Money fights are never just about money—
so why do we keep having them?
Talking about money with your partner can feel awkward, overwhelming, or straight-up terrifying—but avoiding it? That’s a guaranteed way to create resentment, stress, and financial chaos. Nearly half of couples argue about money, and 36% say it’s one of the biggest sources of stress in their relationships. So, how do we break the cycle and actually have productive, meaningful conversations about money with the person we love?
Enter Ramit Sethi—money expert, bestselling author of I Will Teach You to Be Rich, and the host of Netflix’s How to Get Rich. He’s here to help us navigate the messy, emotional, and psychological side of managing finances as a couple. We’re getting real about why money fights happen, the invisible scripts we bring into relationships, and how to align financially even when you and your partner have wildly different incomes, spending habits, or financial values. Plus, we’re tackling one of the biggest taboos—what happens when a woman earns more than her male partner. If you want to stop arguing about money and start feeling financially aligned, this episode is a must-listen.
Key takeaways
Invisible Money Scripts Shape Your Relationship Without You Even Realizing It
Everyone brings deeply ingrained beliefs about money into their relationships—often without even knowing it. Ramit explains that these invisible scripts come from childhood experiences, family dynamics, and societal expectations. If your parents constantly said, “We can’t afford that,” you may have internalized scarcity mindsets, even if you’re financially stable today. Unpacking these beliefs together is the first step to understanding why you and your partner see money differently.
The Most Common Money Fights Are About Control, Not Dollars
Most couples don’t actually fight about money—they fight about what money represents (security, freedom, power, or even love). Whether it’s “Why did you spend so much at Target?” or “You’re wasting money on energy drinks again”, these arguments often stem from deeper feelings of fear, control, or insecurity.
If One Partner Refuses to Talk About Money, That’s a Red Flag
According to Ramit, the #1 dealbreaker in relationships isn’t financial struggles—it’s when one partner refuses to talk about money. If your partner shuts down, avoids the conversation, or shames you for bringing it up, that’s a serious problem. Money doesn’t just disappear—it will become an issue whether you discuss it or not.
A 50/50 Split Is Not Always Fair—Equity Over Equality
One of the biggest mistakes couples make is assuming that splitting everything exactly in half is the “fair” way to handle money. But equality and equity are not the same—if one partner makes significantly more than the other, a true partnership means adjusting financial contributions based on income, not rigid percentages.
Women Need to Stop “Playing Small” in Financial Conversations
Ramit passionately calls out the cultural norm where women handle the day-to-day bills, but men make the “big financial decisions” (investments, buying a house, retirement planning). He argues that this keeps women from fully participating in wealth-building and that we need to stop accepting this outdated role.
Notable quotes
“People waste their lives arguing about $3 questions instead of $30,000 questions.”
“If you don’t take control of your finances, someone else will—whether it’s your partner, your boss, or society.”
“The way we feel about money is highly uncorrelated to the actual amount in our bank account.”
Episode-at-a-glance
≫ 03:35 Ramit’s Personal Money Journey
≫ 07:34 The Psychology of Money in Relationships
≫ 20:09 Common Money Scripts and Their Impact
≫ 26:01 Navigating Financial Conversations in Relationships
≫ 32:24 The Role of Gender in Financial Dynamics
≫ 42:18 Navigating Financial Dynamics in Relationships
≫ 43:11 Building the Conversational Muscle
≫ 44:19 Resentment and Breadwinning
≫ 47:16 Positive Money Conversations
≫ 50:11 Addressing Anxiety and Money
≫ 56:01 Politics and Personal Finance
≫ 01:13:59 Automating Your Finances
Ramit’s Links:
Order Money for Couples: https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/books/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ramitsethi
Money for Couples podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/money-for-couples-with-ramit-sethi/id1577864998
Special thanks to our sponsors:
Squarespace
Go to www.squarespace.com/FFPOD to save 10% off your first website or domain purchase.
Rocket Money
Stop wasting money on things you don’t use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to RocketMoney.com/FFPOD.
Quince
Get cozy in Quince’s high-quality wardrobe essentials. Go to Quince.com/FFPOD for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.
Netsuite
Download the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning at NetSuite.com/FFPOD.
Gusto
Run your first payroll with Gusto and get three months free at gusto.com/ffpod.
Indeed
Hiring? Indeed is all you need. Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at www.indeed.com/ffpod.
Public
Fund your account in five minutes or less at public.com/ffpod and get up to $10,000 when you transfer your old portfolio.
Disclosure: All investing involves the risk of loss, including loss of principal. Brokerage services for US-listed, registered securities, options and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA & SIPC. Public Investing offers a High-Yield Cash Account where funds from this account are automatically deposited into partner banks where they earn interest and are eligible for FDIC insurance; Public Investing is not a bank. Cryptocurrency trading services are offered by Bakkt Crypto Solutions, LLC (NMLS ID 1890144), which is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the NYSDFS. Cryptocurrency is highly speculative, involves a high degree of risk, and has the potential for loss of the entire amount of an investment. Cryptocurrency holdings are not protected by the FDIC or SIPC. A Bond Account is a self-directed brokerage account with Public Investing, member FINRA/SIPC. Deposits into this account are used to purchase 10 investment-grade and high-yield bonds. The 6%+ yield is the average, annualized yield to worst (YTW) across all ten bonds in the Bond Account, before fees, as of 12/13/2024. A bond’s yield is a function of its market price, which can fluctuate; therefore, a bond’s YTW is not “locked in” until the bond is purchased, and your yield at time of purchase may be different from the yield shown here. The “locked in” YTW is not guaranteed; you may receive less than the YTW of the bonds in the Bond Account if you sell any of the bonds before maturity or if the issuer defaults on the bond. Public Investing charges a markup on each bond trade. See our Fee Schedule. Bond Accounts are not recommendations of individual bonds or default allocations. The bonds in the Bond Account have not been selected based on your needs or risk profile. See Bond Account Disclosures to learn more. Alpha is an AI research tool powered by GPT-4. Alpha is experimental and may generate inaccurate responses. Output from Alpha should not be construed as investment research or recommendations, and should not serve as the basis for any investment decision. Public makes no warranties about its accuracy, completeness, quality, or timeliness of any Alpha out. Please independently evaluate and verify any such output for your own use case. *Terms and Conditions apply.
RESOURCES:
Looking for accountability, live coaching, and deeper financial education? Join the $100K Club
Register for our free investing workshop: https://herfirst100k.com/secrets
Feeling Overwhelmed? Start here!
Our HYSA Partner Recommendation (terms apply)
Behind the Scenes and Extended Clips on Youtube
Leave Financial Feminist a Voicemail
Financial Feminist on Instagram
Take our FREE Money Personality Quiz
Meet Ramit
Ramit Sethi is the host of Netflix’s hit show, How to Get Rich, and author of the New York Times bestseller, “I Will Teach You To Be Rich.” Ramit is known for his unconventional insights on money psychology and his no-nonsense approach to designing and living a rich life.
Born in California to Indian immigrant parents, Ramit attended Stanford University on scholarship, where he studied technology, psychology, and persuasion, earning undergraduate and graduate degrees.
Ramit began his company, I Will Teach You to Be Rich, from his college dorm room in 2004. His goal was to reframe the way we think about money. In 2009 he published his first book, “I Will Teach You to Be Rich,” which quickly became a New York Times bestseller and cemented his reputation as a leading voice in personal finance. Ramit also hosts a popular podcast called “I Will Teach You to Be Rich” which features real couples sharing real stories with real numbers from behind closed doors.
Ramit’s influence in the personal finance space has continued to expand with the recent release of Netflix’s “How to Get Rich,” which became an instant Top 10 Netflix show. The show features Ramit’s trademark practical and actionable advice and follows him as he helps real people transform their finances and take control of their financial futures.
Ramit’s financial philosophy is centered around several key principles, including the importance of automating your finances, using money psychology to prioritize your “money dials,” and focusing on $30,000 questions instead of $3 ones.
Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
Nearly half of couples say that they argue about money, and 36% say that money is a huge cause of stress in their relationships. If you’ve ever argued about money in your relationship, this episode is for you. Ramit Sethi is back to talk about all things money for couples. Let’s get into it. Hi, financial feminists, welcome to the show. I am thrilled to see you as always. Thank you for being here. My name is Tori. I’m a New York Times bestselling author. I am a money expert. I have helped over 5 million women save money, pay off debts, start investing and start businesses. And if you want a free personalized money plan for wherever you’re at in your financial journey, you can go to herfirst100k.com/quiz. That is a free financial plan, herfirst100k.com/quiz. We’re going to ask you a couple of questions to be able to deliver you the best advice for wherever you’re at right now.
