Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:03 You wanna get comfy talking about money with your partner. In today's episode, we provide some simple ways for you to start having those hard conversations. Plus Kim and I give our 2 cents on why money's so hard to talk about in the first place.
Speaker 2 00:00:21 Hey, we're Kim and Rod and we're here to show couples how to get the best out of their relationship so they can start living their dream life together.
Speaker 1 00:00:28 We're a West Aussie couple who are living the life of our dreams. We don't entertain the word should we think about the future as a field of possibilities, and we let joy be our compass. We've
Speaker 2 00:00:36 Taken the simple idea of working as a team and applied it to our marriage and it's been a game changer, allowing us to work out what truly lights us up in life and to go after it together.
Speaker 1 00:00:45 From living in snowy Japan to starting our own house ripping business, we've achieved some big dreams and most importantly, we feel fulfilled and are having the most fun we've ever had. Pick
Speaker 2 00:00:54 Conversations from inspiring couples, thoughts from relationship experts and tales from our own lives. As we help you to gain the wisdom and skills you'll need to turn your relationship into a real team.
Speaker 1 00:01:03 These are relationship conversations for real people, by real people. So sit back, get comfort from whatever tickles you pickle, and enjoy living the team life.
Speaker 1 00:01:20 So today we're talking about money and relationship Australia Research has told us that financial stress or financial issues is the number one cause of relationship breakdowns in Australia. While the recent research coming out of the University of New South Wales says that almost one and two adults is currently experiencing financial stress. And we know from our experience one of the most stressful topics that we can talk about or that we used to find the most stressful is talking about money. So today what we're going to try and do is provide ways to help you and your partner come together at the table to talk about money.
Speaker 2 00:02:03 Yeah, you're right. We are definitely, um, we've experienced the financial issues in the past. We've experienced a miscommunication around this stuff, a lot of stress around this stuff. And we know that it is a big issue for other couples. The research tells us that other couples tell us that, and we just thought it would be really helpful to have a chat today around some of the reasons so that people can start to understand why we, we, we as couples often have so many troubles talking about money, some of the reasons behind it, and also a really soft entry into how you can start having conversations around money. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:02:44 This is really a podcast on ways that we can help make conversations about money accessible to everyone. And people find it hard to talk about money themselves, let alone talking about money with their partners. Cuz cuz inevitably when you're talking about money, you are talking about the future and those conversations about the future can also be really, really scary to have.
Speaker 2 00:03:11 That's interesting. That's not, not something I had thought about. I hadn't thought about it like that. I just think for me, there's, well, let's kick onto it and then we can, we should go into what some of the, that
Speaker 1 00:03:23 That highlights the difference that two people can come into a conversation. When I think about the money, I think about the future
Speaker 2 00:03:31 And I think that's part of our personalities, right? Like, I love thinking about the future that, that that just lights me up. Whereas you have never loved thinking around the future.
Speaker 1 00:03:42 I'm not, I didn't used
Speaker 2 00:03:43 To. That's really wrong. You didn't used to love thinking about the future. I think you're more comfortable these days
Speaker 1 00:03:50 Very ver very comfortable thinking about the future these days. Very comfortable about talking about money, but still with always a little bit of an underlying, an underlying sort of, uh, stress a around it. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> that maybe, maybe I'm not good enough. Maybe, um, I'm gonna fail at this and maybe, um, about something about tying up my sense of self-worth in it as well. I think that's a great,
Speaker 2 00:04:16 I think, I think I'm so glad you just said those things because people listening might think, well, if he's still feeling like that these guys haven't gotten very far. And I absolutely disagree. If you are thinking that for me, being aware of what conversations bring up for us, what topics bring up for us is how we continue to move forward and these issues around money. And I'm gonna unpack what some of the issues and some of the reasons are in a second that people have such trouble talking about money are really deep-seated. And so even when we make progress, and you and I have been working on money conversations for a long time, even when we make a lot of progress, there's going to be for a lot of people, residual triggers in there, residual challenges in there. And that's what you are saying. Even though you are now comfortable talking about money, you still have these residual challenges. That doesn't mean you haven't made a lot of progress.
