358 | How to Talk About Money in Your Relationship: Healthy Conversations for Couples
Avoiding money conversations isn’t saving your relationships—it’s silently sabotaging them. The sooner you tackle finances as a team, the stronger your future together will be.
Money: the word alone can spark tension, avoidance, or even conflict in relationships. Whether it’s with your partner or teaching your kids about finances, navigating money discussions often feels like walking through a minefield. But here’s the thing—these conversations are essential, and when approached with purpose and positivity, they can actually bring you closer together.
In this post, we’re diving into practical strategies for having healthy money conversations with your spouse and children. From scheduling intentional discussions to creating a goal-driven financial plan, we’ll show you how to turn money talk into a powerful tool for unity and growth.
Key Takeaways
- Plan for success: Set intentional dates to discuss money instead of “drive-by” conversations.
- Use inclusive language: Replace “yours” and “mine” with “we,” “us,” and “ours.”
- Dream big together: Start financial discussions by focusing on shared goals and dreams.
- Teach kids early: Introduce financial literacy through hands-on lessons like budgeting.
- Stay calm and data-driven: Approach money talks with humility, facts, and teamwork.
Why Money Conversations Matter
Talking about money has become a taboo subject for many couples and families. It’s easier to avoid it or assume the other person doesn’t want to engage. Unfortunately, avoidance only leads to misunderstandings, resentment, and, in worst cases, financial chaos.
The good news? When approached thoughtfully, money conversations can become a way to align on goals, problem-solve together, and strengthen your relationships. The key is preparation, humility, and a shared vision.
Three Steps to Healthy Money Conversations with Your Partner
1. Schedule the Talk
Instead of ambushing your partner with money concerns during a busy workday or in passing, set a dedicated time to talk about finances. Think of it as a “money date.” This intentional planning helps both partners prepare mentally and emotionally, reducing defensiveness.
Tip: Set a recurring calendar reminder—weekly, monthly, or quarterly—to keep these conversations consistent and proactive.
2. Choose Words Wisely
Language matters. Avoid “you vs. me” phrasing like “your spending” or “my paycheck.” Shift the focus to team-oriented terms like “we,” “our,” and “us.” For example, “How can we improve our budget to meet our savings goal?”
This subtle shift creates a collaborative environment, turning what could be a blame game into a team effort.
3. Start with the Positive
Before diving into budgets and spreadsheets, reconnect with your shared dreams and goals. Why did you get excited about building a life together in the first place? What are your long-term aspirations—whether it’s paying off debt, traveling, or saving for retirement?
By focusing on these big-picture goals, you can approach money conversations from a place of optimism rather than stress or frustration.
Teaching Kids About Money: Start Early, Start Simple
Money education doesn’t have to wait until your kids are adults. By introducing basic financial principles early, you can set them up for long-term success.
Hands-On Learning
Instead of a traditional allowance, consider giving your kids a small monthly “budget” to manage. For example, if you typically spend $50 on their extracurricular activities or birthday gifts for friends, let them oversee that amount. Teach them to plan for field trips, special treats, or savings goals, all within their budget.
Use Positive Framing
When discussing financial decisions with your kids, avoid phrases like “We can’t afford that” or “We don’t have money for that.” Instead, reframe the conversation: “We’re choosing to save for a family vacation instead of eating out this week.”
This approach teaches kids that money is a tool for achieving priorities, not a limitation.
The Power of Goal-Driven Conversations
One of the most impactful ways to make money discussions productive is by tying them to shared goals. Every financial goal—whether it’s saving for a house, investing for retirement, or taking a dream vacation—has a monetary component.
By focusing on these goals, you create a sense of purpose and motivation behind your financial decisions. Budgeting, saving, and cutting back suddenly feel less like sacrifices and more like stepping stones to a shared vision.
Wrapping It All Up
Money doesn’t have to be a source of conflict in your relationships. With intentionality, inclusive language, and a goal-oriented mindset, you can transform financial discussions into opportunities for growth and connection.
Whether you’re scheduling a monthly budget meeting with your spouse or teaching your kids the basics of budgeting, the key is to approach money as a tool—not a taboo topic.