Today’s episode is a great one because my friend, Ramit Sethi, is back. You know him from his book, I will Teach You To Be Rich, but you also probably know him from his Netflix show as well, which is all about money. And his specialty is money for couples. How do you manage money in a relationship? How do you have hard financial conversations? How do you both get each other on board towards your financial goals? So we are talking all about invisible money scripts today that we bring into every relationship. These are the narratives that you might not even know you’re believing or the psychological side of money that you are bringing into your relationship with your partner. We’re talking about the common money fights that Ramit sees in the couples who come on his show and what to do if you’re in a relationship where you and your partner either have very different ideas of how they want to manage money, very different incomes.
And we’re talking about if you make more than your male partner, if you’re a woman dating a man, we’re going to talk about that too. Ramit Sethi is the host of Netflix’s hit show, How To Get Rich, and the author of the New York Times bestseller, I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Ramit is known for his unconventional insights on money psychology and his no-nonsense approach to designing and living a rich life. Ramit also hosts a popular podcast called Money for Couples, which features real life couples sharing real stories with real numbers from behind closed doors. This is one that you’re going to want to share with anybody in a relationship and your own partner.
This is required sharing. Do not pass go, do not listen to the rest of this episode until you have shared it with your partner, because bonus points, if you listen to this episode together, maybe just turn it on while you’re in the car together, while you’re driving somewhere. Nice way to introduce this conversation without a lot of overwhelm or intimidation. So great episode for anybody, but especially someone who is struggling to manage money and their relationship. So let’s get into it. But first a word from our sponsors. Ramit, we’re so happy to have you back on the show. Can you tell us what you do and why is it so important?
Ramit Sethi:
If you have ever thought about going beyond a spreadsheet and living a rich life, that is what I do. I help people use their money to live a rich life. It could be traveling six weeks a year, could be buying a beautiful cashmere coat, could be being home to take your kids home from school every day. That is what I do. That is why I love what I do.
Tori Dunlap:
You have given financial advice for nearly, is it two decades now? But over the past few years, you’ve really honed in on personal finance for couples. What drew you to that specifically and why is that so important?
Ramit Sethi:
Well, my wife and I began talking about money much more seriously when we were dating. I have to admit, I violated my own rule from chapter nine of my first book where I’m like, “Talk about money early,” and I didn’t. And my wife called me on it. She said, “Hey, it doesn’t feel fair. You know everything about my finances. I don’t know anything about yours.” And that began a series of conversations including how we see money, how much we have, signing a prenup, combining our finances, even deciding on how we want to use money on a day-to-day basis. I think it’s fascinating. I think it is the combination of money and psychology. It’s super juicy and voyeuristic. I could never stop talking about this.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, you mentioned your experience with your wife, and I think it is so interesting that you knew everything about her money and she knew very little about yours. What were those first financial conversations like between both of you?
Ramit Sethi:
Well, they were one-sided because she asked me for some advice about her 401(k), something like that. And I was like, “Have you ever heard of this book, I Will Teach You To Be Rich?”
Tori Dunlap:
Ever heard of it? You might recognize the guy on the cover.
Ramit Sethi:
Yeah, that’s me. So I helped her with some 401(k) question, and as a matter of that, I knew about her income and her investments and stuff like that. It was fine. But what I forgot to do and what I failed to do was to realize that can start to feel very unbalanced when one partner in a relationship knows more about the other or just knows more about money, that doesn’t feel good. And I see this often when I speak to couples on my podcast. One partner earns more and almost naturally they become the money person, which is a big no-no. So we started talking about money and we had actually one of my favorite conversations of all, which was just, “Hey, here’s how much we both have. What do we want our life to look like?”
And it was just blue sky, it was so beautiful. Do we want to live here or there? What kind of family do we want? How often do we want to see our parents? And it was just very exploratory, brainstorming. That’s a feeling that I love and I want every couple to have that feeling regularly. That was the good stuff. But we also had a lot of tough conversations. Our conversations about a prenup started off pretty well, but then they got really hard and eventually my wife said, “Look, we should go see a therapist. This is not going the way it should be.” And so I literally went on Yelp and searched therapist near me. We went to the closest one.
Tori Dunlap:
That is the most male thing I’ve ever heard.
Ramit Sethi:
I know. She was so good though. She asked these great questions. And she said to both of us, “How do you see money? When you think of money, what word comes to mind?” She looked at me, I said, “Growth. That’s the easiest question I ever heard. I could literally see the numbers floating in front of my eyes, rule of 72, Trinity study. Just like, oh, so easy.” Then she turns to my wife, asked the same question and she goes, “Safety.” I said, “What?” I looked at her like, “What’s that word? That’s the equivalent of saying metal, look, metal. What? What does that have to do with money?”
And it really revealed that we saw money so differently. I have been an entrepreneur for 20 years. I feel safe. I feel physically safe, financially safe. That’s not a correlation for me. For her, it was. And that actually allowed us to come much more closer. It sort of made us realize, oh my gosh, we have so many things that we see money differently about, the way we were raised, our jobs. And now, we talk about money in a different way. We talk about it regularly, positively, proactively. That’s what I want for every couple.
Tori Dunlap:
We’ve both done a ton of research, both looking in the data, looking at the studies, but also talking with our audiences about how just money comes down to often upbringing, how you viewed money in relation to how your family viewed money. And even it sounds like the words you and your wife both chose have a lot to do with maybe how you were brought up around money. So what did you discover when you were researching how men and women talk about and feel about money and how is it different?
Ramit Sethi:
Well, I talked to a lot of couples and thousands of them and I always ask them, “What do you remember your family saying about money when you were a kid?” And it’s quite revealing. You can even see it in their body language. They’re almost transported back. And here we are a five-year-old and they will usually say the same two answers. The most common answer is, my mom or my dad said we can’t afford that. That is the most common. And hey, maybe it’s true. Maybe the parents couldn’t afford it. However, as a child, you hear that one times, 10 times, but 10,000 times and you internalize that you simply can’t afford it. And that is why I now speak to couples who have often done very well with their finances. They may have a high income or even millions of dollars and they still agonize over the price of blueberries.
Also, wealthy people are weird freaks. They’re obsessed with the price of berries, but that’s a whole separate issue. Freaking spreadsheets open, ooh, I’m cross categorizing. I’m doing a VLOOKUP on raspberries. Why don’t you stop doing that and get a life? Let’s focus on some stuff that matters. But that’s the most common answer. The second answer that people remember about their families saying about money is simply silence. Because most families don’t talk about money. In America, we have this tortured love-hate relationship with money. And especially for parents, they often see money as something bad to protect children from. But you would never protect your kid from learning how to ride a bike. No, you say, “Get on that bike. It’s just fun. We’re going to learn it.” And yet, parents often do not talk about money thinking, let kids be kids. And I couldn’t disagree more.
Tori Dunlap:
I mean, it’s very similar to any sort of taboo topic like sex education in schools is either typically bad or non-existent unless you get it from your parents. And the way you get it from your parents, I think shapes your relationship with sex for the rest of your life. I think the same thing with death. All of these taboo topics, if approached the right way, have the ability as children to completely transform how you view sex, death, politics, religion, money for the rest of your life. But most of us don’t have parents because they’re not equipped with the tools to be able to teach you how to be financially responsible or how to talk about money in a safe way.
Ramit Sethi:
I agree. And it’s also culturally mediated. There are certain cultures that are more open about it, certain that are not. There are certain socioeconomic groups that talk more about it. For example, I had this very fascinating couple on my podcast, I’ll never forget, she was just over 40, and she was very successful. She was a self-made entrepreneur making $200,000 per month, very successful. And she was dating a man who was just a little younger than her, late 30s. And he had recently quit his job to start his own business. He was making $25,000 per year. Now, that’s a stark difference in income. And it was causing certain issues because the primary disagreement was she wanted him to occasionally pay for dinner. She wanted to feel taken care of, makes sense to me, fine. And he actually said, “Yeah, I agree, I want to.” So they would go out to dinner once in a while and he would slip his card on the table and you know what she would do? She would push it back and she would say, “No, I want you to max out your Roth IRA.” Now, talk about…
Tori Dunlap:
So mixed signals.
Ramit Sethi:
Mixed messages, exactly. And there are so many fascinating parts of this two part episode on the Money for Couples podcast. But one thing that was revelatory was I asked her, you’re making $200,000 a month. What do you remember your family saying about money when you were a kid? She’s like, “Oh, they were talking about investing when I was five or six years old.” Of course, they were. Of course, they were. We tend to see this in higher socioeconomic families. They talk about money. It’s like a lot of families, we talk about food, we want to have a healthy relationship with food. Why don’t we have the same inclination towards money?
Tori Dunlap:
I am in a similar relationship with my partner. And I find it so interesting that story because I make a lot, a lot more than my partner. My partner, I joke as a civilian, he is not an entrepreneur, he is not a public person and works very hard at his job, but does not make a lot of money. And so we’ve had to have a lot of conversations, especially if we’re trying to go out to dinner and it’s a restaurant I choose. And for me, a money dial is food. I call him a value category. You’d call him a money dial, food out is one of my favorite things to spend money on. And so I’m choosing the restaurant that’s more expensive and it would be completely unfair if I choose the restaurant and then expect him to throw down his credit card because this is a restaurant or a lifestyle that I can afford and is now normal for me in a way that it isn’t for him.
