Ep 47 | The #1 Financial Red Flag in Couples
Financial problems contribute to 20–40% of U.S. divorces, but the real issue often isn’t the money itself, it’s how couples talk (or don’t talk) about it. In this episode, Priya sits down with power couple Doug & Heather Boneparth, co-authors of Money Together, to unpack the real dynamics behind financial conflict, partnership, resentment, “the Bermuda Triangle” of early parenting, and the habits that either make couples unstoppable… or quietly blow up their finances.
Whether you’re merging lives, managing uneven incomes, or trying to get back on the same team, this episode pulls back the curtain on what truly makes (or breaks) financial partnership, the subtle ways couples undermine each other’s autonomy, and the single biggest red flag most couples miss.
**Source
Takeaways:
The #1 financial red flag isn’t debt.
Risk-takers and savers can thrive together when they understand each other’s money stories.
Many couples get stuck trying to split everything 50/50. The healthier (and more realistic) goal is equity, not equality.
Your financial plan won’t work if only one person knows what’s going on. True partnership requires shared visibility, even if you divide responsibilities.
Guest Bio:
Heather and Douglas Boneparth are the co-authors of Money Together: How to find fairness in your relationship and become an unstoppable financial team. By day, Douglas Boneparth is the founder of Bone Fide Wealth in New York City. Heather spent more than a decade as a lawyer in the commercial insurance industry before joining the firm as the director of business and legal affairs. They also co-write a weekly newsletter, The Joint Account, which helps couples talk about money.
Guest Links:
Firm: BoneFideWealth.com
Book: DoMoneyTogether.com
Newsletter:ReadTheJointAccount.com
Follow Priya Malani:
LinkedIn | Instagram | Youtube | Stash Wealth
Transcription
Most people I know lead the conversation again, not just with what's not working, but they bring out the spreadsheets and they bring out the numbers right at the front. And for a lot of people, and Heather is one of those people, starting out that way isn't a great way to really get that conversation. Now we can. Now we can. Years back into this practice, we can. But when you're first trying to get your disengaged partner into your family finances, that is not the way. Who the fuck am I to tell you what to do with your money? My name is Priya Malani, currently managing millions of hard working dollars. Enough for play. Let's talk. Welcome to the F word, smart money. Hey guys, welcome back to the F word.
It's estimated that financial problems contribute to 20 to 40% of all the divorces in the US. That stat kind of terrifying. So I've got some really great guests with me today who are going to help us unpack just why that might be the case and what you can do about it. Doug and Heather Bonaparte are long time friends of Stash Wealth. Doug and I actually go back probably over a decade at this point. Back then it seemed like every single time I was quoted in CNBC, there was another name alongside mine and that name was Doug thrown apart. So I reached out, got to know the guy and come to find out he's got a really cool advisory practice that he's now co running with his wife who has a stacked resume of her own, which you'll get to learn a little bit more about. All right, let's get into it.
Doug and Heather, welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. I'm pumped, Doug. A lot has changed since I first met you. Your hair was black, for one. Oh, you took my line. That's what I was going to say. We're starting. Regardless, his hair color has changed. For those of you who aren't watching, Doug has one of the most insane hairstyles of any man I've ever met. So much so that it's actually your company logo. Yeah, it's not like narcissistic or anything, but hey. You got it. Yeah, flaunt it. You make a lot of men very, very jealous. Yeah. Who does your hair, Doug? Oh wow. Well, I do it myself, but I met a really great guy in our town. His name is Pete and it's actually been part of our life. He runs a plant shop here locally and still continues to cut my hair, which is super cool. So in Pete we trust Terrace Plant Shop, Westfield NJ. I'll plug him all day long. Check him out. Shout out Pete. It's the man. Plant Shop Pete. Oh my God. I'm obsessed.
So what else has changed? I see you managed to recruit your powerhouse of a wife who's formerly a successful lawyer. Tell us more. Heather, what made you quit law? Oh my God, where do we begin? How much time do we have? No, you know, I spent over a decade in the commercial insurance industry working in various in house roles for different companies. You know, at the end of the day, first of all, I didn't really choose commercial insurance. It chose me. You know, I'm a lawyer who graduated right on the tail end of the Great Recession with six figures of student loan debt. You know, it's one of those things where you kind of do what you got to do when you get the job in the specialty in which we'll receive you. And that's how I ended up doing it. I ended up liking it and I was pretty good at it. But, you know, I was always kind of moonlighting as Doug's business consultant. And I would tell anybody who asked that I had three jobs. I was a mom, I was a corporate lawyer, and I was moonlighting as the Bonafide Wealth Director of Business and Legal Affairs. And there came to be a point in our relationship, our lives, my career where I kind of felt like one, I'm not going to keep doing all three of these all the time, and at another I'm just so glad you didn't choose not to do the husband and the parent part. Glad it was the lawyer one. That's true.
