[00:00.43]Passage 56. The Reasons We Fight over Finance

[00:08.31]When I started doing research for this column,

[00:10.72]asking what sorts of money fights people have, every single couple said the same thing:

[00:16.62]“Well, we don’t really fight about money.”

[00:19.79]Right, right,right, I’d have to say,backing away from the flame of lies.

[00:24.83]“But we all have the occasional childish squabble, right?”

[00:29.43]Even then people were hesitant.“Well... maybe,” they’d say.

[00:35.55]One woman described how her husband took away her credit card one day.

[00:40.69]Not that they fought about it.

[00:44.08]Or take another couple I know.

[00:46.05]I was at their house recently when the husband came home from work with a new drum set.

[00:50.31]He hadn’t planed to drop 500 dollars on drums that day, he explained,

[00:55.78]as he unloaded the car, he just saw a classified ad and thought,why not?

[01:01.47]Although his wife appeared calm while I was there,

[01:04.86]she told me later that they had a long “discussion” about the fact

[01:10.01]that they had agreed to save money to buy a house

[01:12.52]—never mind their long-planned trip to Europe this summer—

[01:15.80]and why did he have to buy a drum set NOW?

[01:19.42]What we have here is a failure to communicate.

[01:23.90]“It’s a fairly common fight,

[01:26.86]and it usually happens because the two people involved aren’t on the same page,”

[01:31.34]says Barbara Steinmetz, a financial planner in Burlingame, Calif.

[01:36.05]“One person thinks they have a shared goal of saving for a house, car or retirement, and the other doesn’t.”

[01:43.38]In fact, most fights occur not because of the amount of money spent

[01:47.97]but because of unspoken expectations that couples have

[01:52.02]and are often afraid to talk about.

[01:54.54]Sometimes it’s clashing styles, sometimes mismatched agendas,

[01:59.79]but people get so rooted in their own money views

[02:02.85]that they can’t see that their partner simply has a different perspective.

[02:07.33]Steinmetz described one couple she advised who had this blind spot.

[02:12.59]The husband first outlined his goals for investing, retirement savings, etc.

[02:17.95]Steinmetz then asked the wife about her goals.

[02:21.66]“The husband was shocked to find out his wife had goals

[02:25.28]—and they were different from his!” she says.