Speaker 1 00:05:11 No, I I actually do feel very comfortable talking about money with you now and we do it a lot. Yeah. Uh, because we talk about the future a lot and we also talk about the business. We run together a lot. But it did take a while to get there and I think, you know, some of the things we did back maybe eight to 10 years ago to really figure out how we could come together and talk about money we're gonna discuss today, and I think we'll also, as you said, unpack some of the issues that might have made it hard for us to come together and talk about money first up. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:05:47 So I'll, I'll dig into that first because I think, uh, some of the listeners might, might hear themselves in this, in, in some of these things showing up. And one of the big things we know about the way we interact and engage with money as an adult and within our relationship, what we know is that that's highly and often influenced by our upbringing. So the way our family actually handled money, it's, it's one of those legacy items that really does get passed down generationally in a lot of situations and some of the ways that families can handle money that can be difficult and can leave people with challenges around managing money or having conversations around money. Some of those things look like this. If you experience financial hardship as a child, you may have feelings that money is scarce and hard to come by and must be very carefully guarded.
Speaker 2 00:06:45 If you experience parents who equated money with success, you may have been raised in a household that was focused on material things and status. And you may experience a lot of pressure in those areas feeling like your worth comes more from the things that you can provide, the things that are more materially based. Some families have a concept that money is evil and people will have said things like, it's the root of all evil, which can lead to shame around money. Some families talk about money as being the source of power, which means that there's more respect given to people with money and less respect given to those with less money. Some kids are raised in families where money equals instant gratification. When you get money, you spend it because what you want is an instant feedback. There's no conversation around saving, there's no conversation around prioritizing longer term goals.
Speaker 2 00:07:46 It's get the money, get the instant gratification. Some kids grow up in families where debt is considered a fine part of life. Parents normalize having significant debt, continuously accumulating debt, and rather than teaching their kids that debt is also a financial burden. Children can often learn that debt is just a part of life and a necessary solution to getting through life. Some kids grow up in families where there's a lot of financial secrecy. Parents may encourage not talking about money. They may in fact have a policy in the household that we don't talk about money. And that can cause a lot of shame and embarrassment in adults when money conversations, for example, are raised by a partner. A lot of people who have been raised in these secrecy environments find them very uncomfortable because they've had it drilled into them that this is not something that should be discussed.
Speaker 2 00:08:38 And some kids grow up in households where there's a lack of budgeting and planning and, and parents haven't actually passed onto kids that money requires foresight. It requires a lot of effort and planning around how you're going to save the money, how you're going to use the money, what is financial literacy, what does that look like to be literate, to learn about how to manage your money. So there's some of the things that I think are very common that people experience in childhood in, in their younger years, in their, their immediate family when their children that will often last with them into adulthood because they don't know any different. And so they can bring them into the relationship, these beliefs around money, these beliefs around how to talk about money, how to engage money.
Speaker 1 00:09:26 Yeah. So while Kim and I come from fairly similar backgrounds, our story of origin around money is very, very different mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And you can see how whenever two people come together, more likely than not, their values around money will be different. And that's not to say that one is superior to the other. In fact, that's, that should play no part in it. It's really about coming together and agreeing this is, this is how we should see finances going forward. But those conversations are so hard to have that they're often not being had. And so what happens is people come in with these different values, these different ideas, these different origin stories, and they constantly butt heads and they constantly,
Speaker 2 00:10:19 100% I think you have hit the nail on the head. Really what this comes down to is us having different, being raised with different values around money, and it's just as simple as not having the resources to know how to start to talk around, talk about what the team, what your relationships values are now going to be around money. And that requires more than just having that conversation around how you wanna move forward. Because to move forward, you first have to know where you both are. And we'll get into that a little bit more in a minute, but I completely agree with you. What we are really summarizing about how we're raised around money and how that impacts us later is that it's as simple as this. We have, in most cases, people in relationships will have different values around money and they need to talk about that.
Speaker 2 00:11:03 And the other thing that, there's a couple of other things that can really impact how money shows up in relationships and why people have, um, more challenges around the dealing with money in their relationship. One of the big ones that, um, that I think is, is a really, uh, important one is a fear of judgment from the partner. So, so sometimes we have one partner who knows more about money. Sometimes we have one who knows less about money, and there can be a fear of, of the sense that that person is a power imbalance, I think is is what you've mentioned roj before, that, that that person is, is going to judge you for not having the skillset.
