I Will Teach You to Be Rich, which he wrote before he got together with his now-wife, Cassandra. Their marriage — and occasional financial conflict — has informed his work, and over the past several years, he has focused on helping other couples get on the same page with their money.

The crux of many couples’ problems, Sethi believes, is that they forget that they’re a team — in money as well as everything else. As they entrench themselves in certain patterns, they focus more on their differences and who is “right” rather than their commonalities and shared goals. Here, we talked about the four most common fights that couples have about money, and how to overcome them.

You both avoid talking about money, but feel frustrated that there’s no “plan.”

It’s normal — even healthy — to avoid topics that make us stressed out and uncomfortable. However, this can lead couples, including perfectly happy ones, to avoid talking about money for literally decades. “It’s actually very easy not to talk about money with your partner for 40 years,” says Sethi. “As long as you have a roof over your head, your cell phone works, and you can turn on the TV, most of us will kick the can down the road.”

To fix this, at least one person has to want to shift the dynamic. “It might be that you’re just sick and tired of feeling bad about your finances at the end of the month, or it might be something as serious as the lights get turned off,” says Sethi. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that, but either way, here’s how he recommends broaching the topic: Find a quiet moment with your partner and say, “Hey, I’d love to talk to you about something that’s been on my mind. I realize that when I think about money in our relationship, I don’t really communicate with you about it. We pay the bills, but I don’t feel like I know where we’re going, and I don’t feel like we’re really connected about it. I would love to change that. Would you be open to talking about money more?”

Notice a few crucial elements in this statement. “You want to start by sharing a vulnerability, something you haven’t done perfectly. We all have one,” says Sethi. “Second, talk about where you would like to go. It’s about connecting to your partner. And third, don’t bring up a single number, or words like budget or debt. It’s about coming together. The question is, would you be willing to talk about it?” If you pose it respectfully and kindly, they’ll probably say “yes.” “Give them a big hug and say, ‘Fantastic. How about we talk about it next Tuesday or Wednesday? What works for you?’ That’s it.”

When the appointed time comes around, keep your tone positive even if your numbers aren’t. Most of us associate talking about money with conflict and anxiety; your goal is to upend that expectation and make the conversation encouraging. “Start with a compliment, and take your time on it,” says Sethi. “It’s really important to build the practice of connecting money with joy.”

Next, review your key numbers. After you calculate your take-home income, Sethi believes that there are four critical sums that you need to go over each month. These are: (1) regular costs and bills like housing, transportation, medical needs, cell phone, groceries, pet food, debt repayments, and other essentials; (2) whatever money you put toward savings (if it’s zero, which it is for most people, put that down); (3) investments, including contributions to your 401(k) or other retirement funds; and (4) fun spending like dinners out, nonessential clothing, subscriptions, travel, and hobbies.

For your first meeting, these amounts don’t have to be exact. Estimate if you have to, and don’t get derailed by details. Once you’ve got them all down, stop. Congratulate yourselves. Even if the numbers aren’t what you want them to be, you’ve communicated them to each other. That is, especially for avoidant couples, an enormous positive step. And for your first meeting, that’s all you need to do. Set up a date for your next meeting, where you’ll go over these four figures again and talk about which direction you want to take them. But now, go do something fun. You’ve earned it.

One person hoards money and worries about it, while the other spends it and doesn’t see what the big deal is. The former feels like they have to monitor the latter, and the latter feels stifled by the former.

Sethi calls this “the chaser-avoider dynamic,” and it’s incredibly frustrating for both parties. “Each time they talk about money, the avoider avoids and the chaser chases, and the only way to fix this is to totally recalibrate the relationship,” he says. “The chaser’s natural tendency is to just chase harder, and they cannot chase the avoider into submission. It’s not going to work.”

Inevitably, it’s the chaser who initiates a change because the avoider would rather not do anything. But the chaser has to take a softer approach. “You go to your partner and say, ‘There’s something I want to talk about. When we talk about money, it feels like I’m chasing and you’re avoiding. I’m not blaming you; I know that I have played a role in this. And I really want to change our relationship with money. I want us to feel confident with money, and I want us to feel like a team. Right now, I feel lonely. Can we find a time to talk about this more, together?”

