I want to buy a new couch.
My Instagram algorithm is constantly showing me new styles by Joybird. (I like this one.) I’m always checking out what my friends have when I visit their homes. And sometimes when I’m out by myself, I’ll pop into a furniture store and sit on a few floor models. (I have no idea how people buy sofas online!)
The one thing I haven’t done? I haven’t told Ken that I want to make this big purchase.
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I already know what he will say—we’ve been married 14 years this week and together for 20 (!), and while there are times when he will surprise me, I know exactly how the couch conversation will go.
Me: “I think we need to buy a new sofa.”
Ken: “We don’t have the space. We don’t have the money.”
We’ll continue to go round and round for six months or a year, and maybe I’ll finally wear him down. Or I’ll give up for another six months or a year, until we finally reach crisis level because our little family of three really truly cannot all fit on our leather loveseat anymore.
I’m not quite ready for those discussions (I won’t call them fights), so in the meantime, I’m just enjoying the search on my own. I love a good consumer daydream.
Is this a healthy way to handle things? Honestly, I’m not entirely sure. I think pretty much everyone in a long-term relationship knows that it can be a dance—there are things you agree on, things you can find a way to compromise on, and certain topics that are essentially off the table because you know they will cause the blowout fight of the century. Ken and I agree on a lot: that our kid is the greatest kid in the world, that we want to live in Brooklyn forever, that PBR is pretty much the perfect beer, and that there’s no reason to argue about who’s better, The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, because we’re lucky enough to live in a world with both. Of course, there are lots of things that we don’t agree on, but the list may be too long for this newsletter.
When it comes to love and money, I don’t pretend to have any of the answers. It’s so complicated, and it’s so personal. When I wrote the Money Diaries book, the major theme of the love and money section was the importance of finding a partner who wouldn’t have a problem if you made more. That was super important to me at the time, as I had just started earning more than Ken. Things flipped this year, when I decided to go freelance, and I’m not going to lie, it’s been weird for me.
Ken’s a saver, and I’m sort of a saver and sort of a spender. When we got married, we combined our finances, and I took over as the family money manager (even though Ken’s the one with the economics degree). We’ve always been mostly aligned on our long-term financial goals. Short-term is where things get a little murkier.
shouldve bought her chocolate & she probably wouldnt have questioned the purchases #ilovemywife
My friend Aditi Shekar assures me that it’s pretty normal for couples to have different money personalities. And she should know. She’s the founder of Zeta, which offers joint spending and savings accounts for couples and families. Aditi has talked to hundreds (thousands?) of couples since she founded Zeta in 2017, and she’s heard it all.
Sometimes couples start out with the same money personalities, Aditi says, and they evolve over time to balance each other out. So maybe I’m really a super saver who has learned to spend in order to make sure our little family has nice things! Okay, okay, I don’t think that’s exactly true, but it’s funny to think about.
She also suggested that we set aside a certain amount of money each year for bigger-ticket discretionary spending—whether that’s trips or furniture—so we don’t have to do 10 rounds of negotiating. FWIW, our financial planners at Stash Wealth say the same thing. Putting this good advice into practice is always easier said than done.
That’s arguably one of the biggest challenges of giving out advice to couples about their money. You can offer two people the most practical advice in the world, and because they have a million and one hang-ups, there’s a good chance they won’t take it.
Maybe that’s why there aren’t a lot of books about love and money. In the most popular personal finance books, any advice on combining checking accounts or aligning your savings goals with your spouse's usually gets relegated to a single chapter—if it’s included at all. It’s very hard to be prescriptive with this kind of advice because every relationship is so different. But that doesn’t mean someone shouldn’t try.
So of course I was excited when I met Heather Boneparth earlier this fall and learned she’s writing a book about couples and money with her husband, Douglas Boneparth, who’s a financial advisor. Their newsletter, The Joint Account, is one of my favorite reads right now—it’s both super relatable and informative.
I also like that Heather and Doug don’t pretend to have all the answers—and they know that what works for them won’t necessarily work for other couples with different backgrounds, goals, financial circumstances, etc. Heather says the book won’t offer prescriptive advice—the goal is to weave in other people’s stories with their own. But at the heart of it, Heather and Doug understand the importance of bringing all of this out into the open—pulling back the curtain and encouraging people to have uncomfortable money conversations with their partners.
Heather and I are going through a similar career transition right now. She left her fancy corporate lawyer job last year to work full-time for Doug’s company. It allowed her to spend more time on her first passion, writing, as well as work toward her and Doug’s collective goal of world domination. (LOL, not really, though I do think Heather could run the world much more effectively than the leadership in place right now. Doug can help because everyone needs a supportive partner.)