Speaker 1 00:11:46 Yeah. So if someone comes in with perhaps more financial literacy than another person, that can be that real power imbalance and that can progress through other stages in life. You know, at school, you know, they don't teach budgeting, which Kim and I, I think find, find amazing. I know I would've really appreciated, uh, a class that went all the way through to year 12 that said, this is how you budget. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you know, um, they had accounting, but it, it's different. Uh, Kim and I met during our accounting degrees. I was a terrible accountant. <laugh>.
Speaker 2 00:12:18 No, I learned to budget because my dad made me do a budget <laugh>. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:12:23 So, so, and, and that, that's how I, I never learned about budgeting when I was young. Um, you know, I I, you know, I still worked when I went to uni. Um, I knew I started, that's when I started learning, oh, I have to actually pay for stuff, um, and, and earn money to pay for it. But budgeting, budgeting still wasn't part of my, my repertoire, my language. And as a result, I could actually start to feel quite incompetent and intimidated by Kim, who was very financially literate and also very confident in budgeting because she'd been doing budgeting since she was w was a kid. And not only that is, um, Kim's very good at mental maths in her head. And while I, you know, put me in front of an Excel spreadsheet, I'm a wiz. Uh, if I'm put on the spot in terms of, um, numbers and have to do mental maths, I actually find it quite challenging. And then I get stressed and then I find it even more challenging and then I shut down. And, you know, that's something today I'm very aware of and I put, um, we put, uh, things in place to, to assist me with that. Uh, but definitely you can see how that power imbalance between two people with two different origin stories, with two different levels of financial literacy could come together and one person might take a bat step or the other person might be a bit more aggressive towards how, how, how the conversation starts.
Speaker 2 00:13:52 I think when I reflect on that time, I, you know, not my finest time, that's for sure. Because I, I, I have to be fair, right? We're all learning. And whilst you were learning about financial literacy, I was learning that we all view the world differently. And I did not accept in those early years at all that you could view the world any other way than the way I had been raised. So for example, with, with money, I just could not understand how you didn't value it the same way I did. I couldn't understand why you didn't do budgets. It just didn't make sense to me. And I, I absolutely would've made you feel uncomfortable about having financial conversations, which perpetuated the situation because for me, you not wanting to have the conversation, I didn't understand why I thought you, because you was, because I honestly believed you didn't care, um, made me even more frustrated with the process. And so you shut down even further and it just continued on in that cycle.
Speaker 1 00:14:59 I think it's important also to note that at that time I wasn't taking a lot of accountability for my life and the future. I, I was definitely someone who just thought you could cruise through life. Things would just happen. Um, you know, I, I lived a, a you know, I worked hard at uni. I had a part-time job. And then when I went out and worked in the workforce, I always worked hard, but I just made assumptions about how life would go, that if I had a good career and a good job, I'd just have enough money. And we all know that's just not the case. So there had to be some accountability. But definitely I did find it hard. I found it very hard to come to the table with you because there was such a power imbalance. And I, I I, it wasn't malicious 2020 hindsight it wasn't, but at the time I just thought I was being bullied.
Speaker 1 00:15:46 And at the time you just thought, he doesn't want to talk about this because he doesn't maybe see, even see a future with me. So again, you can see how, you know, two people who love each other very, very much, who wanted a future together just because of how they were raised on money and their current financial literacy and even the stages of life they were at in terms of their development and, and growth in their careers and their own personal development can really, uh, cause conflict. Mm-hmm. And, and lead to this, uh, lead to a relationship breakdown, which is of course what we're always trying to avoid here.
Speaker 2 00:16:24 Yeah, absolutely. Uh, and just, you know, beyond that fear of judgment that we've talked about, obviously that existed in our relationship. Definitely from my side, fear, from your side judgment from my side, uh, the other thing that sort of comes out in that is, is whether you have the adequate communication skills to be even able to say, you know, that's not what's happening here. And, and some people don't feel like they have those adequate skills, the ability to say, hang on, let me raise my hand and say, and we didn't definitely when we were younger, otherwise we would've asked each other some questions and figured out what was going on. But we weren't able to do that. We weren't able to add adequately communicate at a deeper level. And so as a result, we left the misunderstanding sitting there on the surface.