Call to Action
Ready to make 2025 the year you and your family master money conversations? Start by setting up your first “money date” this week. Write down your top financial goals and discuss how you can work together to achieve them. Don’t forget to involve your kids in age-appropriate ways, giving them a head start on financial literacy.
Let’s break the money taboo and use it as a tool to create the life you’ve always dreamed of—together.
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We are excited to create the time & space to talk to you about your current money situation. This is a free, no-obligation call where we can answer questions you may have and maybe find some quick wins for your budget.
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Full transcript
We’re all here. We’re so it’s so early. I’m not gonna lie. I slept in today. It felt amazing. I know that I know I’m ruining my life for like next week, when things get back to normal, but I didn’t care.
I slept in and it was glorious. And you know what? It’s today we’re talking about relationships and money, Vanessa, money and relationships. Yeah. It’s one of those things. It’s an icky conversation sometimes. And sometimes it just doesn’t even come up. Like just don’t even bring up the money.
It is easier. And it’s it’s become taboo. It’s become this. This means of fighting, just people they’re afraid to have the conversation. And then, most of the times with our clients, Shana, where can, we’re trying to talk to them about how to have that conversation if they’ve never had it before.
And then what is, what ends up happening is it ends up. being way better and way less of a harsh conversation than they ever thought it was going to be. If they do it the right way. So I think what happens is they, it’s like you get trained. So you know how you train a dog the right way.
It’s okay, every I’ve learned over the years, every time we broach the subject, it ends up in a fight. We don’t make any progress or whatever. So then that’s when you start avoiding it. What we want you to do is approach it with a whole different mindset. There’s a lot of different little things that we would recommend and that way that you can set the conversation up to be successful instead of the repeating the pattern that’s been in the past.
And you know what really got us, got me thinking about this Vanessa, I remember hearing Dave Ramsey, our friend, our close personal friend who doesn’t know we are people, but it’s fine. I remember him talking about don’t be barking around them like a chihuahua. And I was like, Oh Dave, that’s ugly.
But Oh man, that hits real very true. Like some, you usually have one person that’s mostly into the finances. And they just want, they want the other person to be like them. That’s never going to happen, but they just always. Saying words and nipping and what did you do?
Why did you do this? Or just like trying, just being like that Chihuahua circling you. And of course, if I’m the other person, I’m gonna be like no thank you. Hard pass. Don’t wanna have that conversation. Yeah. We’ve also seen the other side of it where somebody is just trying to handle it all. So the other one doesn’t have to quote unquote deal with it.
They want them, maybe they’re the breadwinner, so they’re going to work and they’re. They’re not really in the finances as much as like you said, but they are trying to not tell them the truth, tell them what’s going on and not in a way to purposely keep them afar, but it’s like they don’t want to burden them with it.
So that ends up them bird, they’re burdening it and they’re holding that weight on their shoulders and it just doesn’t end up being, it’s not really healthy, right? So what we’re seeing is when they do go to have these conversations, Kind of you alluded to it. It’s like you, this is, and then it’s what are you doing?
And then this is what I’m doing. And why are you spending this money? And so we really try to change that conversation of no, you guys are a team. We want you, this is something we want you to do together. So approach it as a, this is a, us, a, we, our, all of us. That’s what I was going to say is we really, there’s three sort of.
Big things that we say when it comes to relationships is, and this is particularly about the spouse so we can get into kids and stuff. But there’s three things. First of all, we want you to do it on purpose. So set a date so that everybody’s aware we’re going to talk money. It’s not a drive by budget conversation where you get, you get Yeah.
Or if somebody’s at work or whatever, that’s not what we want. We want to schedule on purpose. What the second thing is what Vanessa said. We’re going to talk about our language, right? We’re going to, or we’re going to watch our language and talk about it quickly. And then the third thing is we want you to start with the good stuff.
Start with dreaming with your big goals. We always say that, you are. You started off with and dreams as a couple an to that. If we start the there, it’s much more lik right? So those are the t The first thing you always we’re asking for, you kno days and we’re asking for a time on purpose to talk if you can set that time on your phone, just set it up as an alarm, like every week or every month, whatever you need to do at first to start checking in.
But yeah, 12 days out of the year, if you guys sat down, came together as a team and go, look, this is what’s happening this month. What do we want to happen next month? And Shaina said, when y’all got married, you had dreams, you had goals, you had all this ambition of things that how you wanted to change the world.
