Rebuilding our Finances in Marriage: Money Beliefs

ENOUGH.

This is a word that I have been wrestling with this week.

It is related to words like CONTENTMENT. And GRATITUDE.

And it reminds me of the money lesson I learned a long time ago: “A life that is truly life”.

And interestingly, ENOUGH, CONTENTMENT, and GRATITUDE are all wrapped in my beliefs about money.

We are working on brightpeak financial’s Love & Money eCourse. It has been perfect for us — short videos, good information, and an assignment to fill in our Storyboard. You can read about what we learned in Lesson 1 here.

In Lesson 2, we delved into our money beliefs.

And that is the catalyst to starting my thinking and journey about our money beliefs, especially as we think about whether we have ‘enough’ or whether we are ‘enough’. I don’t think we can really talk about money in marriage without talking about this idea.

Our change in our money behaviors starts with our heart.

I love what the Love & Money eCourse says that their purpose is:

the purpose of this course isn’t to help you get what you want. It’s to help you strengthen and grow what you already have.

ENOUGH

This is a hard concept to fathom when I am staring at my bank accounts and credit card bills and seeing that we are overdrawn or are maxed out. How can this be ‘enough?’

But I wonder if the point of understanding “enough” is that when we root our beliefs in this, we can think more wisely about how we spend our money. When we are overdrawn or maxed out, we have neglected to understand that we have been given all that we need. Instead, we have squandered and spent on areas that do not align with our values.

In the book, Your New Money Mindset by Brad Hewitt and James Moline, they talk about a “surplus” mentality — one that is highly content with what they have. They say, “[those with surplus mentality’s] purchases match their needs, not their income.”

Enough is understanding that we have what we need.

By constantly judging or feeling that we don’t have enough, we can damage our marriage relationship (making our spouses feel like they are not enough) and our relationship with money (dissatisfaction that leads to desperate or neglectful money habits).

I recently listened to a great podcast by Beyond the Dollar, called: What does having enough money look like? , which talks about this idea. (I love listening to podcasts on my way to and from work — it’s great!). Similar to what the Love & Money eCourse has been talking about, Garrett & Sarah really emphasize that in order to change our behaviors, we need to understand our beliefs. I love it when God affirms the things we are learning by bringing in other resources and wise people to speak to us!

GRATITUDE

Lesson 2 in the Love & Money eCourse talked about GRATITUDE, which is a direct result of our feelings of having enough/contentment. Because if we truly feel that we have enough, what other response is there except to feel gratitude?

I admit, when I think about money, gratitude is not often my first instinct.

Stress, fear, and anxiety all come to mind when I reflect on my money beliefs. Most likely born out of my early memories of money (see: Money Memories).

Through this lesson, hubby and I had to speak out loud the things we are grateful for, both in our lives and in our relationship with each other.

I told hubby that I was grateful for his steadfastness to me and to our family. While he has been unfaithful with our finances, he is still a steady partner, friend, and dad. I am grateful for that.

Hubby told me that he was grateful that I haven’t given up on him yet.

It is a reminder that marriage is a long haul — a commitment to sticking together when things get tough.

Armed with these feelings of gratitude towards each and other and the life we share together, the lesson encouraged us to write a family motto for our beliefs about God’s character, the purpose of our marriage, and our beliefs about money. Here is what we have come up with so far:

We believe that we have ENOUGH, that He is FAITHFUL to His promises, and that we are to SHARE what we have been given.

Here is our storyboard so far:

Grateful for what we are learning, and excited to continue on, as we rebuild our finances together in our marriage.

Rebuilding Our Finances in Marriage: Money Memories

I recently wrote an article for Medium.com about the Heartbreak of Financial Infidelity. It was cathartic to write and it was helpful to see where I have been and where I hope to be going in terms of money management in our marriage. It was a reminder to me, a “check-in”, if you will, about how far we’ve come, but how far we still have to go. We are on a journey to changing our behaviors and start new ways of interacting together when it comes to money in our marriage.