Speaker 1 00:17:12 Well, they, they rarely got resolved. And you know, again, looking back at it, I've sit there and go, wow. Like we, we, we've done pretty well to make it this far because we would have these conversations about money, you know, so we would at least get to the table. But very rarely were they resolved, or if they were resolved, it was maybe one of us acquiescing to the other. Either me going, fine, whatever, just that number's fine, let's just do that. Or you going, you're not, you're not paying attention, you're not doing this. We'll talk about this later and, and time going on. And it's
Speaker 2 00:17:44 Not really resolved though
Speaker 1 00:17:45 <laugh>, it's not really resolved. It just finished <laugh>. Um, and, and you can see from that where I think a lot of this comes from, and communication is maybe a telltale sign of the fact that we, a lot of couples still approach the conversation about money as, as adversarial as my spend versus your spend. Mm.
Speaker 2 00:18:05 And I think we've talked about, oh, we talked about this adversarial notion in a different context in terms of what do I in time, time also pops up in the adversarial space. But, um, it does pop up with money certainly because if you haven't gotten clear with one another on what your agreed relationship values are and your agreed relationship expenses are, there is, there is unsaid stuff. And so we do see money as, as a right and as something that it gives us a freedom. And so if we're not clear on where we want that freedom to be together, we can feel deprived of that freedom when the partner comes in and says, maybe that's not the right space to be spending it in, or whatever it might be.
Speaker 1 00:18:52 You can see how you get there as well. So at the start of your relationship or even leading up to when you're getting married, you know, you are, you are double income though kids, right? You know, men much of the time and your, I guess discretionary income is still fairly high. And then what happens is you get married and you have children, you maybe take on a mortgage and you find that you are actually, as we talked about in our, um, how kids can change your relationship. Part two podcast is that you actually start to financially stagnate and go backwards generally throughout those years. And when you do that, but your cost of living is rising, you have to actually start cutting back on things. And what happens is, if you are both coming at this from an adversarial, what I spend versus what you spend point of view, you could see as you said, that your, you feel that someone else, when they start to limit your, someone's limiting your spending as opposed to limiting our spending.
Speaker 1 00:19:51 Yes. And as a result, they're taking away your freedom. Mm-hmm. You know, when I was young and I, when, when I grow up, I want to be able to do whatever I want. I don't want just the pocket money from mom and dad. And now we're adults. We're saying, what happened? <laugh>, where's all, where's all this freedom that I thought I had when I'm an adult? Well actually no, you have responsibilities as an adult. And I think that is a, it is a very hard thing and I think it's a very hard thing for a lot of men. Uh, I know I, I struggled with it for a while where it's about, okay, for me, I like to go and smoke cigars and drink whiskey and expensive whiskey with the boys. Now Kim obviously doesn't value that. So in the past she would've sat there and gone, we're tight for money. Why are you going and wasting money on that while now Kim knows that that's actually just a vehicle for me to spend time with my friends, which I need for my own mental health.
Speaker 2 00:20:49 Yeah, absolutely. And we've got very clear on, I mean this is a layer cake, right? You gotta get clear on your values first. You gotta get clear on your goals and and your dreams and all the rest of it. And then right down to your budgeting, you gotta get clear on where you wanna put the money aligned with what your plan is, right? Because a budget after all, as my dad loves to say, is just a quantification of a plan. <laugh>. Exactly.
Speaker 1 00:21:13 But we're not gonna get down into the minutia of that today. Today's really about just how the two of you can come sit down at the table or anywhere and talk about money. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:21:25 So I think the first thing, overarching wise, when we're going to have these sorts of conversations and we're trying to make a change in our relationship, there's five things we really need to think about. Just, just holding in mind that you need to make change in a relationship. The first thing is time. You've gotta actually put dedicated time into it. The second is empathy. You need to have compassion and empathy for your partner. They're going to come at it differently. They're going to view it differently. They're going to experience it differently. It might be very difficult for them. Bring the empathy to the table. You love this person, you want them to feel supported. You do not want them to feel judged. And the next one's support exactly what I just said. You want them to feel like you've got their back. Remember we're a team in this.
Speaker 2 00:22:08 The fourth one is education. You're going to have to upskill in areas that you don't know enough about. That's a normal part of life. And anybody who thinks education ends at high school or at university is just categorically limiting themselves. You are limiting yourself in life. We have to upskill all the time if we wanna get better and grow in life. And the fifth element we are going to have to have is practice. Everything takes practice, practice to build new habits, practice to develop new skills, practice to get better at something. Get so good at something that you can go and do something even harder. That's part of life. So whenever we're making a change in our behavior and our approach to something and especially something as big as money, we need to think about those five things first and just hold them in mind.
