Family Series Part 1 – Our Partners’ Thoughts About Personal Finance & Financial Independence

Both of us are married and in each of our households we are the ones that are most interested in personal finance & Financial Independence.  Although there are some couples who are on the same level when it comes to money, most households, at least anecdotally, have a similar dynamic as ours where one partner takes the lead in all-things related to finance.

When this type of disparity exists it’s always interesting to learn how the non-financial partner acts.  In some cases the non-financial partner is still a willing participant in household finances and may even support their partner; they might just have less knowledge or less interest in money.  In other cases the non-financial partner is impartial and lets their partner take the lead because they really don’t care much about money.  And in more rare cases the non-financial partner actively clashes with or fights against their partner for whatever reason.

Read on to see what financial dynamics exist in each of our households and specifically how each of our wives view the whole subject of Financial Independence.

The Squire

My wife was in great financial shape when we started dating in our late twenties – way better than me! She had recently moved into a condo, was setting money aside for retirement, and had a money market account. She even had a financial advisor! On the other hand, I had been spending most of my paychecks on rent, food, and fun, only setting aside a little bit in my 401k.

Personal Finance & Investing Education

Although I had been reading about personal finance and just recently started taking some advice from Scout, I didn’t have much to show for it. When I brought up the subject of finances and savings, my wife listened to my thoughts and what I had learned, and was happy to hear that I had recently started to pay more attention to saving up for the future. However, I was also very transparent with how much I had actually saved, which I’m guessing she wasn’t very impressed with. She was making more money than me as well, even though she was in the education field. (By the way, we were dating in 2008, when the market didn’t exactly have a stellar year, and wasn’t exactly an ideal time to convince someone how wonderful investing money in the market was).

Her financial education was based on taking advice from family and those around her, which did set her up fairly well. However, she didn’t spend time reading or listening to any external money experts since she had an advisor that could help her with these decisions. Her advisor, who came with her 403b account, had listened to her when she said she wanted to invest conservatively, and had her in a high fee, conservative fund.

She liked the idea of listening to professional advisors more than someone who was just reading books about investing. As we decided to learn more together, we signed up for and attended a 3-4 session financial education for retirement class put on by an advisor. We were still very much in the learning stage, and we both found it somewhat informative, but it was also very much geared toward people nearing retirement, and of course for the advisor getting new clients.

As I continued to read and listen more about investing, I started to put together spreadsheets and graphs of our own potential savings goals. When I showed and talked through these with my wife… she wasn’t impressed. It just wasn’t something that she cared much about.

Where We’re At Today

I think my wife’s lack of interest in personal finance just comes down to her not wanting to spend time talking about investments or really money in general. She wants to spend time doing other things. Money is not something she wants to obsess over or worry about. It doesn’t make sense spending a lot of time focusing on finances when she could spend time on other things. It’s okay for her to work and save and be financially stable, and not have to be extremely efficient and invest in just the right funds. She doesn’t connect the power of money to freedom, independence, less stress, and autonomy to the degree that I do. I’ve come to accept this.

Despite her not being very interested in talking about personal finance, we have talked about it from time to time and decided that monitoring our money flow does make sense. Over time she did come to trust my investing philosophy, and asked me to help with some investment decisions, including moving her 403b to a less expensive fund with a longer term outlook.

Financial Independence

In theory my wife could look at graphs I’ve set up with current projections… but in reality, she doesn’t. She seems open to the idea of having the ability of reducing hours or even leaving our jobs earlier than 65 if we wanted to, but we are still quite a way off from this, and she is happy with her current job for the time being. We have a number of house projects to take care of, so that is her main focus of money right now.

I am hopeful that my wife will become more interested in the subject as we get through some needed house projects and as we get closer to Financial Independence. I am also hopeful that I can share enough resources and my knowledge with her that she would be able to deal with the finances should something happen to me. In the meantime, we are happy, and she is supportive of me spending time in the Financial Independence community.

Scout

Overall I would define my wife as “passive-supportive”, meaning she understands and approves of what our household is doing financially, but she’s not necessarily an active participant or even too interested in the details.

Personal Finance & Investing Education

Since both my wife & I are natural savers, I think this unintentionally (and of course very fortunately), put us on a similar page financially from the beginning of our relationship.  We both questioned spending money on unnecessary things and were in alignment that we should save most of our paychecks each month… but for what, we didn’t know for the longest time.

I was the one in our household who first started learning about personal finance & investing about 6 months into our marriage.  Through co-workers I discovered the book “Rich Dad Poor Dad”, which hit me like a lightning bolt and fundamentally changed my view of money & investing forever.  I learned that a W-2 paycheck alone wouldn’t lead to wealth creation, but instead the rich have assets that work for them to produce additional money.  With my curiosity piqued, I started my self-education in personal finance & investing, gobbling up any information I could (which at the time were only books & magazines since the podcast medium wasn’t widely available or popularized yet).

Even as I was continuing to learn, I started sharing information with my wife.  At a high-level she grasped the concepts and agreed that investing for the long-term was a good idea.  We started down the path of maxing-out contributions to our workplace retirement accounts, Roth IRAs, and throwing additional money into a taxable brokerage account.

As our wealth continued to grow over the years, we both gained more & more confidence in the process and in our investment philosophy.  Although my wife was more passive and didn’t necessarily show overt interest in investing, I could tell she was picking things up along the way.  She would even tell co-workers on occasion to max out their own retirement contributions and was also mystified to learn that some of them weren’t even contributing at all.  She was even more astonished to learn that some co-workers didn’t even know how much their paychecks were each month (simply because they never had the awareness/foresight to look).  Note: We’ve actually found this to be very prudent since my wife has found errors in her paycheck a scary amount of time (at least once or twice a year). 