It is an ongoing journey.

Some days we feel like we are moving forward, and other days, we feel like we are back to our old behaviors. I was encouraged by a book that I read this week, The One Page Financial Plan by Carl Richards. He reminded me that “there is no such thing as perfect” when it comes to money management, that we all carry baggage, and sometimes, we need to let go of the past to move on with the future. He says, on page 164:

“If your spouse blew your budget with some big-ticket item that hasn’t been paid off, it’s time to forgive, learn from the mistake, and deal with what’s right in front of you”.

So, in an effort to move forward together, I joined brightpeak financial’s Love & Money eCourse. Hubby and I are taking time out now to work on it together. The lessons are simple, the video sessions are short, and we have had meaningful time to talk about the application questions. We just finished lesson one. We are not quite sure where it is all going just yet. I admit that I am a little anxious to get going to the nuts & bolts of how love and money work together! But, I know that understanding each other and how we relate to money is key.

I especially love visuals (of course!) and the main project for this course is to complete a storyboard of us. A storyboard! I love this idea.

This week, we did the introduction to the storyboard and learned about the 5 influencers of our money habits. We talked about our earliest memories of money and we filled it in under the “cultural” category of money.

Hubby’s Money Memories

It is fun to keep learning about your spouse, especially after all the years of being married. Hubby shared a cute story about his earliest memory of money as one where his older sister took him to the corner store with pockets full of change. He said that he remembered that there were a lot of pennies. But, nevertheless, his sister (4 years older), walked him to the store and they spent all the money on some candy. It was probably his first lesson in saving up money to buy something that he wanted. I loved that his money memory was a relational one — and that somehow, he had good feelings about being with his older sister, walking to the store. It was fun to imagine my hubby as the younger sibling, being taken care of by his sister. As a mother now, my heart warmed to this money memory, thinking about how cared for my husband must have felt as a child.

My Money Memories

My memories of money weren’t quite as sweet. I have memories of my parents always whispering in hushed tones about money; about telling us that they didn’t have a lot, but then always buying us whatever we wanted. I remembered a blue bank account book with a plastic cover that we opened at the Bank of Montreal that kept track of our money, but like most things that have to do with money in my life, I have no recollection with what happened with that money. Did I spend it? Did we use it for something? It is a vague memory. But, it is my earliest memory of money: a blue bank account book with transactions tracking our allowance money.

Putting It Together

These memories in and of itself are so interesting to me. While hubby’s memories with money are tangible (pennies/change), and relational; mine are vague. I don’t have a memory of actually handling money (other than maybe the fake change we used to learn money in school). I also don’t have a memory of what money is used for.

These memories make sense to me as we think about our current financial picture and management styles.

It seems that hubby understands well that money is to be spent. That its use is for our benefit. It is meant to be saved and used. I don’t know that I have actually ever understood its use. I have some weird emotions regarding money (I’m sure we’ll get to that in another lesson…), but some of it stems from my lack of truly ever really seeing money in action when I was young. Money was always a vague, abstract concept, hidden behind locked doors, hushed whispers, and random numbers in a transaction book.

Super interesting.

Following The Love & Money eCourse lesson #1 objectives, we filled in our storyboard, adding our earliest memories of money and we will head on to lesson #2. I’m excited to see where this will lead…

I waited until my husband went into the shower to get a verification code for his iTunes account so that I could look up what the mysterious charges that he “didn’t know” about were. My heart was pounding in my chest when I did it. It felt so sneaky, but having found out about an irregular expense earlier in the weekend, it made me want to know more.

In the past, I would have given hubby a stern lecture, tell him to get this sh*t together and then leave it at that. We would go back to me struggling to pay all the bills.

But on this day, for whatever reason, I wanted to know what what was going on, once and for all.