Ramit Sethi:
So how do you navigate it? What did you decide to do?
Tori Dunlap:
I mean, if I bring up, I want to go to this restaurant, it’s on me to pay. And I think we’ve also had conversations, and we’ve discussed this on the show before, that if we were to move in together or start sharing some of the bigger expenses, a 50/50 split does not make sense. That is equal, but that is not equitable. So maybe actually, can we talk about that as a solution for folks as well? I think there is this misconception that, okay, when we start having conversations about money and I want to be an equal partner, it’s a 50/50 split, but most partners don’t have the exact same financial situation. You’re both making 75K a year, you both have $10,000 invested. Very few people have the exact same situation. So what problems does that lead to when we say, “Okay, we’re just going to split things down the middle?”
Ramit Sethi:
Excellent question. When you’re dating, things are relatively simple. I don’t encourage people who are dating to combine their incomes in general. So it’s like, hey, we’re going out and maybe one partner picks up dinner, the other picks up drinks, or however you decide to split it, as long as you both feel good about it, great.
Tori Dunlap:
Can we pause there? How do you have that conversation? Because I know there’s some people listening of like, how do I bring up, “Hey, I’m going to cover dinner, if you can cover ice cream after or whatever that looks like, I’ll cover dinner, you cover the movie?”
Ramit Sethi:
Let’s start at the beginning. Let’s start with dating. When should you talk about money? Okay, take it from the guy who didn’t follow my own advice and talked about it too late. Everybody listened to what I’m saying, not what I did. Okay. The frequent advice in the personal finance world is you should talk about money as early as possible. First date, I’m like, you guys have never been on a first date, get a life. That’s not how people, you’re pulling out your freaking Roth IRA on date one. Hey everybody, look, Vanguard. No, by date three or four, you probably like the person a little bit, you’re curious about them. That’s a great time. As you’re learning more about them to start asking genuinely curious questions. Hey, where’d you grow up? What’d you guys do for the holidays?
And I’m listening for clues. If they’re like, “Oh, every December we go to Aspen.” Oh wow, that’s quite interesting. Or if like my family for vacation, we got in our minivan and drove from Northern California to Southern California to visit our family. That’s also telling. So I’m not asking numbers, but I’m genuinely curious and I’m kind of putting together a little collage of what I know about this person. A great time to start talking more substantively about money is the first time you take a trip together. It can be the first trip, first nice dinner. It’s that first moment where the stakes are a little higher, and I want to tell the exact phrase that I encourage you to use in this moment, adapt this for whatever relationship status you’re in.
You go to your partner and you say, “Hey, I’m so excited about this trip we get to take, I can’t wait for us to spend five days together and be by the ocean, it’s going to be amazing. I took a look at my numbers and I have a sense of what I can afford, but I would love to hear from you, how are you thinking about money for this trip?” Now, let me break down what I did in three parts. First, I got excited. I always pin it to the north star, the rich life vision. I’m so excited. I appreciate you. I love spending time with you. That’s number one.
Tori Dunlap:
And it’s not about money at all actually. And we’ll come back to what you did with your partner, but it’s what I advise people to do too, which is like how do we use money as a tool to build the life that we want? It actually has nothing to do with money originally. It’s like we want to do this thing, which is travel. I’m so excited for that. So it takes money out of the conversation for a second before things start getting a little more serious.
Ramit Sethi:
Always start with appreciation and a reminder of what we’re doing and why we get to do it. The next thing I did is very important, too often people give away their power when it comes to money. And the way they do this is they say, “What do you think?” No, what do you think? You better know your numbers before you start a conversation about money, you’re actually delegating your power and your authority by going, what do you think? That’s actually unacceptable. I have a lot of compassion for money. I have infinite compassion for people who don’t understand how savings and investing works, but I have very little patience when people willingly give away their power and then turn around and say, “Hey, it doesn’t feel fair.”
So in part two you say, “Look, I ran my numbers. I have a sense of what I can afford,” which is amazing. And then politely you say, “But I’m curious what you think.” And that’s part three, which engaging in a dialogue, right? I’m not coming in there guns blazing, “Hey, look at how much my savings rate is.” No. It’s like, “Hey, let’s talk and I have a number, maybe you don’t have a number, but let’s figure out what this looks like for us.” Now, adapt that to the first time you go out to eat at a fancy restaurant or when one of you buys a gift for the other and you’re thinking about holiday gifts, et cetera. It’s pinning it at the north star, making sure you maintain your power and engaging in a dialogue.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay, that’s so helpful. I want to then ask the question that’s on everybody’s minds, which is what are the red flags when we are dating and we start to have these conversations that spark that, oh, this might not be a healthy relationship, and what are the absolute deal breakers? If we’re having this conversation and something happens, how do we know this is not fixable or this is not solvable?
Ramit Sethi:
To me, there’s one deal breaker when it comes to money, absolute deal breaker. And that is if your partner is unwilling to talk about money. We can work with a lot, but if they’re not willing to talk about it, if they are simply shut down, if they shame you for bringing it up and they might use language like this, “Why do you always have to bring up money? Can’t we have one night where we don’t talk about money?” That’s a method of simply shutting you down. That’s a red flag to me. I have a second red flag, not as severe, but pretty bad. And that’s cheap, people, listen, I can fix a lot, but I can’t fix cheap. People who are cheap actually revel in being cheap and they’ve actually created an identity where they are virtuous for being cheap.
Oh me, little old me, simple Ramit, I don’t need that fancy wine or Topo Chico or type of car because I am a simple virtuous man who simply exists with a 35-year-old cotton shirt. It’s not cute. It’s not cool and it actually is very difficult to change. So I don’t mind if someone’s like, “Hey, I actually don’t really care about nice hotels or eating out isn’t really like my thing. I prefer to eat at home.” That’s fine. But there’s a difference between being a conscious spender and being cheap. And when you’re cheap, it affects the people around you and you always lead with cost and that’s a red flag.
Tori Dunlap:
We’ve talked about this before on the show, but I love it when you talk about these invisible scripts, can we explain what’s going on from a psychological perspective? How might these show up for adults but specifically in relationships when we are starting to have these financial conversations?
Ramit Sethi:
Invisible scripts are beliefs that are so deeply held that they are invisible to us. I’ll give you a few examples of invisible scripts we have. In America, you need to buy a house to be successful. I know you and I both share those laughter over this. So that’s one invisible script. We genuinely believe it. Let me give you another invisible script. If you work hard, you can get ahead. I think that’s in general a positive invisible script. I think it can be taken a bit far in the individualism of it, but in general, I think it’s good. Another invisible script is you should go to college. And when it comes to money, oh, there’s a lot. Some of them would be, we don’t have enough or inflation is crazy. I get this one a lot. Inflation isn’t, grocery prices are insane. I go, “Really? Are they? Can you show me how much you spend on groceries?”
Oh no, I don’t keep receipts and I don’t track any of it, but it’s crazy. The way we feel about money is highly uncorrelated to the actual amount in our bank account. And you can multiply that by a thousand when it comes to how you feel about the economy. And so with invisible scripts, we often have stories that guide our thoughts about money, our behavior with money and our feelings about money. Common ones in relationships would be, we don’t have enough. I spoke to a couple last night on my podcast and they were concerned they don’t have enough. They were a high earning couple. And she said to me, “It feels like we live paycheck to paycheck.” First of all, I fucking hate that phrase, the median American does not live paycheck to paycheck.
The median American has a net worth of $193,000 and $8,000 in their checking and savings accounts. That’s an invisible script that has pervaded culture because of a fake survey that was made up by a marketing firm. So she goes, “It feels like we don’t have enough money. All we do is just live. We have no money to save and spend.” We go through her numbers. They’re putting aside thousands and thousands of dollars a month for retirement. They’re also spending thousands and thousands of dollars on eating out and on luxury items. So I don’t mind that we all have strong feelings about money, feelings are real, emotions matter. But sometimes your emotions are not telling you the truth. And so in order to live a rich life, we have to do two things. The first, you got to know your numbers, you have to know your numbers.
It’s unacceptable to say, “I’m not a money person,” yeah, yet, but you’re about to pick up a book and learn it. That’s number one. You got to know your four key numbers from my CSP. You have to understand what compound interest is. It’s a basic simple language of money. It’s not hard. The second thing is you got to master your money psychology. And that means you really have to work on acknowledging the invisible scripts you have about money, probably starting in childhood. You’ve got to ask yourself, how do I want to feel about money? And you have to develop a practice, which I know we both talk about in terms of feeling good about money and building confidence through competence.