But in all seriousness, there's something to be said for watching your spouse kind of get to swing for the fences, take risks, live out their dream career. And you're kind of the one who's holding down the safety net, the corporate safety net, paying for the benefits, having the stable W2 income. And I was happy and proud to do that for a long time. But all the credit in the world, you know, that Doug always gave me credit. Lip service. It does become lip service at a certain point where it's like, all right, well, I want a chance to do those things too. And eventually I came on board and it's been a wild journey ever since. It's been about almost three years. And the rest is history.
That's amazing. You guys are now power couple entrepreneurs. So speaking of Bonafide Wealth, where is the practice today? I'd love for you to share who you guys primarily focus on day to day. Yeah. I started the firm wanting to focus on an underserved demographic, which was us when we were in our mid to late 20s, just getting out of the Great Recession, finally catching some ground when it came to establishing our careers. And by and large, no wealth management firm or financial advisory practice really cared too much if you didn't have assets. It was, hey, you're nothing to us. And I hated that. I really hated that. And I saw such amazing opportunity by investing in our peers at a time when they needed the help. They might not have had the money or the most complicated financial issues in the world. They needed that start so they could. They needed a foundation. Yeah, they needed. And these were impressive folks. These were folks I wanted to ride with and it was just really a function of time. So I kind of seized that and put myself out there as an advisor for millennials in our mid late 20s. And here we are in our early 40s. So a lot of time has elapsed to see if that bet on us would pay off. I'd like to believe it has because the numbers don't lie. The clients we serve, the wealth that's been generated, that's one thing. But you look at the events that have taken place in our lives, that's the stuff that really. That's the meter, watching them take their wins like people that we've been with for over a decade. We've lost track, truly lost track of how many babies have been born, businesses have been sold or started, homes purchased and sold. And these are the things that happen in our lives that really move the meter from a planning perspective and from a relationship perspective.
So I think we're pretty lucky to be working with who we have at the front end of the beginning days of our lives. And it just creates wonderful relationships that are stickier, that last longer and that allow you to have a front row seat to the relationships that you hold dear. And here we are, and we'll keep doing that and the future looks great. We are now replicating that process down the chain into Gen Z with some amazing associates on our side to help continue that level of growth. Obviously, I feel the same. So love the work that you're doing and the people that you're serving. They're very lucky to have us because no one else will have them. And we'll drop a link in the show notes to Bonafide Wealth so people who want to learn more can check it out.
Let's switch gears. You guys recently launched a book on a topic very close to my heart. It's called Money Together. How to find fairness in your relationship and become an unstoppable financial team. So let's start with what prompted you to write the book. How long have you guys been married? We've been married for 12 years. I'd stay with a quick what year is it, what year is it? What's happening? I don't know where I am anymore. We've been together for 21 years, a lifetime. We met many, many years ago, but the thing that prompted us to write this book was that we felt that people were not having the right conversations around money. And one of the closest front row seats we got to that was in our own lives, as I would say as a lawyer, Exhibit A. We are Exhibit A in that. We thought we had it all figured out in our early 30s. We had just had our first baby. We had refinanced my student loan debt to an insanely low interest rate. We were purchasing our first home. Everything kind of felt like it was falling into place. And that was true for a moment in time until it wasn't, until the next unprecedented event hit our entire generation, which was COVID and having two small children during those years.
And simultaneously with that happening was right around the time that our incomes flipped. So at one point, I was the breadwinner early in our relationship. I was the one holding down the staple salary. And I had mentioned before, while Doug took these risks to start the firm, but it was like overnight, suddenly he was making three plus times my income. And you start to tell yourself stories about who deserves things and the messages around money and around time and around who has a say and whose career matters more, whose time matters more, begin to change. And that wasn't even necessarily him doing it. A lot of it was me doing it too. But because you're not talking about it, we kind of embedded these messages in our relationship. And we got to a point towards the end of COVID where I was almost resentful of our situation and I was pretty unhappy.