I just about fell over when I opened the iTunes account and found pages and pages of Marvel Super Hero game charges. While hubby continued to shower, I started writing down all the charges. And my hand shook as I did it. The more charges I started to write down, the angrier and angrier I became.

I put the paper away and as he got ready for work, I calmly asked him about whether I should go back to work full time? He shrugged as he usually does and then I whispered angrily my ultimatum:

“‘Cause I just found out that you have been spending $1800 on Marvel gems and I am done with you. I don’t want to have anything to do with you and your money anymore. I. AM. DONE.”

He was stunned. But I shut the conversation down and told him to have a good day and waved him off. The kids were home, after all.

I seethed the entire day.

Emotional Shock & Grief

My husband and I had been married for 17 years when I made this discovery. And to be sure, we have always struggled with money. I have always joked with my girlfriends that if there were ever a reason to divorce my husband, it would be over money.

I had no idea how true this would be when I found out about the pages and pages of spending over an iTunes game. Because, suddenly, I lost my footing — what were the foundations of our marriage, if honesty, transparency, trust were all gone? The pain of this discovery was heightened by the fact that we had been struggling with debt and with living paycheck to paycheck. I was always swimming in worry over how our next bills would be paid.

How could he have been spending when he knew how dire our financial situation was?

It seemed that suddenly, I was very alone in this marriage.

I grieved for days.

I listened to Whitney Houston’s “Didn’t we almost have it all” on repeat and I just wallowed in my hurt.

I journaled pages and pages of despair and of anger.

And part of the shock and grief was the thought that I wanted out.

Oh, how I wanted out.

I couldn’t understand how I could have been carrying the financial burdens and all the while, he was spending hundreds behind my back.

I grew up in an all-female household. My sweet father, while the head of our family, took a back seat to my mother’s strong personality. She taught all her girls to have their own money, to never depend on a man, to have our own sense of worth outside of a relationship. She would tell us that if my father ever dared to cheat on her, she would leave; that we as women needed to know that we deserved more and we deserved better and that we would not let a man disrespect us like that. Now that I write this, my mother sounds a bit like a man-hater. But nevertheless, these were the things that I grew up hearing and I had always thought that if my husband ever cheated on me, I would not hesitate to walk away.

I just never really thought about financial cheating.

My righteous anger wanted to cut my losses and leave. I deserved better than this.

But, oh, how trapped I also felt: where would I go? What would I do? And, what about my poor, sweet babies? Surely a divorce would create even more chaos and more expenses and hardship for us all.

What else could I do?

The emotional shock of the discovery of the secret spending sent me into confusion about my marriage, my life together with this man whom I have loved over half my life.

Setting Financial Boundaries

In our conversation that ensued a day later, I had already journaled and decided what I wanted from him. I really prayed and wanted to have a calm heart. I know him. He will be remorseful. But I had already decided that enough was enough. I needed to be strong.

I had decided a few things:

1. He needed to pay the consequences of his misspending. He had to figure out how to pay for everything. I was tired and weary of trying to figure it all out.
2. I needed financial separation from him. I didn’t want to have him accessing my money anymore since I felt used and abused. I wanted boundaries.

I created a financial separation plan and emailed it to hubby before we talked about it. He texted back enthusiastically that he thought this was a good idea. I rolled my eyes. The separation was good for him because it allowed him to spend without any accountability.

And truly, in my mind, as long as the children and I were clothed, housed, fed, taken care of, he could do whatever he wanted. I didn’t want to have anything to do with him anymore.

I also knew that giving him back the reigns of the financial management would also be a bit like “sticking it to him”. I knew how hard it was to make ends meet and I wanted him to feel the pain of it.

I grieved again when we went through the motions of financial separation. It felt like an ending.

But, having something to do in those days immediately following the discovery of secret spending gave me some purpose. I was busy calling our banks, getting a new account set up, moving my direct deposit into different accounts and cancelling auto-drafts into our children’s savings accounts that were almost now depleted from his spending (I know.)