Tori Dunlap:
In that example you gave of the couple you talked to last night, that tells me everything I need to know, which is again, it’s not about money. And most of the problems that we think are about money have nothing to do with the actual stack of bills in our bank account. It is the feeling of not having enough or feeling of being unsafe. And you were mentioning being paycheck to paycheck. There are people out there as we know who are actually living truly paycheck to paycheck, indent, new paragraph. But there’s a whole set of people who say, I’m living paycheck to paycheck, almost as their way of not having to engage with money. If you have a Netflix subscription, you’re not living paycheck to paycheck.
It’s like you are not in actual survival mode. So I think that it is important for us to get honest with ourselves. Are we actually in deep financial ruin or poverty? Because there are plenty of millions of people out there who feel that way. And then there are people who are paycheck to paycheck because they mindlessly spend or because they’re not owning their money choices. And I think there is a huge difference between both of those that I want to make sure people acknowledge for themselves of like, are you actually there or are you just ignoring the problems so that you’re there because of it?
Ramit Sethi:
I agree. I agree. By the time people turn 40, their number one worry is money. And yet, almost nobody has read a single book on personal finance. Okay. Now, I want to say that’s the personal responsibility part, which is even if you’re in $50,000 of credit card debt as the couple was last night, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. We can work with that. I talk to people who have $500,000 of student loans. We can work with that. However, I also think it should just be a little bit easier.
I don’t think the world should be stacked against us in every way, trying to figure out how to read an insurance prospectus or propose… What? It’s so confusing, trying to figure out if Wall Street is ripping us off. And by the way, they are. That’s confusing. Trying to get housing because of NIMBYs who prevent new supply from being built means housing is so expensive for everyone, that shouldn’t be as hard as it is. So I want to acknowledge all that as well. And I also want to say we got to take control of what we can.
Tori Dunlap:
When we come back, Ramit and I are diving into the most common money fights, how to get a partner who is ambivalent about money to get more involved, especially when one partner makes more than the other. We’ll see you after this word from our sponsors. Let’s talk about some of the common money fights you see in couples. Can we list them? Can we talk about what’s going right and what’s going wrong and how we can fix it?
Ramit Sethi:
Most common money fights is one person pointing the finger at the other. And it almost always goes like this, “I can’t believe you spent that much at Target. I can’t believe you bought energy drinks again at the gas station.” It’s very common. And then they each go to their respective corners of the boxing ring, they point fingers, I can’t believe you do that. How are we ever going to save for the kids? We have to repair this thing in our house. And then they go to sleep, sleep on opposite ends of the bed and they wake up in the morning and pretend it didn’t happen until it does six weeks again. That is the classic money fight.
Now, I want to point out a couple of things about that fight. Number one, the only time most couples talk about money is when they fight. That’s it. No couple sits down. Almost none. Oh, let’s do Ramit Sethi’s agenda. Hey, let’s start with a compliment. Oh my gosh, look at our four key CSP numbers. Nobody’s doing that. That’s why I wrote a freaking book. So they fight and they only do it reactively. It’s put like this. People hate flossing. Okay, you know what they hate more than flossing? Planning 40 years from now how much they’re going to have to floss.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, it’s reactive. It’s not proactive ever.
Ramit Sethi:
It’s totally reactive. And then one final thing, which drives me absolutely insane. Hey, let’s spend the next 30 years of our relationship fighting over a $3 turnip at the grocery store. You all are wasting your lives asking $3 questions instead of asking $30,000 questions. You know what I would love to hear before I die? I’ve only been doing this 20 years. Hey, I’d love to hear a couple having a drop-down battle eviscerating each other over their savings rate. I said 5.5%. You said 6.5%. The differences over $360,000 over our lifetime. They never had that conversation. No, they’re busy arguing about how much you spent on radishes, a complete waste of life. The amount of coffee you buy is probably not going to materially change your life.
The amount you spend on energy drinks while stupid and bad for your health, probably not going to change your life as well. In fact, if you want to buy energy drinks and you love it, I’ll find a way to make sure you can buy those energy drinks in your guilt free spending category. But you are playing small. When you sit there and fight about $5, $10, $20 expenses, and you ignore the $30,000 questions, what’s our savings rate? What’s our investment rate? What’s our asset allocation? What’s our debt payoff date, the exact month and year will be debt free? When will we have $1 million? And what does that even mean? And most importantly, what is our rich life?
Tori Dunlap:
One of the questions we got from our community that I think I hear more than anything else other than we fight about money is probably one of us is involved and the other one isn’t, I care so much and I try to get my partner to care. And they just go, maybe the well-intentioned version is just like, no, you’ve got it, you know more than me versus complete apathy. So how if you are on the involved side, well, let’s assume you are, you’re listening to this show. You’re the involved one, right? You’re the one that is actually interested and your partner’s not, how do you get them to care? And at what point is it then a red flag where we talking about before where the person isn’t willing to talk about money at all? How do you know the version of the relationship where it’s like, actually, this isn’t working at all anymore?
Ramit Sethi:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s a really tough question, but it’s so common in many, many, many relationships. You have one person who is “the money person.”
Tori Dunlap:
Right.
Ramit Sethi:
And actually, they chase their partner. They chase them figuratively. They chase them literally to get them to please engage with money. Please sit down and can we talk for 10 minutes and not have you start a fight about it? And this is a really tough situation. You don’t want to feel like you are the only person in the relationship pulling the other partner. No. You’d rather be both holding hands and going against the wind and doing it together because you can give each other strength. And you know what? Sometimes in life one of you falls, one of you gets laid off, one of you steps back for family reasons. That’s okay, that’s natural. But it sure feels good to know your partner’s by your side holding your hand and they can pick you up when that happens. If you are in this situation, first off, I would suggest you understand the four different money types.
One of them is an avoider. I write about this in the new book and avoiders use a series of conscious and unconscious techniques to avoid money. When you read this, you will recognize your partner because they will say things like, “Oh, you know what? You’re better at money than I am. Or I’m just not a math person.” There are very specific phrases that I’ve cataloged in there. And what this will help you do, it’s not meant to get you mad, you’ve already been mad enough. It’s meant to help you understand what is their money type and how do you relate to that money type to reach them? The good news is you can reach an avoider. The hard part is not only will you have to go through a process, and sadly you will probably have to take on the emotional labor of helping them to change, but you’re actually going to have to take a hard look in the mirror because partners of avoiders often have a hand in their partner’s avoidance, like let me put it bluntly.
If you didn’t take care of the bills, would they? Probably. Probably if you left for six weeks for some reason, would they make sure that the household kept running? Probably. And so part of it, not to blame anybody, but simply to acknowledge the reality of the situation is that when a partner continues avoiding, the other partner, the one who’s in the chase or avoider dynamic often chases them more and picks up more of the slack. And it is really hard for you to say, you know what? I have to be willing to let a couple of things go and it might fall down and shatter, as long as it’s not going to destroy this family, I have to recalibrate our relationship. So I have some very specific techniques in there, but in general, I would say it’s common. You will both have to re-conceptualize your relationship with each other and with money. And you can use the word for word scripts in the book to help get that going.
Tori Dunlap:
I also want to acknowledge for people who are in heteronormative relationships, and if you are a woman, stereotypically still the man in the relationship is handling the money, is handling especially a lot of the bigger financial decisions, the investing.
Ramit Sethi:
Can we talk about this?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, sure.
Ramit Sethi:
I’m sorry to cut you off.
Tori Dunlap:
No, please.
Ramit Sethi:
This drives me insane and I just have to make a point, especially because I know your audience. They are so loyal to you and they listen. Okay. Over 50% of the time when I’m talking to couples, I’m speaking to them and I have all kinds of relationships, heterosexual, gay, all kinds of relationships. Men, women, older, younger, all cultures. And in a heterosexual relationship, I’ll ask them, “What’s your role? What is your role in the finances of the family?” And so almost always, it goes like this. The man goes, “Well, she does the day-to-day and I do the big decisions.” I go, “Okay, what does that mean, big decisions?” Oh, investing, buying a house. Okay. I go, “All right,” I’m already getting very suspicious already. My antenna are going up. Then I turn to her. I say, “Is that accurate?” She goes, “Yeah, I do the day-to-day.” I go, “What does that mean?” She goes, “Paying the bills.”
Okay, listen, I’m going to be very direct here. If you believe that managing money is paying the bills, you are playing small, paying the bills is not as valuable as so many other parts of the personal finance system that you have in your family. A computer can pay your bills better than you can. That’s why I don’t pay mine myself. It’s automated. A computer can do that better than you or I ever can. So if I were to simply say like, “Ooh, let me log into my Chase account and pay it off,” that’s not a valuable use of my time. In order to be a valuable member, a partner in a relationship, we want to be focusing on the things that are important components of a rich life.