We want to come back to that. We want to come back to going, okay, Why did we, why were we so excited at the very beginning of this? And put all that back on paper on purpose. It’s the new year 2025. Let’s put some new goals down so that way y’all can achieve them and accomplish them together.
Yeah, I think one of the, for me, one of the things about scheduling the time to talk about it is. It’s like I want to mentally prepare, but I feel safe all the other time, like all the other time. And I feel like this is what these other people that don’t want to talk about money is I don’t want the pressure of having to deal with this.
I like all the other times, it’s just not my thing. I don’t want to but I can get, I can rally around one time, this one time that I’m prepared. I mentally know that this is what’s going to happen. Vanessa, you were talking about it and we can expound more when it comes to language.
We’re using week. Us, our, this, there is no your or my, it’s us, it’s ours. This is, and the sooner you just start doing that, it’s going to feel better. It’s going to feel better. And then that is going to lead to better conversations. One of the things that I just recently had to discuss with my client is that I told her, I said, listen, you’ve been holding onto this for years.
Like I’m talking about 20 years. She’s been bearing the burden of the finances and didn’t want to didn’t want to bother him. And so that was mistake number one, but in her eyes, she was doing the right thing. But I told her, I said, look, you have freaked out about this. You’ve already internalized this.
You’ve thought about it. You have processed all this. So your freaking out is done. I said, when you go to present this to your husband next week, I said, allow him a moment. Give him a moment. He might yell, he might scream, he might get really mad. That’s okay. Allow him to process it because you’ve done that and he hasn’t, right?
And so she was like, oh. I think stepping back and realizing like he needed a moment too. And then I said, remain calm. It’s okay. And bring in that language of we as our. And and really watch the conversation turn. And she was the one that texted us. Shana was like, I just want to say thank you. Because that was way different than I thought that it was good.
How it went way different than I thought it was going to go. And she’s and I just, I’m so appreciative of how now we’re on a team we’re together. And like just having that, being the first person to have the humility to do it this way, it’s like a domino of humility, right?
Like we’re going to get to the right place if you start with the right spirit, which is, Just being, a lot of times we’re accusatory or we’re so defensive because we’re like this girl, she was, or this woman, she was so stressed out. You become very defensive. If we can lay that down and just come humbly to the conversation, they will match that energy.
Give them a moment. Like Vanessa said, usually they’ll match that energy. And we just, the other thing is when you bring this, it’s, Bring some data. Yeah. Men love data. I think it’s, you can be less dramatic about data because it’s numbers. It’s math, right? When we’re just talking, a lot of times these conversations are not based on math.
They’re based on what’s in here. You, me, whatever, how many times I went to target or whatever. So bring data. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but bring data. And that way we can we can, instead of each other, yo and solve the problem and to do to solve the problem remembering look, n It’s both of us together of happened to.
It wasn’t malicious. It’s just look Okay. This is what we did. Didn’t realize that the domino effect of and how this is going to affect us longterm, but now we have a chance to tackle it as a team.
And the other thing that you always, we always say is you don’t know what you don’t know. And this is two of you, right?
First of all, neither one of you probably that great at budgeting. Let’s be honest. And then we had a combined forces and it didn’t necessarily, it didn’t like magically one of us became really good at budgeting. So we don’t know what we don’t know. And now’s the time to work on it as a team.
And that’s what we really love. So when the third part, when we’re saying work on your goals together is start there, we say all the time, you’re every goal that you have has a monetary like assignment to it some way or another. So that is where you want to start. What do we actually want for the future?
If we can start there in a good, positive, excited motivated place, then when we’re working towards those goals, it will give us the the oomph to do all the things that require discipline, like budgeting, setting up accounts, Sticking to a spending account limit, right? All of that is going to be fueled by those goals.
I think I was just reading one of the comments that somebody wrote on Facebook this morning under one of our questions. And they were like, I want to be able to set up for retirement. And I think there’s this vision, especially, I think a lot of men, like the idea of investment, the idea of being prepared for the future and wanting all that set But I think that there’s a step before that, like Shana said, you’ve got to get a system in place.