And yet, everything remained joint. I knew that deep down, I needed everything to remain joint. This separation was a way for me to regain control, but also for hubby to pull his act together. But we were still married, after all. No matter how much I wanted to get out, we were still in it for better or worse.

Our Commitments

As expected, hubby had very little to say with the discovery of his secret spending. He knew that he had done wrong, and he knew that no amount of apologies could ever repair the hurt and betrayal his secret spending had caused. He said that his apology would come in the form of action.

His actions came in the form of taking care of the bills, being more involved in our financial systems.

I’m not entirely sure that he understands the “heart of the matter”, but he is trying to fix the financial problems.

I am wary of trust. But, I also know that trust takes time. And rebuilding a new way to interact with money takes time. After all, there are 17 years of ingrained behaviors that we have each had that has led us to this place.

I love what Mary Hunt says in her book “Debt-Proof Your Marriage” (p.66)

“For many couples, the disclosure of money secrets serves as a wake-up call that moves them to begin to address the underlying issues in their marriage”

As we moved to get past the financial infidelity, there was a definite sense that there were ways that we had related to money in the past that were not healthy.

We have made many money mistakes in our past: how many times had I gone to the checkout counter at the grocery store, to be turned away because our credit card had been declined. How many times did I sit in the house, with our water turned off because we didn’t have the money to pay the bill on time? And how awful was it when a collector came ringing our doorbell to tell us that our house was under foreclosure? We have been through a lot together. As long as we were together, figuring it out together, we would put band-aid solutions in place. We were good together to do that.

It wasn’t until my entire marriage was under threat that I realized that we needed to have a good long hard look at our finances together.

Financial infidelity was the catalyst to looking at our money management and our financial goals. It was the “wake-up call” that Mary Hunt refers to, that made us take notice of what we were doing.

And so, while hubby committed to working out our debt and our bills, I committed to waiting and learning.

Because my first instinct was to cut my losses and run.

But, God asks me to stay in the hard places sometimes, to give grace when needed, and to do the hard work of repairing the broken things. In our case, it was trust that needed to be rebuilt. And it was a good, long, hard look at how to move forward together with our finances, knowing that it was in disarray.

Sometimes the waiting and the staying is the harder part.

In the beginning, keeping busy with a financial separation plan made me feel like I could get back some control. But, the waiting after? This is where the hard stuff happens. It is where we start to break down the long-ingrained everyday habits, where I begin to recognize my own part in our money mess, and where we start to do new things that feel strange, like having regular budget meetings. This waiting place is this in-between place, where we continue to make mistakes. It’s where we try, but we don’t know if we will really make it. There isn’t really a road map for this place after financial infidelity, but there is this commitment to do better and to wait for each other as we each learn and grow.

I am learning to stand on my own two feet and to understand how we got to the place of secret spending. After all, hubby couldn’t have moved money all around secretly if we knew exactly where our money was at all times. Obviously, we didn’t.

The heartbreak of financial infidelity is in the brokenness of our trust and money foundations. But, sometimes heartbreak leads us to new places, to new ways of interacting and doing things; it leads to the destruction of the old, to make way for the new.

At least, this is the hope I’m holding on to.

Catching Foxes: Habits That Can Destroy Finances in Marriage

I’m following a series through Proverbs 31 ministries called Covenant through their First5 app. It’s a great devotional series through the books of Ruth, Esther and Song of Songs. Song of Songs is known as the romantic book of the Bible, the one filled with flowery verses about love in marriage. There is a little verse in Song of Songs that I had never noticed before. It says:

“Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, our vineyards that are in bloom” — Song of Songs 2:15 NIV

Today, this verse strikes me because I am reminded how quickly these “little foxes”, the seemingly small things we do, can “ruin the vineyards” and damage a marriage.

In my marriage, it is always money that comes between us.

We enjoy being together, are good partners in parenting, are great friends. But, there are habits that we do that not only end up destroying our finances, but also kill our trust with each other. I have felt the hurt and betrayal of financial infidelity, but I also know that I am not perfect either.