Valuable things would be determining what are our four key numbers? What’s our savings rate? Do we have a debt payoff plan? Hey, what’s our rich life? Are we aligned? Those are valuable. But I hate seeing people play small. I hate it. It’s a tragedy to live a smaller life than you have to. And managing money is not paying bills. That’s actually small. That’s playing small. I want everyone to play big, much bigger than logging into account and manually transferring money over. No, I want you to be living your rich life. I want you to be strategizing with money. I want you to be involved in the investments. That is the level of big that I want everyone to be playing.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay, so let’s talk about this. This is always I wish we were in person because this is one of those where I want to connect with you one-on-one because I completely agree with that. My entire platform is like, yes, grocery shopping, bills, fine. But no, we need to be investing. We need to be negotiating our salaries, we need to be starting businesses. And I completely agree with the $3 versus $30,000 decisions. I also know that we live in a society and we were talking about money scripts before. I know from the data that I found in my book, the societal expectation is that men know how to do these things and so they should handle it. And that women don’t have the skills or don’t have the expertise to invest. And of course, we know that’s bullshit.
Ramit Sethi:
Bullshit.
Tori Dunlap:
No, I agree. I think that this is also part of the scripts though, where yes, I think at the individual level, we can start taking responsibility and going, “You know what? I am going to learn how to invest as a woman. I am going to figure out how to negotiate my salary. I am going to figure out what our debt payoff plan is.” I just also want to acknowledge for people listening that you grew up in a society where men and women were not really allowed to talk about money, but it’s more societally acceptable for men to talk about money and to pursue money and to think strategically about those big decisions. So I do think that is what you’re battling if you are a woman dating a man where society expects men to handle this one thing and you to handle the other thing. So it is then on you unfortunately as the individual to then say, “No, I’m going to be an active participant.”
Ramit Sethi:
Listen, I agree. There’s a lot of historical reasons as you talk about frequently in your book and on your social media. Women were not allowed to have their own bank accounts until very recently in American history. That’s crazy.
Tori Dunlap:
1974.
Ramit Sethi:
Yeah, most men have no idea. And so when we talk about things like secret accounts, there’s a whole thing I cover in the book. There are gender-based differences with money. And the reason that I’m getting so mad and so passionate about this is that I hate seeing the expectations of playing small that have been placed on women with money. I want to give you an example that just happened to me. I was on book tour. I went to a bunch of cities across the country and I have been doing these larger theaters and we had this just beautiful theater in Chicago. I was doing my show at. Before the show, my team came into town and we all met and we went and did this cool dinner theater thing. And we came and we’re going to take a photo and we were in one of the upper wings of the theater and it was a little crowded. So we start to get all together. The photographer was there and I noticed several women crouching down.
I hate the sorority squad, I hate it. To me, it is playing small. And actually, nobody expects, the way I think about it’s when I’m taking a photo, the people behind me, they can figure it out themselves. This is my height, this is who I am. Boom. So I said, “No crouching. I want everybody up. Take up space.” And there was a little surprise around the room because you never really heard that before. Take up space. You are you, take up space. That’s the same thing in money. We don’t need to crouch down for somebody else. People behind us can take care of themselves. It’s not my responsibility. I’m here for me and I want that for money. Man or woman, I want us to decide what is our rich life. I want us to be cognizant of the invisible scripts that exist. I’m not saying we all can break out of everything, that’s obviously unrealistic.
I know my parents are immigrants. I know I grew up in an immigrant family, but I also know that when it comes to money, I can’t imagine going the rest of my life simply accepting cultural scripts. Because if I accepted the cultural scripts for me, think about it, I would be working as a software engineer somewhere. I would probably be the money person in my relationship. My wife and I wouldn’t really talk about it. I’d be handling it all. And that’s not the life I want. So I want to encourage all of us. Yes, I acknowledge there are a lot of money messages out there, a lot of invisible scripts. We can’t fight against all of them. That’s not our job. But I don’t like the crouching, I don’t like it physically, I don’t like it financially. I think we can stand up tall and take up space.
Tori Dunlap:
No, I completely agree. And I mean I would be living a very different life if I had made the “right choices” for me, my gender or what society believes my gender should do. No, I completely agree. I mean, speaking of playing big, let’s talk about breadwinners and let’s talk specifically about when women are the breadwinners in relationships. I know from research from my book, you might’ve found this for yours too, in heteronormative relationships, there was a study done that in census data, if the woman made more than the man, the woman would lie and say she made less. And the man would say, “No, I made more,” and lie as well. So can we talk about some of what’s going on, both from the invisible script, patriarchal norm of it all, but also actionably, how do we navigate, especially when a woman is the breadwinner in a heteronormative relationship?
Ramit Sethi:
What’s happening more and more commonly in major cities, women in their 20s earn more than men, and a lot of people don’t know that, it’s happening more and more. And that presents a series of troubling, fascinating challenges and opportunities. My view, there’s so many ways we can analyze what is going on. What I look at primarily is there has never been a model for this before now. Of course, there were exceptions in the past, but in general for a variety of reasons, men earned more. But that’s changing and it’s changing fast. And so when you are experiencing a sociological difference in incomes, gender roles, expectations, career paths, family planning, boy, it becomes very confusing to men and women alike. Now, we can’t lean back on past history. That’s part of what the murkiness of today is.
In the past, if you look at “traditional family structure,” it was like, okay, dad goes to work, mom stays home, 2.5 kids and a white picket fence, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It was a clear model. And if there’s one thing masses of people like, it’s a clear model. Tell me what to do. Oh, I should buy a car and a house to be successful. Cool, I’ll get a dog too. But suddenly, you have people getting married later, et cetera. So I work on an individual level, although I studied sociology, I work with individuals and my question always for them is, what’s your rich life? What does it look like for you? And I spend a lot of time with people, hours and hours when I talk to them because this is a very hard question. How can you ask somebody what your rich life is when the largest extent they’ve really thought about is I want to travel.
Tori Dunlap:
Right.
Ramit Sethi:
And now, I’m asking them like, “Hey, wait a minute.” In a heterosexual relationship, if she earns three times as much as he does, it’s all nice to say like, “Oh yeah, kumbaya, everything’s great. Okay, who’s doing the laundry? Who’s cooking? Who’s waking up when the baby’s crying?” These are real questions. And I don’t mind if the couple goes, “You know what? She makes more, but we’ve decided we prefer this type of ‘traditional relationship.'” Okay, as long as you talk about it and it’s fair to you, cool. But most couples don’t talk about it. They actually don’t talk about it. Even though one partner in the example I’m using, she’s earning two, three times more. And that is actually the worst of all worlds. How can she be earning three times more? You don’t talk about it at all. And suddenly, she’s waking up every night and doing the laundry. It actually doesn’t make any sense unless you talked about it.
So it is critical for couples to start the conversational muscle from as early as possible. Start talking about it when you’re dating. You don’t have to talk about every little last thing, but hey, how would you feel if this? Do you want to live on a farm? No, I want to live in a high rise. What if one of us got injured? Do we expect our parents to live with us? Again, you don’t have to have the right answers, you just have to be able to flex the muscle of talking about it. Life is going to be infinitely challenging with its varied situations that it confronts you with. Somebody will get laid off, somebody will get in a car accident. If you’ve built up that muscle of talking about it and realizing we’re a team, sometimes one of us is going to be in the lead. Sometimes another’s going to be in the lead, realizing that the lead doesn’t only relate to money, but overall relationship contributions, then we can find a way to work together in our relationship.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, things are heating up when we come back, we are talking about resentment in relationships. So stay tuned. Can you speak about resentment when one person is the breadwinner?
Ramit Sethi:
I see it a lot. I see it a lot. I ask couples a lot, how do you feel about money? And I will say, I want to spend a second speaking to the gentlemen listening today. I know you have a lot of women listening, but I also know you have a lot of men. When I’ve spoken to couples, even when I was on tour recently, I brought couples up live on stage. And these are not actors. These are real people. I only know a teeny bit about them. And it all unfolds live in front of a huge audience. And very often, I was speaking to men and I would ask them, “How do you feel?” And they would say, “Well, I think we can do this.” I say, “Hold on a second. My question was, how do you feel?” And they’re startled. This is me. This was me at age 22. If you asked 22-year-old Ramit, how do you feel about X? I would’ve instantly said, “Well, I think it’s about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
I had no ability to tap into my feelings. I was raised an Indian guy. We didn’t talk about feelings, especially not for Indian boys. And that is true of a lot of men, especially in certain cultures. And so I’ll ask the audience, “Hey, how many men in here struggle to connect to your feelings?” At least 50% of men raise their hand. It is really hard to build the skill of tapping into your feelings. I’m not talking about just for men. I’m talking about for everybody. My wife and I, we’ve seen a therapist. She actually gave us something called the wheel of emotions. It’s fucking awesome. I needed it. I needed like a beginning wine taster needs that little wheel of oaky, whatever. I needed it because, well, I’m going to tell you something. This just happened. My book came out, got on the New York Times Bestseller list, and she calls me, well, we talked and she goes, “Oh my God, it’s amazing, da, da, da.” I was on tour. She goes, “How do you feel?” And I was like, “Good.” And she literally said…
Tori Dunlap:
That’s not an emotion.