So if you guys can see the goal, see the vision, right? If that’s where you are, where you’re at, cause a lot of times women are seeing it as security, like finances, men is like a, it’s What is it, Shannon? What would we always say? It’s like a scorecard. Yeah, it’s a scorecard. So have that, having those investments, having that money, having that vision of being able to retire wealthy, like that’s exciting.
But women right now wanna feel secure. They wanna know what’s going on. They wanna know that everything is good. But if you guys can sit down and go, okay, that’s the long-term goal. We see that, but before we even get to that. We’ve got to have a budget. We’ve got to set up a system. We have to make sure our savings buckets are in place to see actually how much we cost in a whole year, because people forget Christmas, they forget birthdays, they forget holidays, let’s set up what that looks like for a whole year.
And then let’s set up the next step vision of what does that look like to invest? Yeah. Yeah. And so that’s a lot on the marriage. Very quickly, we can just say kids we think the sooner you bring them in on the conversation, the better. We don’t think there’s, really a too young age, there’s different levels of what they can handle, but we want them to be in on the conversation.
We want them to start learning how to manage money now. We don’t, what we say is we don’t want to create another you, love you. Love us like, but we don’t want them to wait till they’re 30 or something to figure this out. Let’s try to teach them as much as we can right now. And that comes with as much as responsibility as you’re willing to put on them.
Vanessa and I have shared all of our different different as the kids have grown up, all our different escapades with teaching them about budgeting. And it goes along with that same vocabulary, that same conversation. When you’re talking with your spouse, it’s us. We, our, when you’re talking with your kids, it’s not, no, it’s not.
We don’t have money. It’s not, we’re broke. It’s not any of that. It’s the terminology of we are choosing to do this over that. We’re deciding as a family to invest in this for us versus that. It’s not that we don’t have the money for that, we’re just not gonna buy it right now. So you just change that.
That mentality and that vocabulary, they are not going to grow up with that money baggage thinking that either they always have money and they can buy whatever they want, or there’s never money. So they can’t buy anything. Yeah. Or, that would lead them straight into the arms of credit cards.
So what we, one small thing that we think is they can start off with and I was actually just talking to a client about this the other day, Vanessa, it’s not an allowance. What we set up was not an allowance. This was a budget. We don’t, we don’t really, we think that you are part of the household.
You probably need to help out with some of the stuff, right? We’re all building this house and trying to maintain this house together, but we don’t mind. We like the idea of setting a budget for them and then letting them So let’s say you have a kid and that you have a 50 budget because you know you’re going to spend that much on them between field trips, between them needing new socks or whatever, and you set that budget up.
You can turn that over to them and say, look, you have 50 to get through the month. You can decide if you’re going to this birthday party but you probably can’t go both, or whatever. And we think even at a young age, they can start to learn those things. And I think that’s so great.
If you guys gave them a piece of paper with 50, it said 50. Income. And allow them to dictate where it goes. That’s really gonna allow them to mature in this financial literacy . Era, way better than we ever did. Nobody ever did that with me. But think of this place that they can start now.
Think of how much better they’re gonna be. In their twenties and thirties, understanding where money goes at an age now versus when we started in, when we started in our twenties and thirties. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, so that’s just one of the ways, but like I said, the positive conversation the thing, the real true thing to not do is to not talk about it.
That usually is the MO regardless of the actual relationship. It’s we’ll just not talk about it. It’s taboo. No, it’s not money makes the world go around. It’s not good. Jesus talked about money a lot in the Bible. So it’s not something that we need to not talk about. It is something that we don’t want to ruin our lives or our emotions or decisions, but we want to talk about it.
We don’t want it to be a foreign concept by the time they’re out of the house. So that’s really what we’re talking about, guys, is we want to have a conversation on purpose. We want it to be positive. We want it to be goal based. Like Vanessa was saying, we’re not saying we can’t do this.
We’re saying, Hey guys, Instead of going to a Chipotle, we’re saving to go on this vacation that we’re all as a family excited about. So it’s just this positive goal oriented conversations. And we hope that out of this, you took what you took out of it was that money is a tool. It is an awesome tool that can allow you to do so many things.
And it can allow you to have such great conversations with your spouse and your kids to allow you to accomplish so much in the future and help you hit all your goals.