What are some habits that can wreck our finances?

1/ Micro-cheating/Secret Spending

In a timely article by Scott & Bethany Palmer, they discuss micro-cheating.

Micro-cheating as “anything you may feel guilty about telling your partner”. They are the small things, the “little foxes”, if you will, that we hide from each other. Scott & Bethany Palmer still considers any intentional misrepresentation of hiding or spending money as financial infidelity.

What are the warning signs of micro-cheating with money?

Moving money around — For my hubby, he moved some money around into his cash debit account. This was the first sign that something was amiss. We have talked in our planning meetings about our upcoming bills and the things that were coming due and what we wanted to have money set aside for. When an unexpected move into another account came up, it heightened my worries about what he needed the extra cash for.

An extra payment to the credit card — Similar to moving money around, when hubby made an extra payment to his credit card, it was another warning signal that something wasn’t right. While I loved the thought that he was finally staying on top of the bills, I saw the extra payment as another warning that he might be close to maxing out the card.

Both of these money moves, while innocent in their behaviors, were “little foxes”. They were small decisions that we did not talk about together. And the more that he made these little decisions on his own, the more the secret spending grew.

2/ Flying Blind

A major habit that hubby and I are guilty of is “flying blind”. Scott & Bethany Palmer discuss this extensively in their book, Cents and Sensibility: How Couples Can Agree About Money. “Flying blind” includes habits such as:

• not knowing account balances (savings, checking, or retirement/investments)
• not knowing credit card balances (until we max them out)
• being behind on bills (or paying them late)
• bouncing checks
• paying for subscriptions unknowingly
• not knowing how much is spent on eating out
• not knowing the amount of bills

..you get the idea. Flying blind involves a lot of “not knowing”.

I’ve called this the ostrich method — burying our heads in the sand and just not seeing where our money is coming and going.

In their book, Cents and Sensibility, the Palmers quote professor and author Juliet Schor (p. 70):

Americans live with high levels of denial about their spending patterns…. 65% [of people surveyed] agreed that “in looking back on my spending, I often wonder where the money goes”.

While ignorance is sometimes bliss, this lack of knowledge of our money situation can destroy our financial picture and it certainly led the way to financial infidelity in our marriage. After all, how could hubby have been secretly spending, if I had known what our account balances were at all times?

3/ Money Laundering

This is a habit that I did not know about until I read Mary Hunt’s Debt Proof Your Marriage. But it is a habit that I myself am guilty of. Money laundering is skimming money to avoid accounting for them. It’s taking from one account to pocket into our own. We hear about this in the financial world often in relation to criminal activity. But, in marriage?

In marriage, it can be as simple as getting cash back when buying groceries. It is pocketing the cash, while the monthly budget check-in will show that groceries were purchased. There is no accounting of the extra cash pulled.

In my case, it is paying for lunch on my credit card with girlfriends and then taking the cash that they pay me back with and pocketing it. It never gets paid back on my credit card. The amount just shows up on our credit card bill, categorized as “dining out”, paid for at the end of the month when our credit card bill is due.

Money laundering, like secret spending, both thrive on secrecy. Lack of transparency.

And secrecy in our financial affairs is a sure-fire way to destroy marriage.

These are the “little foxes” that we need to catch before they “ruin our vineyard”.

Setting Money Goals with Your Spouse

We are now 6 months past the discovery of the secret spending.

I wish I could say it was perfect, but we are still works in progress. Some days we are the same old Michaela and hubby that we have always been. 20+ years of friendship and dating will do that. We fall into the same familiar habits as we have always been in, which is nice and comforting. I’m grateful for this companion in life.

However, some of the not so favorable familiar habits are also creeping back in. And that is not necessarily a good thing.

It’s what happens when we let our guard down.