The avoider may resist and deploy techniques they’ve used in the past. They might say things like, “You’re better at money than I am, so just leave me out of it,” or, “I’m so bad at dealing with this stuff, I just can’t.” This is where you double-down on the desire to work together, adds Sethi. “You can say, ‘I want to know that if something happens to me, that you will be okay. And it’s more fun to do it together. I don’t want to do it all by myself.’”

When the avoider relents and you choose a time to meet, you can follow the same agenda as the meeting from scenario one, above. But be conscious of keeping the chaser-avoider dynamic at bay, says Sethi. “Often, the chaser gets frustrated and ends up taking over, and the avoider has no consequences,” he explains. “Instead, come to the meeting and say, ‘Here are 13 things that I currently do with our finances. Could you take over two of them?’” It could be keeping track of grocery and food expenses for the month; keep it simple, and be prepared for the reality that the avoider might drop the ball. “The important part is that they show an interest in participating. Even if they get the numbers wrong, at least they are trying, and we can work with that,” says Sethi.

Meanwhile, remember to give them the benefit of the doubt. “This is your partner, somebody you love. We have to assume positive intent and give them room to grow,” says Sethi. “That means talk about it, share what you need, give them the opportunity to own a couple of numbers and even to run next month’s meeting. If the day comes and goes, that might be when you consider getting the help of a third party, like a couples counselor.”

A note on couples therapy: Sethi is all for it. “You’d benefit from a couple’s therapist before you think you need one,” he says. He and his own wife saw one before they got married. “The therapist asked us some questions that got us to realize we were not connecting over money the way that we needed to,” he says. “One of the best things you could do is to be proactive about it. You could say, ‘Hey, we’re just starting this process of talking more about money and it’s going well, but I’d like for us to learn some extra tools.’”

You stress about each other’s spending and argue over your individual purchases, like $50 at Target or $40 on takeout.

When couples nitpick each other’s expenses — how much one partner spends on pedicures, how much the other spends at Chipotle — it gets in the way of their ability to see the bigger picture. The way to quit looking over each other’s shoulders is to create separate accounts for your respective “fun” spending, and one shared account for everything else.

“Each person should have their own account that the other does not have access to, and in that account you have money that is yours to use, no questions asked,” says Sethi. “You want to use it for energy drinks, nails, massage, a boys’ trip? It’s up to you, but your partner has nothing to say about it because they have their own money, too.” This doesn’t mean you’re on totally separate pages, though. Most of your big expenses — housing, groceries, health care, etc — will come out of a shared account that you go over together during your monthly meeting. That way, you’re both still accountable for the larger picture, but you each have your own autonomy, too.

There’s a big disparity between your incomes, and there’s an imbalanced power dynamic as a result.

This one is particularly hard because it’s embedded in our social fabric. “In America, we believe what is quantifiable is better. So if one person in the relationship makes more money than the other, we often believe — even subconsciously — that they are making a bigger contribution than the other person, simply because the contributions that the the lower-earner makes are less quantifiable,” says Sethi. “But I reject that the person who makes more money has more power. That’s not the way I want to be in a relationship, and that’s not the way I want any of us to feel.” The truth is that there are lots of ways to contribute to a relationship, and money is only one of them.

To solve conflicts around imbalanced incomes, Sethi recommends pooling all your money together. “If you’re married, research shows that combining your money has positive effects on the health and longevity of a relationship,” he explains. “So even if one person makes three times more than the other, it all goes into the same pot.”

From that shared pot, you pay your family expenses together. And each of you gets your own, no-questions-asked money too — even if one partner is not earning anything. “It’s totally okay to have a big disparity in incomes, but you want to make sure that for the most part, you are aligning your incomes to be together,” he says.

How to bring this up? Sethi recommends saying something like, “I don’t want us to feel uncomfortable because I earn more, or you earn more. I want to figure out how to operate as a team so we both feel good about our money, and have a shared vision.”

Finally, many couples will disagree about certain priorities, and that’s okay. “My wife and I have different things that we want to spend our money on. You can still coexist and have a very healthy relationship, as long as you agree on most of the key big things,” says Sethi.

Many people think of “trust” in their partner in terms of telling the truth; their partner doesn’t cheat on them, or lie to them. But Sethi points out that another element of trust is knowing that if something happens, your partner would react in a way that you can predict, and that would support you and your family. “In any given month, there are a thousand opportunities to build trust around money in your relationship. The question is, did we make similar — not identical, but similar — decisions? Are we operating under the same idea of what we want?” If so, you’re on the right track.

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