And so we thought to ourselves, man, if we had done this as two people, millennial money expert, corporate lawyer who's well versed in their finances, if we got to the point where I was checked out of our finances, didn't feel like I had a say in anything, totally overwhelmed by time, not getting what I wanted out of my career, what's everybody else doing too? Compounding that was what Doug would see with his clients where you see either one partner come to the meetings or you see both and you see someone who's checked out. What are the conversations that we're not having that we should be? And so that's what kind of had us embark upon this journey two plus years ago to say, well, let's start by talking to couples about money, talking to as many real couples as we can about what we think are the real issues under the issues.
Yeah, I think it underscores this notion that it's not a scarcity problem with money. And for a lot of people, it can be, but it's not for everyone. It definitely can be. And I think one thing we want to point out here is that the inability to communicate around it ultimately leads to a lot of the challenges that people face. And that's one of the things that we saw in that particular moment. And we were fortunate enough to take a minute pause and have those conversations. Yeah, see it all the time.
So, so be honest. Was this book written from your money wisdoms or your money fights? Both. Yeah, both. And the stories of so many people who were brave and willing to share their experience with money together. The thing that I think is cool about the stories we share in the book, both our own and other people's, is that we are sharing wins and losses truly. Truly. And a lot of times, because I think something that's interesting with money and with time and with age and moving through different seasons of life and maybe you agree, is that something you might think is a loss, something that might feel like a challenge is something that you realize down the road is either not as bad as you thought it was or that you have greater perspective on that time in your life. And you say, wow, if only I could go back to that time. And I think those perspectives, we wanted to bring perspective as well to some of the more proximate conflicts that people find themselves in. So I think it's a little bit of both.
So you said COVID hit and nothing was ever the same, which we all felt and still feel the reverberations of. So how has your approach to money evolved in your marriage? Like bird's eye view, can you share a little bit of the shift that happened? So let me share this going in. There was a point where Doug and I were both completely dialed in. We were like money dating. We were doing all the things you're supposed to be doing. I mean, look, we were definitely like, yeah, there was a scarcity problem when we were young and living in the city and buried under student loan debt. And we were both starting out and yeah, I was making more money and I was the breadwinner. But things were tight. We had to be on top of it. We had to be sitting down week to week. Working meals, packing lunches. Every day, every day. We were keeping it tight for a long time.
A couple things happened. One, you get lulled into the comfort of being like, well, things are good. I don't need to be as on top of it as I was. Two, I think a lot of mothers, and this was my experience too, we had never really had discussions about divisions of responsibility when we had kids. You just kind of have kids and then you figure it out and everyone kind of falls into their roles and responsibilities. And I fell into most of them. And when COVID hit, you know, it was just again like no one could have predicted it, but it was just enough. That's just another illustration of how life happens. Right. It exacerbated all of it. It did. But we got to a point where I had fully tapped out of our finances because I felt like this was the one responsibility I didn't have. I knew that I didn't need to worry or think about it because he would. And I think that when we talk about like the invisible burdens, they were literally like set on fire during COVID. There were so many invisible burdens beyond just the typical day to day. There were social constructs that you had to keep in place, especially with young children who were trying to navigate school and things like that.
And he was just like, well, you're the one who cares more about it. So you deal with it. Like, you think it through, like you have a stronger opinion, so we'll do whatever you want to do. And I think he thought that being deferential was being amenable, but in reality, it was placing these extra burdens on my shoulder. So I think back to money, it felt like the only thing I wasn't responsible for. So I was very happy to not think about it or not worry about it. But like, you blink and it's been a couple years and I have no idea where anything is or what's going on.
Yeah, I mean, things have changed so much. And you have a situation like COVID really just kind of created this crater in knowledge and understanding around what's going on in our financial lives. But we caught ourselves and decided not only to write this book, but you got to practice what you preach and you got to make these efforts to build that foundation up again and get back in tune with one another around that. So the framework that we put together was we meet quarterly for these large meetings. I mean, you can call them a money date, you can call them anything you want. I feel like you want to talk about it. I do. OK, you tell me. I do want to talk about it.
So we have quarterly money dates, and we feel like that's enough time to allow there to be actual growth and things that you can monitor. Anything shorter than that or more frequent than that probably starts working against you. We pick a time and place that works for us. We like walking, we like cocktails and dining and things like that. And it's important to pick something that you actually look forward to. Otherwise, it's just so easy to bump that meeting or cancel it. Of course, put it on your calendar. We learned a lot of things along the way and talking to people and having these meetings ourselves. And you don't want to start with the things that you know aren't working. No better way to lose engagement than, hey, let's talk about the things we sucked at this quarter. Talk about the wins. Let's get into the things we did right. Let's build that momentum.