We have been working hard at future forecasting our budget using CalendarBudget and having regular planning meetings. And we have successfully had several months where we have been on top of our finances. It has been a big celebration for us.

But, this month, we slipped back into our familiar head-in-sand approach to our finances. We have had an extra cushion in our accounts and so we have spent without thinking. We just only knew that we had money in our accounts.

I guess the journey past financial infidelity isn’t quite a straight path.

It takes some twists and turns.

But, we are reaffirming our commitment to do better.

And so we try again.

One of the things we haven’t done quite yet is set a goal.

What are our Money Goals as a Couple?

The financial goals we have are unspoken and generic across many other couples: pay off our debt, pay for vacation, save for college, save for retirement.

In the beginning, the goal was just to be on top of our cash flow and not overdraft our account.

But it is interesting that once we met this goal of a few months of staying on top of our finances, we started slipping back to our old habits.

Do we need a new goal?

Or was the goal not specific enough?

SMART Goals

In my career in special education, we talk a lot about making SMART goals.

It is an acronym for the kind of goals we need to make:

S — Specific

M- Measurable

A — Achievable

R — Relevant

T — Timely

When I think about our planning together, we really only focused on “getting by”. And truly, in those beginning days past the secret spending, we just wanted to build accountability and transparency again. We re-worked the way we handled our money, and talked more about who was in charge of what.

But, now we needed more specificity around our goals. Namely, we needed to make it SMART.

And so, we created goals that were more detailed, measurable (ie. a specific amount), goals that made sense within our monthly budget, and goals that had a time limit.

Steps to creating our goals together:

1. DREAM — We made a big list of the things that we wanted to dream about: vacations, college, home improvements
2. PRIORITIZE — We prioritized together what were the important things to us for this year, that we realistically could accomplish. We had to compromise and really listen to each other, supporting each other’s dreams and wishes and understand the heart of the other. In the past, I handled the day to day finances and I just automatically made my own priorities, figuring that I was the keeper of the financial knowledge in our home.

And you can see where that got us….

So this second step of prioritizing really took some negotiating and some active listening on each of our parts as we discerned together what we needed to focus on financially.

Scott & Bethany Palmer, in their book Cents & Sensibilities, identified that disagreement on goals and priorities can create ambivalence towards the goals and can possibly lead to the financial infidelity we experienced in our marriage.

Making sure we prioritized together our goals was a significant step in moving forward together again.

This step may take time.

It may also take compromise.

But in an effort to avoid falling into our same money habits (neglect & avoidance), we needed to spend time deciding together what our priorities were going to be.

3. SMART — Once we decided on our priorities, we turned them into SMART goals by asking questions like:

a. How much will that cost? (Specific and Measurable)

b. When will we accomplish this by? (Timely)

c. Do we have enough in our monthly spending plan to account for this? (Realistic, Attainable). For this question, we had to play around with our numbers based on our monthly budget numbers. (We love using CalendarBudget.com for this). This often changed our timeline too. We used to struggle with the realistic, attainable parts of our goals, because we have been known to bite off more than we can chew, not truly knowing our full financial picture. For this step, I definitely recommend that you have a handle on how your monthly spending picture looks like by tracking your expenses. (see my post about CalendarBudget.com for a good program to try!)

4. ACTIONS/RESPONSIBILITIES — We decided on actions to meet the goal and then assigned responsibilities accordingly. It wasn’t enough for us to just say we were going to catch up on our utility bill in 3 months time. We also needed to know who was responsible for doing the payment or what account it would come out from. A clear delineation of action steps was needed.

5. TRACK — We made a way to track our goal progress — just a simple monthly money planning page that had simple numbers that we tracked each month together while we looked at our goals (see image above). We needed to know our debt and savings numbers each month and then we tracked our goal amount also. It is fun to see month to month how we are doing with our goals and it is motivating to see it tracked in our monthly money planner.

We are still learning as we go — I am hopeful and optimistic that we can making lasting behavior changes with our money habits, starting with making good goals together.