The Reasons We Fight over Finance

When I started doing research for this column,
asking what sorts of money fights people have, every single couple said the same thing:
“Well, we don’t really fight about money.”
Right, right,right, I’d have to say,backing away from the flame of lies.
“But we all have the occasional childish squabble, right?”
Even then people were hesitant.“Well... maybe,” they’d say.
One woman described how her husband took away her credit card one day.
Not that they fought about it.
Or take another couple I know.
I was at their house recently when the husband came home from work with a new drum set.
He hadn’t planed to drop 500 dollars on drums that day, he explained,
as he unloaded the car, he just saw a classified ad and thought,why not?
Although his wife appeared calm while I was there,
she told me later that they had a long “discussion” about the fact
that they had agreed to save money to buy a house
—never mind their long-planned trip to Europe this summer—
and why did he have to buy a drum set NOW?
What we have here is a failure to communicate.
“It’s a fairly common fight,
and it usually happens because the two people involved aren’t on the same page,”
says Barbara Steinmetz, a financial planner in Burlingame, Calif.
“One person thinks they have a shared goal of saving for a house, car or retirement, and the other doesn’t.”
In fact, most fights occur not because of the amount of money spent
but because of unspoken expectations that couples have
and are often afraid to talk about.
Sometimes it’s clashing styles, sometimes mismatched agendas,
but people get so rooted in their own money views
that they can’t see that their partner simply has a different perspective.
Steinmetz described one couple she advised who had this blind spot.
The husband first outlined his goals for investing, retirement savings, etc.
Steinmetz then asked the wife about her goals.
“The husband was shocked to find out his wife had goals
—and they were different from his!” she says.