Speaker 2 00:22:54 And with that in mind, we'll talk a little bit more detailed here about how you can actually start talking about money with your partner. Now, bearing in mind, as Rod said, we're not gonna get into the nitty gritty today of budgeting and all that sort of stuff because that's next level. And if you jump in with that stuff, you've missed all the stuff that builds the foundation. You haven't talked about your values, you haven't gotten clear on where your partner's head's at. And so you might have a budget in place. Well done. Your same old problems are gonna show up over and over again because you haven't done the foundation work. So today is just about building the foundation. And we have two intentions for building the foundation today. The first thing you wanna do is build trust with your partner around talking about money.
Speaker 2 00:23:43 This is critical, your partner and you need to feel safe to have conversations about money. I cannot overstress this point. If they do not feel safe, you will never have the open conversations you need to have and you will never move forward as far as you can. And as far as your potential will let you if you haven't created a safe space. The second thing we wanna do today is start to become forward focused as a team. We want to start thinking about the fact that money is around our future planning. We're talking about the future here. We that we're not going back, we're not gonna harp on about what happened, what didn't happen, what worked, what didn't work, who did what said what spent, what we are becoming forward focused.
Speaker 1 00:24:30 So we've got four ways that we can build trust and go into these conversations with the growth mindset. So step number one, building trust around money conversations. And I think some of the ways we can do this, I'd reckon the number one thing is being patient with each other. Understanding that your partner, even if they are more financially literate than you, has a different way of looking at money than you do. And just because they have a different way of looking at it doesn't mean they're not on your team and doesn't mean their way is wrong. So what we have to do is be patient. And once we're patient, that will actually help us start to have empathy for them. Cuz what we find is when we are patient, we actually start to listen and open up more.
Speaker 2 00:25:17 I think that's the place you wanna come from. Absolutely. And and some gentle starter conversations you can have with patients being, being held in mind and empathy being held in mind are asking them what their experience was like with money when they were growing up. Simple as that. Just asking the question without any judgment, whatever comes out, just remember you're on the same team, you're getting curious about your partner, you're wanting to know more because the more you know, the more you guys can move together aligned in the future. So start talking to them about what it was like for them growing up. Ask them how does it make them feel When you guys talk about money, what is that experience like for them? Build that empathy that Roger's talking about, that compassion, that connectedness with your partner. This is all fostering the trust. Be curious in the conversation, the aim is to show your partner that they are safe to talk about money. You are open-minded to how they view money and that this, there's no judgment here.
Speaker 1 00:26:22 That's great because often Kim and I will talk about empathy and it's like, well, you know, some people might go, how do, how? How do I become empathetic? And really, I always look at empathy as putting yourself in the other person's shoes. And a great way to do that is ask searching questions, deep dive questions like what did the conversations around money look like in your household while we're young, what are your concerns and fears now about money? Is there anything that I do when I talk about money that makes you worried or scared or upset to you?
Speaker 2 00:26:53 And also I think the one really cultivating empathy in that is, you know, how are you experience this convers experiencing this conversation right now? Yeah, what's coming up for you? Are you okay? Yeah. Do you need anything right now? Yeah, that's really fostering empathy for the person. Do you need anything from me? Can I get you water? Is there a better place we could sit for this for you? You know, anything like that, that's really building that connection and trust and making a money conversation, a safe conversation. So that's step one. We suggest. Step two, talk about what matters to you in life. Again, we are just working here on building trust and becoming forward focused. So let's talk about what matters to us in life. We wanna talk with our partner about what is meaningful to us in life. What, what is joyful? What lights you up? You need to start having these conversations around what is purposeful to you in life? What really matters to you two in life?