Ramit Sethi:
I know. I know. I mean, I’ve been working on this for 20 years. And that was my natural reaction. She called me on it too. She goes, “Listen, you’re not allowed to say good. Give me another word.” And I was like, “I really wish I had my wheel of emotions.” So I share all of this to say I know how hard it is to talk about feelings, yeah, especially for men but for everybody, because so many times, either we don’t have access to our feelings or our feelings around money are all negative. I’m scared, I’m worried, I’m anxious, I’m overwhelmed, I’m ashamed. In relationships, too often we do this thing where most of the time we feel bad about money. But when we start talking about it on those rare moments where we talk about it, suddenly we turn into spreadsheet analysts, “Hey, look at this number. The $4.50 actually doesn’t reconcile over there.”
It would be much better to say, “You know what? I have some questions about some of our spending, but I actually don’t even want to talk about that today. I actually am just so excited to get a chance to talk to you about money.” And I’m actually going to share how to have your first positive conversation about money now, whether you’re dating or you’re married 30 years, you can use this. You start off and it’s four parts. It’s very simple. You go, “Hey, I’m so excited we get a chance to talk about money. I realize in the past when we’ve talked about money, it hasn’t really gone the way I wanted to. I think sometimes maybe I’m a little overbearing, but I’m excited because I want to do this together.” Part one is just you pinning it to the North Star and maybe even acknowledging with a little vulnerability, something you are not the best at.
Part two, right now when we talk about money, I feel worried. I feel anxious, I feel alone. How about you? What I’m doing there is I’m talking about my feelings, but then I’m also engaging my partner. I want it to be a discussion, not a monologue. Part three, when I think about money, I want to feel calm, confident, connected. How about you and your partner shares what they know? And part four, so simply you just say, “Hey, when should we talk next?” That’s it. Give each other a big old hug and a big kiss and call it a day. You don’t need to be talking about your freaking estate plan, not on the first conversation. Just have fun. Give each other a hug. Good job, babe. High five. And that’s it. That is how we start to feel good about money.
Tori Dunlap:
I think it was Terry Crews who talked about when he was training people one-on-one doing fitness training, he would have them drive to the gym every day for a week, but not go in. And he’s like, “I need them to get comfortable, grow the habit of just drive to the gym, you don’t even have to leave your car. Just sit in your car and then drive home.” And that’s kind of what we’re doing, which is just like, “You’re not even talking about money really, you’re talking about how you feel about money.”
And then once the training wheels are off, once you’ve gone to the gym and driven to the gym for a week, then we can start to have conversations. But I agree, I think one of the most harmful things you can do is listen to this podcast and go, “Oh my gosh, I need to go talk to my partner about money, honey, we don’t have a will. We need life insurance. We don’t have a retirement plan. We don’t know what our rich life is.” Don’t take that away from this episode of just diving into the deep end because it will not go well.
Ramit Sethi:
Yeah, I love what you said. I totally agree that gym example is so good, by the way. It’s amazing.
Tori Dunlap:
Isn’t that funny? It’s so good.
Ramit Sethi:
Too often we let our anxieties in our head come out with stream of consciousness. And you got to stop that, everybody. I know on the internet these days, no one’s being directive. Okay, I am Ramit Sethi, stop that. It’s actually not helping you. It’s making you spin up even more. And it’s driving your partner away. Your anxiety may be real, but that is not something for you to dump on your partner.
Tori Dunlap:
Yes.
Ramit Sethi:
In fact, a much better way is to deal with that on your own. Get mental health help, get a therapist, read a book, practice. Literally, record yourself and then listen to it. That’s amazing. Try it. But also, when you talk to your partner, you got to remember, ask yourself, how do I want to show up? Okay. Sometimes I even do caricatures with my guests on my show. I’ll have a guest who’s incredibly fearful of money. Every time they talk about it, they’re always catastrophizing and asking the worst thing. I go, “Who’s that person? They’re sitting on your shoulder. What’s their name?” And I’ll make them give them a name, catastrophizing Carrie. I go, “What’s Carrie wearing?” And she’s like, I get them to really visualize it, “She’s wearing a tattered shirt.” It’s like, “She’s not the kind of person you want to take advice from.”
And then I say, “Who do you want to take advice from on your other shoulder?” And it’s calm Colleen, what is Colleen wearing? A very stylish piece of clothing that appeals to you. How does she look? She takes a deep breath before she answers and she smiles. And she even acknowledges when she doesn’t know something. Calm Colleen isn’t expected to know everything, but she will say, “You know what? I don’t know the answer to that, but let me find out and I’ll get back to you.” So we have to remember, every time we show up, whether with ourselves or with our partner, we are creating a groove. And over time, that groove calcifies. So if you’re always showing up anxious, if you’re always worrying about what can go wrong, boy, your partner’s probably not going to be drawn to that.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s like you’re reading my mind because what I was literally going to say is, one, you can’t dump your own stuff on your partner. And if I’m an external processor, you got to go do that in therapy. You got to go do that with a friend. You got to go do that somewhere else. And the second thing is something that my therapist, I see my therapist, my partner sees our therapist, and then we see her together. And one of the things she tells us all the time is you have to bring your best self to this relationship. And I know that sounds so obvious, but you have to decide what version of me am I going to bring into this conversation? And if it is the one that has not processed any of the external bullshit, that is not your best self in this relationship.
Ramit Sethi:
Right on.
Tori Dunlap:
Can we talk about how all of these things might show up differently or uniquely in queer relationships?
Ramit Sethi:
Well, I speak to several different queer partners on my podcast. I’ll tell you something interesting. We make it a point to reach out to LGBTQ community and we really want to represent everybody. We’ve had several gay female couples, several, and it’s really fascinating. Could not get a gay male couple to come on the podcast.
Tori Dunlap:
I’ll give you some names.
Ramit Sethi:
Please. I want to talk to them. And so listen, we make it… I’m asking my producers and my team like, “What are we doing? What can we try?” I reached out to one of my gay friends, I said, “Hey, I’m trying, what’s going on here? What am I not doing? What am I missing? Because clearly I have a blind spot.” And he said something really interesting to me. He said, “If I didn’t know you, I would not come on the show because I would think you’re a bro. And I’ve been hurt by a lot of bros before.” And I was like, “Fuck, that’s honest. That’s really honest.” So it hurts to hear, but I also get it.
At least I get it from where I sit, from what I can understand, I’m proud to say we had our first gay male couple on stage on book tour. It was awesome. They were young, 23 years old, creating a rich life. That was amazing. But I will say it’s a challenge. I do see the dynamics are slightly different with the couples I’ve seen because we don’t have the heterosexual male-female dynamic that is so common. But I don’t really feel knowledgeable enough to speak confidently from such a small group that I’ve had the chance to speak to.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, I think that in my experience talking with some community members, I think that one of the big things that shows up is ironically because the gender roles aren’t there, there’s then the conversation of what is our role then? And so I think that that tends to be one of the first hangups for queer couples is speaking of charting a new course, right? We have a lot of data and history on traditional relationships. So it’s almost the same problem in a different way. It’s like, okay, we’re not doing the traditional heteronormative relationships anymore. So there’s that issue. But we’re also, of course, then we can’t do that either. So I think that that tends to be one of the first problems is it’s like, what is my role? And I’m putting that in quotes in this relationship if those roles hasn’t been predetermined for me.
Ramit Sethi:
Really interesting. Yeah, I’d love to learn more as I go through this journey.
Tori Dunlap:
Ramit, I literally wrote this down to ask you about 20 minutes ago. We can cut this if you don’t want to talk about it, but the bro comment brought this up for me. One of the things that I respect so much about you is around 2020, I think it was a tweet you said, everybody’s been saying this whole time in my career as someone who writes and speaks about personal finance that politics doesn’t have a place in personal finance. And I remember very distinctly in 2020, you were like, “I believe that for a really long time and I’m not doing that anymore.”
And it was one thing that, to be 100% honest with you, I was like, first of all about time. And second of all, it was really refreshing because I did see you as one of the more traditional personal finance people that wasn’t going to talk about politics. And it was kind of disappointing. And I loved that shift for you. Can we talk maybe about why that shift happened and what compelled you to be like, “No, we do have to have a conversation about how politics and systemic oppression impact our money?”
Ramit Sethi:
Yeah. Thank you for asking and thank you for noticing and I appreciate the call-out. I think it was time. It was time far before that. I believe that comment happened in 2016 when Trump got elected.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, sorry. Okay, got it.
Ramit Sethi:
I’ve been liberal for a long time. The more successful I’ve become, the more liberal I’ve become.
Tori Dunlap:
Truly, me too.
Ramit Sethi:
Yeah. And I grew up, the son of two Indian immigrants, they came here packed up. My mom had never been on a plane before and she flew across the country to meet my dad who she had married seven days earlier.