Introduction to Financial Independence

While we began our financial journey and education back in 2006, we didn’t find out about FIRE until 2018.  We had just been saving, saving, saving (and investing of course) for over a decade without a clear purpose or end goal.  So finding out about Financial Independence gave us additional structure and motivation, while providing awareness that there were others like us traveling the same path.

We turned out to be the stereotypical couple where one of us got onboard right away and wanted to immediately make changes to our life.  (Just in case you couldn’t guess, I was the excited one).  In fact, I took it to the extreme when I decided to run my own calculations just a few months after finding FIRE, to see how close we actually were to achieving it.  Lo & behold we were actually already there!  Ready to quit my job immediately, I broke the news to my wife over the phone while she was on business travel.  Expecting to hear excitement, loud cheering, or even a simple “congratulations” (coupled with perhaps some tears of joy), I was met instead with silence… dead silence.  

Looking back on it now, this was completely understandable and probably the most logical response.  Although my wife had been “passive-supportive” all these years, I had always been the one leading the (financial) charge in our household.  When I found FIRE, I assumed she would also be completely onboard, but I miscalculated and the result was perhaps more confusion rather than opposition.

A little depressed, but otherwise undeterred, I kept digging into Financial Independence and researching, just like I had when I first started to learn about personal finance and investing.  Over time and as I kept talking about these new FI concepts more & more, the strange looks from my wife slowly started to dissipate and perhaps even turned into gradual acceptance.  She was even open to eventually joining our local ChooseFI group.  I was nervous to see what she thought, but everything seemed okay once she realized that these were all normal people who were just making smarter/more intentional choices about money. 

Where We’re At Today

It’s probably no surprise to learn that I’m still the one taking the lead on financial matters in our household.  While not gungho like I am, my wife is supportive and is gaining more confidence in our plan as she has seen how everything has been playing out over time.  She is way more accepting of the concept of FI and our current lifestyle, especially now that I’m nearing 2 years of retirement, things seem to be going well, and most importantly our life hasn’t completely fallen apart.

We still attend FI events, mostly our local ChooseFI group meetups, but have also attended a couple EconoMe Conferences together.  At this point in my financial journey, although I still love some good technical content related to spreadsheets & numbers, I’m drawn more to the community/social aspect of these events – I love meeting cool people and learning what amazing things they are up to in the world.  This has actually been a perfect trajectory because my wife never really liked the technical side of things and has primarily been drawn to the social aspect of FI from the beginning.  

Beyond the numbers we are also aligned on what we want our life to look like – spending time with each other & with our kids, traveling, and doing things that we enjoy such as attending concerts or sporting events.  We’re both huge fans of “Die With Zero” and have each taken the book’s message to heart – our goal is to constantly focus our spending intentionally to create “memory dividends” with our family, knowing that time is precious and that nothing lasts forever.

Although my wife is still working at the moment, we’re working towards getting her to retirement in the not-so-distant future.  She is a labor & delivery nurse and really enjoys helping patients, so she would miss that, but there are other aspects of her job that continue to wear on her and that she’s not so happy about.  I always joke (well, sometimes I’m actually serious) that since she didn’t initially believe in FI, she has to keep working until her 60s when she would reach traditional retirement age.  For some reason, I never seem to receive a laugh from her.

Tips/Lessons Learned

We’ve been married for almost 20 years, so it’s been a long financial journey for both of us.  We’ve had ups & downs with money, but overall I think we’ve been on the same page.  A huge part of that has been communication and sharing a common vision.  For others this doesn’t necessarily mean that each partner has to participate in financial activities equally, rather it means that both have to be marching towards the same goal.

An important lesson that I learned is that you need to meet your partner where they’re at.  Although I’m a huge numbers kind of guy, my wife is definitely not that, and trust me, I’ve learned that the hard way.  Speaking in “technical language” doesn’t really move the needle when we talk about money.  Instead, I’ve found that talking about life goals is the key for communicating in our relationship.  For example, if my wife wants to buy a car or travel, then money is the tool we’d use to get there.  Using this sort of language and comparison has proven to be more motivating and sensical to her than any spreadsheet I could throw at her.

I’ve also learned that patience is vital, knowing that it’s a bad idea to force things.  My wife has never liked change, so when I first introduced her to the concept of Financial Independence I think a big part of her reluctance was my insistence that we seemingly upend our lives immediately.  Although I was excited, she obviously didn’t feel that way and it took time for her to get comfortable.  This is completely understandable and seeing our financial journey play out over time has built greater & greater confidence that it’s real and can work.

Lastly, a shared set of specific goals is key.  From the beginning of our relationship, my wife and I had a nebulous goal of retiring “early” one day in the future (perhaps mid-to-late 50s), so we just started saving & investing by default.  Over the years as we’ve found other resources such as the FIRE community and after reading “Die With Zero”, we further refined our goals – to not only retire even earlier but to also spend more time with each other and with our kids.  Having this clear goal has helped us immensely because we know that regardless of who takes the financial lead in our household, we are both working together, towards our shared vision.

Links/Resources

• Definition of “Passive Support”
• Robert Kiyosaki, “Rich Dad Poor Dad”
• ChooseFI Local Groups
• EconoMe Conference
• Bill Perkins, “Die With Zero”

Reader Questions

• What are your partner’s thoughts on personal finance & Financial Independence?  Are you on the same page or do each of you have different views?

Leave your answers or comments below – or email us directly at info@epicfinancialjourney.com