Speaker 1 00:27:50 Your relationship, your team is your own business. And I don't mean that from a cold perspective, I mean that from, we have limited resources, scarce resources, and one of those being money. But with the scarce resources you do have, you get to decide the direction of where you want to go in life and how you see the world. And through these conversations about how you see the world and what matters to you most in life, you start to actually work out what you value. And of course when we equate money to things, we are putting a value on it. So what you are doing is actually going, well actually here are the things that I prioritize in my life. So I'm putting value to it. And and what that means is that they're, you are correlating. Okay, well that means that's the stuff we should then be spending our time and money on. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:28:44 Absolutely. Getting clear on your values is super important. The next one, step three that we would suggest again just at these very early phases is to talk about your dreams. So discuss with your partner what are some of the dreams you hold for life And like what Roger's saying about putting a, putting your values out there because eventually you're going to ascribe money a resource to those values. You're going to really ascribe the resource actually to the dreams. So the dreams are going to be driven by the values. You're gonna figure out who you are and what matters to you. Then you're gonna be able to start to talk about your dreams. What do you want out of life? You know, one dream that we have is to own a, a hobby farm. Not to own a hobby farm. It's to spend our weekends out in the countryside.
Speaker 2 00:29:33 We never really wanted to live in the city. We never really wanted to raise our daughter in the city. Obviously circumstances have changed and we need to be here for her supports and her therapies and her schooling. But we have this dream where we will be able to go out on the weekends and live the country life that we, that we really, really, really wanted to have. And knowing we have that dream, you, you can then work out how much is going to be attributed to that dream. What's that dream gonna cost you in a game? We're not getting into the detail of money today, but that is the point of having the dream. Once you know what your dream is, then you know where you wanna be putting your money towards.
Speaker 1 00:30:11 Yeah. And that's a conversation that you'll start to have and that will start to bring you closer about where you want to go in life. Cuz your dreams are really where you want to go in your life and your values or what matters most to his life is almost, uh, they're boundaries, they're are bumpers on how you get there.
Speaker 2 00:30:29 Yeah. Values are like guidelines in life. Exactly. They, they tell us if we're heading in the right direction. So we might have a dream, for example. And when we look at the dream and we think about our values isn't moving us towards who we've said we wanna be, which is our values, or is that dream actually headed in a different direction? So you might wake up one day and say, oh, I would really like a Ferrari <laugh>. You know what? I would really like a Ferrari. But when you sit back and think about what your values are getting a Ferrari might move you further away from who you actually see yourself as a human and what really brings you meaning in life. And you're probably gonna say, you know what? I might like the idea of a Ferrari, but it's not important to me.
Speaker 1 00:31:13 A great exercise you can do is actually a visualization exercise. And Kim's, Kim's brings us to the table all the time with us. And one of the visualization exercises we do is if you won lotto tomorrow, imagine a time in two months time of what your life would look like. And the funny thing is, is when we do this, we go through a day from waking up in the morning on our hobby farm to the end of the day, and it's actually not as extravagant, not as outrageous as you might think, someone who wins low, what they might actually do. And what that did to me, it actually, it empowered me to understand that dreams are achievable. And of course, once you start working towards those dreams, you realize that the actual working towards a dream is living the dream life. And again, we we've talked about that on a few episodes, but again, it's a powerful exercise that you can one, do to death together. But two, what you're finding is that's all of a sudden you are working on common ground.
Speaker 2 00:32:18 I think it's a really interesting point because, you know, you spoke before about how money was scary because it's, it made you think about the future. And for me, even when you say, you know, I I, when I do this visualization exercise, we realize that actually our dream life is pretty close to what our lotto life would be, right? And it means that the dreams are actually the path we're actually on the, the lotto life. We're already on that path, which is super cool and, and you see your dreams then as attainable for me growing up, like of course your dreams are attainable. Like that was, that's never ever been a question for me. And that's again, a different thing. You know, I have to acknowledge that for you, that was a question, our dreams attainable and that made, that made dreaming scary. So I have to hold that in our conversations when we are talking about things that you did have a reservation around whether dreams were even worth having because are you actually ever gonna get there? And that's one of those great examples of where different upbringings, different personalities come together in a relationship. And, and the more we learn about our partner, the more we talk about the things, the, these sorts of things and unpack the way they view the world, the more we can move forward finding alignment, honest alignment together.
Speaker 1 00:33:36 I, I think you're right. And I guess that leads us onto the fourth step, which is come together and discuss how you can both upskill yourselves with money. And we're not going saying, going out and doing a cpa, we're not saying going out and doing a finance course. It could be as simple as buying a copy of the Barefoot Investor or watching the new Netflix series by remit Sethy who, uh, is someone who I've been in reading for the last two years and is really great at not dumbing, dumbing stuff down, but actually just putting it into a layman terms and talking about stuff he calls the rich life. I e you get to decide what your rich life looks like.