Tori Dunlap:
Wow.
Ramit Sethi:
I grew up very lucky. I grew up with two educated parents who taught me to work hard. We were middle class, we didn’t eat out that much. We ate out when we had a coupon and it was maybe every six weeks. When it came time for college, they said, “You’re going to college, you’re Indian, but we don’t have any money. So you better find some scholarships.” And I did. I like to work hard and I was also lucky. With a single flip of a switch or a tiny change in some genetic thing or where I was born, my life could have been completely different. I still go back to India. I see my family a lot and there are systemic reasons for my success. Yeah, of course, I work hard, of course. But I could work this hard in a different country and I would have nowhere near the level of success. That is real. That is true. And having grown up in both cultures, I know how hard so many people work in different countries and you simply cannot achieve what you achieve. I notice you’re tearing up right now.
Tori Dunlap:
I’m crying. You’re going into podcast host mode, which I appreciate. I mean, it’s just a hard time to be alive right now. And one of the things I committed to was that after the race and presidential election, I wasn’t going to get wrapped up in what they call them. We can do hard things, the MAGA riptide of it all. So I wasn’t going to be constantly elevated by something that the Trump administration did or said. And when I just think I have that feeling about myself a lot too, where I am so lucky for what I have and it’s luck and its privilege. And if I was born in a different era, a different country with a different skin color, my life would be very different. And you just start to think about our work is so important and it’s also, this is so much bigger than us.
And I think about that a lot. And it’s something that sometimes scares me because you and I, I think, are very good at, of course, making an impact and teaching people to control what they can control. And there’s also so much outside of our control that feels really scary right now. And I was also just moved by your story because it’s so true. It’s like we are both so lucky and privileged, but we also have things that are not privileges. And so I’m just thankful for the people who do this work, even when it’s inconvenient. And even when it’s not smart, it’s not a smart business decision, you and I have both been very outspoken and I don’t know about you. It’s cost me a lot of money. It’s cost me a lot of money. It’s cost me a lot of opportunities. But I wouldn’t do anything different because I think that’s my responsibility.
Ramit Sethi:
One of the funniest things that happens, I get a lot of trolls because I talk about politics. Money is…
Tori Dunlap:
You get so many trolls. It’s so funny.
Ramit Sethi:
Well, they have no chance.
Tori Dunlap:
And they’re so different than my trolls. They’re so different.
Ramit Sethi:
Listen, I’ve been waiting for 20 years to meet a smart troll. They’re not smart.
Tori Dunlap:
No.
Ramit Sethi:
I’m like, “Please bring me somebody who’s smart.” I’m eating a bagel with my left hand and just verbally eviscerating these losers with my right hand. It’s so easy. I’m like, “You got anything? Come on, I’ve been online for 20 years. You don’t have anything?” Anyway, one thing that happens a lot is they start to give me advice as if I would take advice from Lord of War 52868 online. I’m like…
Tori Dunlap:
As if you need it. Yeah, as if you need it.
Ramit Sethi:
So, they go, “Ramit, you really shouldn’t, first of all, stick to finance.” 100% of the people who tell me that are white guys. And I post their picture too. I have a whole thread on Twitter where I literally post their picture, thank you for your advice to stick to finance. I’ll tell you to stick to mustard, which is all your entire feed is about. But they give me advice. It’s going to hurt your business. I’m like, “If it costs me $1, fine. If it costs me $1 million, so be it.” When I was learning US history in high school, I read about Nazis. When I studied cults and deception at Stanford, I learned about many different cults around the world. And I thought, wow, that’s horrible and intellectually interesting, but that can never happen here.
And when you realize we’re no different than anybody before us, we are human and history does repeat itself, then if I can’t speak up, a person who has been very fortunate, who’s worked hard, has become very successful, who has a worldwide platform and a lot of money. If I can’t speak up, then who can? I’ll take the arrows from Lord of War, the loser online please. But what I want is for people to know you’re not alone. You’re not crazy. There are certain things that are simply wrong. Like denying election results, like denying vaccines, like trying to lower taxes on guys like me. I don’t need the tax refund. Okay, I have plenty of money. What I need is for social services to be increased. And it’s okay to say that. And you’re not crazy to be public about it.
Tori Dunlap:
Plus one, all of that. Thank you. When we come back after a word from our sponsors, we’re doing a rapid fire to end our conversation. Okay. I have a rapid fire for you. Switch gears. Hold on. I’m going to take a second.
Ramit Sethi:
Thanks for asking about that, actually, I really appreciate that.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, I got asked to speak at Google, and after the election, they won’t talk to me, but I think they’re rolling back DEI. Yeah, they just ghosted us. We sent them four more emails. They just ghosted us. And that’s happened to a couple brands that we were in talks with late October. We were very outspoken. We lost 80,000, 100,000 followers. Fine. But it was like, “Okay, this is the hill you’re dying on, huh?” It’s very interesting. Switching gears, back to couples. Let’s do a rapid fire. We asked our Instagram community to chime in on some questions for you. Some of them are true rapid fire and some of them we might want to get into. When should you get a joint account?
Ramit Sethi:
When you get married or if you move in together and you have a certain joint expenses, you want to split, fine, but joint when you were married for sure.
Tori Dunlap:
I have a very passionate answer to this question and I think you will also agree with me. When should you completely combine your finances?
Ramit Sethi:
When you’re married. You should also have your own individual accounts though.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay, because I am like never, absolutely, should you completely combine accounts. You always need some of your own money.
Ramit Sethi:
Yeah. Yeah. Each partner should have their own individual account that only they have access to. It should not be secret, in my opinion. No secrets. However, you should be the one who has access to it. And whether or not you earn money or not, doesn’t matter. Each person gets some amount every single month.
Tori Dunlap:
Yep. When do you know the conversation isn’t productive anymore? When should you take a break and come back?
Ramit Sethi:
You know it immediately. If it’s not going well, if you have in your nose, take a break, low stakes, hey, let’s take 10 minutes. I learned this from our therapist, person who asked for the break, they’re the ones who bring you back.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, love that. My partner is freelanced and I’m salaried, how do we organize our finances?
Ramit Sethi:
Pick a number as a freelancer that you can commit to making. This is important for people with variable income. So let’s say, some months, you make zero, some months, you make 6,000 a month. Pick a number where you’re confident, base your projections on that, and then go one extra step, which is create a rule for any money above that salary. What happens to that money? How does it flow? That’ll keep things smooth.
Tori Dunlap:
Should every couple have a prenup?
Ramit Sethi:
No. Most couples don’t need a prenup. You need a prenup if you have premarital assets, a business, a house, a large portfolio, or any number of things. Most couples when they get married, they come to the table with pretty similar amounts of wealth and it’s overkill in their situation.
Tori Dunlap:
The thing I always highlight for people too is that if you get married, the state has already decided what that is going to look like. So make sure that you’re okay with that. And if you’re not okay with it, and like in Washington state, it’s a 50/50 split. So if you’re not okay with 50/50, then you do need a prenup. And I’ll also say too, it’s not just about assets, it’s also about debt. So if one of you is coming into the relationship with a large amount of debt, a prenup or a postnup if you want to do it after, might make sense for you too, because that’s the part that’s inequitable too. Community members said that their partner doesn’t want to get married until they’re more financially stable. Can you walk me through psychologically what’s going on here?
Ramit Sethi:
Well, this is common for men. Men have this invisible script of I need to be set, financially set before I can get married. Of course, almost no men have a number. It’s just a vague feeling. I think we shouldn’t mock it because all of us have these vague feelings about money, around enough and around feeling scarcity. What is important in that situation is to gently and compassionately probe. Hey, I totally understand that. I like to understand a little bit more about what that means for you. What does it mean to be set? Is that a number? Is there a path? And then remember not to give your power away. You’re not simply just saying like, “Oh, okay, what you say is right.” No, it’s like, “Hey, I totally understand that. Here’s where I am. Here’s what I need.” And you see if you can make those two things work.
Tori Dunlap:
And this is back to, you talked about the first time you were on the show, and one of the things I love that you discussed is most people can’t actually say what they want, right?
Ramit Sethi:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
They can say what they don’t want a million times over, but they can’t say what they do want. And I think that’s a version of that conversation, which is what is set, most people can’t define that.
Ramit Sethi:
Yeah. I ask people, what’s your rich life? And you know what they usually say to me, they do two funny things. They go, “I don’t want to be chained to the desk. I don’t want to…” I go, “Hey, that’s really interesting what you don’t want, how about what you do want?” And they stare at me completely shocked. The other funny thing they do is I go, “What’s your rich life?” They go, “Oh, I’d like to have a beach house. It doesn’t even have to be big. It doesn’t even have to be near the beach. It doesn’t even have to have a roof. Maybe just two walls is fine.” I go, “What the fuck kind of minimization is this? Even in your hypothetical rich life, you’re telling me you don’t even need a roof. This sucks. Your rich life sucks.” Sometimes I tell them that. And they’re shocked. One guy, he had a lot of money, I go, “What’s your rich life?” He goes, “Coffee.”