When Heather decided to leave her job, she was like many other working moms during the pandemic—trying to do it all and drowning. Doug’s business had grown, and he had a lot of freedom. Meanwhile, Heather was working a stressful and inflexible corporate job and still dealing with all the responsibilities that come with being a mother. She felt the power dynamic had shifted in their relationship, and it had become inequitable. Something had to give, so she quit. And while leaving your legal career to work for your husband might seem like it wouldn’t create a more equitable relationship, it’s working for Heather and Doug.
During our conversation last week, Heather mentioned how economist Claudia Goldin, who recently won the Nobel Prize in Economics, argues that we won’t achieve pay equality until we achieve couple equity. This is the idea that in a relationship, both individual’s careers are valued equally, so it’s not expected that one person (in heterosexual relationships, usually the woman) will lean out to handle caregiving responsibilities (whether that’s caring for children or aging parents or both).
But Goldin also acknowledges how difficult this is because of pervasive parenting norms and what she calls “greedy jobs”—roles that pay very well but require the employee to dedicate themselves almost entirely to the work. In an interview with CNBC Make It, Goldin said that 50-50 couples would probably be happier, “but they would be leaving money on the table—and often, it’s a lot.”
I do think those parenting norms are changing—at least in my corner of Brooklyn. Among our parent friends, it was mostly the dads who had more flexible jobs that allowed them to spend hours at the playground watching our kids during the pandemic. The moms were often the primary breadwinners, and they were home, in meetings, running shit.
I’ve written before that I was very nervous to transition out of a full-time job because I didn’t want to be perceived as a stay-at-home mom. (This is very much my own issue and not because I think there’s anything “wrong” with being a SAHM.) But I was also nervous about how it would change my relationship with Ken. While I love being a parent, I also love to work, and I worried that my new flexibility and smaller paychecks would mean that I’d be stuck picking up the parenting slack. But that really hasn’t happened. Maybe it’s because our habits and routines are already entrenched, or maybe it’s because Ken sees even more than I do the potential of The Purse, and he’s a supportive partner who wants to help me succeed.
There’s another reason, though, and it’s another example of how different Ken and I are about money. While I’m still struggling to figure out what my “enough” is, I know I want to make a lot more. Whereas I think Ken would be happy to have a little more financial stability than we have at the moment, but he doesn’t require us to make gobs more money.
Some people might consider Ken to have a scarcity mindset, and they would maybe say that I have an abundance mindset, but I really don’t think it’s as simple as that. I’m not sure I really believe that you can manifest your way to wealth, and I do think having a healthy dose of fear and insecurity can help stop you from making some dumb mistakes.
When I was talking with Aditi, she mentioned that Zeta has a quiz you can take to find out your money personality. I made Ken take it, and it turns out we’re both “Goal Diggers.” Honestly, I’m not entirely surprised by that. I’m grateful as hell that the guy I met at 21 just happens to be mostly aligned with my own goals, and we’ve managed to build a life we’re proud of. People change a lot over 20 years, but Ken and I have been lucky to grow up together. There’s definitely been some trial and error, and like every couple, we go back to the same fights time and again. But these days, I’m feeling pretty good about us. Thank goodness! It’s stressful enough trying to build a business from the ground up without also worrying about the state of your relationship!
In the description for “Goal Digger” that you get after finishing the Zeta quiz, it reads: “You have ‘Saving for a rainy day’ tattooed somewhere on your body but... shh, no one will ever know where.” The funny thing is, Ken and I do have matching tattoos, and they are kinda, sorta money related. They say “Always for love” which is the second half of a line from the Talking Heads’ song “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody).” The first half is, “Never for money.”
That lyric anchors me in some ways when I think about what I want to achieve, on my own and with Ken. Money is inevitably a big part of our lives—like everyone else’s. You need it to pay the bills and, to a certain extent, buy comfort and security. But life is a whole lot nicer if love is involved. And not the love in movies and romance novels that’s grand or overwrought or dramatic. The kind of love that’s comfortable simply cuddling on the couch watching the Beckham documentary (the second hottest couple of the last 25 years) after a long day of working and parenting and all that jazz.
Though I’ll admit, it’s even nicer when you’re hanging out on a new couch. One with velvet upholstery. Just saying.
xx
Lindsey
p.s. Heather and Doug are looking for more couples to interview for their book. If you’re interested, reach out to them at [email protected].