Speaker 2 00:34:16 It's very aligned to the way we view the world in that you get to decide, you set the values, you set the goals and the dreams, right? And um, I think the point you're making though, obviously Roger around upskilling is such a great one. So we've made four points there. The fourth being that go and, and educate yourselves further. I said this when I said, what what do you need to consider when you wanna make change? One of the things you need to always hold in mind is that you need education. We are not born with all the skills. And I think people hold a lot of shame when for some reason, you know, that weren't given the skills that their partner was because of family or schooling or whatever. There's no shame in not knowing something. You just go and learn it. And we are always learning.
Speaker 2 00:34:59 If I don't know something, I will find the answer out. And I think when I was younger and I was more perfectionist, I found that very difficult because I felt like I should know everything. But the quicker you let go of that and the more you lean into learning is growth, everybody is learning. We are all always learning. The more empowered you're going to be and it's a great opportunity for connection as well. If you guys decide to learn together and upskill on your, your money literacy together, that's going to be a moment of bonding and connection. And when you go forward and have those conversations, you're also going to have the same vernacular around it. You're going to have the same ideas around it because you will have learnt from the same, um, from the same place together. So you,
Speaker 1 00:35:41 Well you are equalizing that power and
Speaker 2 00:35:42 Balance. You are equalizing the skillset sets.
Speaker 1 00:35:44 Yes, you're equalizing that power imbalance. You are now finding common ground and working as a team so that what I span versus what you spend adversarial nature of the conversation is being taken out of the equation. And last but definitely not least, is by doing these four things, by building trust around conversations about money, by talking to your partner about what is matters to you most in life by talking about your dreams and then discussing about how you can upskill, you're starting to normalize the conversations about money. And instead of these, we've gotta come together and sit down and talk about money. You start to actually bring money into your everyday or every few day conversations because it's not as so not so scary. You're getting good at it cuz you do it more often. You're normalizing what used to be an abnormal, scary conversation.
Speaker 2 00:36:34 A hundred percent. If people walk away from this podcast today and feel empowered to begin to normalize conversations around finance and money in their family, this is a game changer for people. This is a, as you said from the beginning, rod, it's the top, if not the, one of the top three issues that causes divorce in, in, in relationships. So,
Speaker 1 00:36:58 So out of that, there's a lot of opportunity, the
Speaker 2 00:37:00 Massive opportunity here to cause connection. So
Speaker 1 00:37:03 To cause connection. Yeah. So to be aligned where you want to go in the future, you'll communicate better, you'll treat each other better. And because you'll be growing forward together in the same direction, you'll be happier.
Speaker 2 00:37:16 Big part of the team life,
Speaker 1 00:37:17 Big part of the team life. What was your gold nugget from today?
Speaker 2 00:37:23 My gold nugget today was really what we just summarized at the end there, which is, it's just about getting comfortable with talking about money. That is the starting point. We, I think we often as humans make the mistake of jumping to how do we fix this problem? But problems are layered and really to, to cha make any change in life. If you just hold in mind, and I talk about this a lot, and I'm gonna keep banging on about it, <laugh>, you've got to make people feel safe. They will not do anything before they feel safe. So just work on making it a safe space to talk about money.
Speaker 1 00:38:01 What I took out of today's conversation or the maybe the gold nugget I took out of today's conversation was really about putting yourself in that other person's shoes and understanding that even though you might love each other and be very similar in some ways, there's a good chance that you were, your upbringing around money was very different. And so when you approached the conversation you're coming at, you're coming at it with different values and a different experience. And so you need to come together and grow a new experience together. And that's the way that you can remove that power imbalance, remove that friction, adversarial nature, and start to grow. You are amazing. You've just spent quality time on your relationship,
Speaker 2 00:38:49 Feel like you're on a role. If you want more living, the team life, relationship, insights and conversations, head over to kim and rod.com where you can find all the show notes as well as tons of other relationship goodies.
Speaker 1 00:38:59 And if you like today's episode, please hit subscribe or let another couple know where they can find us. It'll make them happy and it'll make us really happy.
Speaker 2 00:39:07 Until next time, keep on living the team life.