And I was just like, “That’s boring.” That’s boring. And he was shocked. Someone would say that to him. I go, “Listen, dude, you have millions of dollars and you’re telling me the answer is you’re going to the grocery store and buying Dunkin Donuts coffee beans.” Ooh, I was saying it because I knew he could take it. I wouldn’t say that to everybody. What we ended up realizing was he really loves coffee. I go, “Man, first of all, you can get nicer beans if that’s what you choose, but second, you make coffee every day, why don’t you hire a barista to come to your house and show you new brewing methods? And third, why don’t you go to the national coffee competition, make it a trip, take your partner, go there, have an experience.” And he had simply never thought about the power of thinking big.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and even, our first conversation sparked that for me, where that was, I think we spoke in, gosh, 2022, 2023. My life was changing a lot. I was making a lot more money. And I was starting to determine, okay, what do I want to do? And I’m having that conversation now where yes, I was, okay, I want to travel more, I want to be more generous. But now, I’m defining what does that actually look like? And one of the things I want to do, I’m going to really try to do this by 2026, I think 2027 maybe. But I want to go take a cooking class in Italy, like a cooking intensive where I go for at least six weeks.
I live in Italy, I take a cooking class. That is what I want to do. And the thing everybody listening about that’s so powerful is I can taste what that feels like. I can sense it. I can see what my day looks like. I can see what my life looks like in a way that I don’t get when I just go, oh, I think I want to travel, or I think nice restaurants maybe, that’s not definitive, but it’s also not going to help you actually get to your goal because you don’t feel it. It’s not a sensory experience yet.
Ramit Sethi:
Totally right. The smell, when you say travel, I want to know what seat on the airplane you want to sit on. I want to know what time of the day are you drinking wine? Oh, you’re drinking it during sunset? Is it windy? What are you wearing? Who’s with you? All of those details, they give you a why. And I remember, I’ll tell you something. I did this exercise with my wife. We call the 10-year bucket list exercise. It’s in my book. And it’s both of you sitting down writing down what would be incredibly meaningful and magical over the next 10 years. And then you have a fun time. Let’s compare notes. Oh, you want to go skydiving? Ah, do that on your own, I’ll meet you at the bottom, ha, ha, ha. And then you pick one that you both love and you actually start putting money towards it and you make it happen. One of the things that I picked was write a book at a hotel. I’m a writer and I love hotels.
A few years later, here I am writing Money for Couples and I forgot that I put this on my 10-year bucket list. And my wife goes, “Hey, why don’t you go to that hotel you’re talking about in Kyoto and why don’t you write part of your book there?” I go, “Oh my God.” So two weeks later, literally, I knew the exact seat I was going to sit in at that hotel because I’d been there before. I knew the exact view, I knew what I was going to be wearing. I knew what it smelled like. I am there two weeks later looking at the exact view. And I felt an immense amount of gratitude because it was like bringing a dream to real life. And that is the power of a rich life. It can be as extravagant as flying to Kyoto to write a book, or it can be as simple as every Friday when I pick up my son from school, we’re going to go get a piece of candy every Friday. It’s up to you. But it’s so important to visualize the feelings, the smells, the emotions.
Tori Dunlap:
Should you ever have a joint investing account?
Ramit Sethi:
Yeah, you can. They tend to be a little bit more rare because most people have their 401(k) and IRA and theirs and theirs, but you technically can in certain ways.
Tori Dunlap:
And I’ll highlight for people, some people don’t realize this, a Roth IRA is individual to you or a 401(k). So you can max it out and your partner can max it out. So both of you can be contributing the full amount of money every single year or at least getting up to that full amount of money. I mean, depending on your tax situation but that’s a nice thing. What’s something you can do now to protect yourself financially? If the worst happens, your partner gets injured, your partner passes away, how can you protect yourself and potentially your children?
Ramit Sethi:
Easiest thing to do is to have an emergency fund that is three to six months of your fixed expenses. Please remember fixed expenses, they don’t include things like eating out, et cetera, because if one of you lost your job, you’d probably cut that immediately. So it’s everything in my conscious spending plan are fixed costs. That’s like groceries, rent, auto, the bare minimum to keep the lights on, take that monthly number, multiply it by three to six, I recommend six. And that is the best thing you can do to set yourself up for safety.
Tori Dunlap:
My final question for you, Ramit, you’ve talked to at this point, thousands and thousands of people and hundreds and hundreds of couples. What is the best tip, trick, takeaway that you have? And if you can tell us a story of a specific couple with that tip or takeaway, that’s really helpful.
Ramit Sethi:
Well, the best tip when it comes to money is to automate it. None of this should be an existential crisis. You know what I mean?
Tori Dunlap:
Yep.
Ramit Sethi:
My investing is easier than brushing my teeth every day. I brush every day, but I still got to wake up and pick up that toothbrush. My savings just grows, so does my investments, and I have a pretty good projectability of how much it’s going to be in one year or, well, five years, 10 years, 30 years. I speak to a lot of different couples from different socioeconomic backgrounds. A lot of times there’s some big challenge with them, but there was this one couple where they’d actually done very well. They were in their 50s. They had millions of dollars, and I asked them, how’d you do it? There’s no magic. There’s no secret trick. They said, “We started investing when we were in our 20s. We maxed out as much as we could afford. When we made more, we increased our contributions and we just let time do its thing.” And I love that because it is revealing in its simplicity. We constantly look for secrets, hacks, tricks.
Right now, I have a video up on my YouTube channel about why most people should not pick individual stocks, and I have all these people arguing with me. They’re arguing with me, a guy who has probably a larger portfolio than them, probably more deal flow and proprietary research, and yet the majority of my portfolio is in low cost index funds. Why? Just think about the logic. Why would somebody argue against someone who has been investing for 30 plus years? And the answer is deep down, we all want a secret. I want a secret to beat everybody else. The real secret to money is you actually don’t need to beat everybody else. It doesn’t need to be hard. It actually can be simple, easy, out of sight, out of mind, and what you realize deep down when you do automation, you get to turn the page and get away from your computer and live a rich life. That is the key.
Tori Dunlap:
I call them salvation investments like we think, okay, crypto, the lottery, right? It’s like, okay, this is the thing that’s going to finally save me from my financial problems. Most of them are scams. Most of them are not going to make you money at all. Ramit, thank you for your time. Thank you for your expertise. You know this already, but I have to tell you that a huge part of my financial journey was directly influenced by and from your work, and you were kind enough to lend your voice to my book, which I’m so appreciative of. I just love and appreciate everything you’re doing, so thank you. Plug away my friend, Money for Couples, plug away.
Ramit Sethi:
Thank you so much. I’m flattered and honored. For everyone who’s listened, Money for Couples is my new book. I shared some of my most interesting and fascinating findings, including word-for-word scripts, what to say when your partner avoids these conversations, how to have kids that are not spoiled, and how to even know if you can afford a house, a mattress, a car. There’s some very counterintuitive findings in the book. I think you’ll be quite surprised. Money For Couples is the book. It’s also the podcast, every week, you can listen and watch on YouTube couples sharing their most intimate real numbers from behind real closed doors.
Tori Dunlap:
I love it. Thank you for being here.
Ramit Sethi:
Thank you.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you so much to Ramit for joining us. You can get his new book, Money For Couples, wherever books are sold. It pairs very well with his first book, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, and of course, with a side of Financial Feminists, the book, all of those books are incredible resources for you to be able to manage money better as an individual and as a couple, and you can listen to his show, Money For Couples, which is honestly such an interesting concept. It’s so good. It’s like voyeuristic and helpful because you get real numbers and a real peek inside people’s relationships, and that’s fun. That’s fun to see what everybody else is up to. Thank you so much for being here. As always, financial feminists, we appreciate you listening to the show and sharing it.
The best, easiest thing you can do to support the show, to make sure that we can continue bringing you so many valuable episodes. If this show has impacted your life at all, just do me a favor, I would really appreciate it, share it with a person in your life, leave a five-star review, that’ll take you about a minute or two and subscribe if you aren’t already, it really does help us and it allows us to continue producing this show for free. This is not just me. We have a whole team behind Financial Feminists, so when you support feminist focused media like this in a very non-feminist world, it allows us to continue. So we appreciate it. I hope you have a great rest of your day, and we’ll see you very soon. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First $100K podcast. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap, produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Researched by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video Engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Taylor Chou, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Claire Kurronen, Daryl Ann Ingram and Meghan Walker. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton. Photography by Sarah Wolfe. And theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound.
A huge thanks to the entire Her First $100K community for supporting the show. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com. If you’re confused about your personal finances and you’re wondering where to start, go to herfirsthundredk.com/quiz for a free personalized money plan.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