So we do have to talk about the things that need improvement, and you're going to have an easier time getting to that there as well. And obviously the foundational and fundamental things are very important. And there's a thing about that. Most people I know lead the conversation again, not just with what's not working, but they bring out the spreadsheets and they bring out the numbers right at the front. And for a lot of people, and Heather is one of those people, starting out that way isn't a great way to really get that conversation. Now we can. Now we can, years back into this practice, we can. But when you're first trying to get your disengaged partner into your family finances, that is not the way.
Yeah, it makes finances feel like finances rather than finances feel like supportive of your lifestyle. It's also not tapping into necessarily how your partner likes to learn. Listen, I do this, we do this for a living. I can sit down with numbers all day long. It doesn't bother me one way or the other. But that's not how most people want to start. We learned from a couple in the book that they were both very willing to have these conversations, but they weren't able to meet there when those spreadsheets were being brought out until such time as a whiteboard got brought out and someone started drawing it all out and it clicked. So it's very important to not only be mindful of time and place, but also how your partner likes to learn. And you start to put all of this together and create a practice around it, and you'll find yourself having very meaningful, deep, motivational type conversations when it comes to your money.
Let me mention this too. What else has changed about the way we speak about money is that we talk about time as part of our conversation around money. Do we both? I think we both believe and we write about this in the book that time is our greatest currency. And that we include a discussion in our quarterly meeting about do we both feel like we're getting the time we need, whether that's for work, whether that's for each other, whether that's for our own time to ourselves, whether that's time with our children. And if not, what do we need to fix and tweak for the next quarter to see if we can feel better about it? That could be him taking on a couple more things at home. That could be us outsourcing a couple things, either a service, hiring childcare, a couple more days a week or days a month. And then over the course of a quarter, we can come back and say, hey, did that feel any better? Because there's no better time to have that time conversation than during the money date because you have the numbers there too. How much can we afford to invest in shuffling around our time so that that's a big change as well?
Speaking of, how much can we afford? This is not what this podcast is about, but I am very curious. Did you guys think about affordability before you went into the kids decision or did you just say we'll figure it? Like what was that? What happened there? That's a great question. Sorry, before we went into what? Having kids. Oh, before having kids. You know, like Grandpa would always say, love finds a way. Have the kids. But, you know, I love you Grandpa, rest in peace. But like you have. His house was $4.00. Yeah, he bought a home for a sack of strawberries and didn't have $200,000 in student loan debt. And childcare was extremely affordable. But there is some truth to that, but I feel like you have something more intelligent to say.
No, it wasn't part of the decision making process as to whether we had kids, but it was part of the financial decisions that we made afterwards. I was not comfortable and Doug was not comfortable. And again, I think this is very personal to people. I'm an only child and grandchild on both sides of my family. I was kind of like a miracle of a miracle baby. I wasn't willing to put off trying to have children, not knowing how long it could potentially take me to have children. So that was not something why I was like, well, the logistics, maybe in a couple of years we'll be in a better financial place. I think that that's a slippery slope. And I'm not saying, look, maybe for you that's the right way to approach it, but for me, for my background and my upbringing and my experience and feelings around this topic, and knowing that we wanted to have more than one child because also God willing, because I'm an only child and I wanted my child to have a sibling. To me, those feelings outweighed the financial logistics of what we would do. Look, if we had had a child and it was unaffordable in New York City, we would have left, and eventually we did. We did within a year. We didn't like the construct of childcare. I didn't like having to pay a nanny half of my salary just to go back to my job. So yes, it plays into it, but it didn't play into the having children.
As it relates to the work we did for the book here, a lot of what Heather and I know about each other is how different we are in terms of our own relationships with money. And Heather does a really great job of talking about her relationship with money throughout the book. And it's being able to reconcile those things that create your identity around that. Heather just told you only child on both sides. I'm the son of serial entrepreneurs. My attitude obviously quite different from hers. We're going into business. We'll be all right. I was taught to bet on yourself. Have kids. That's part of this. I had colleagues telling me the best thing that would ever happen to my career would be having a kid. I'm rolling my eyes because that is such. I mean, did you see that New York Times headline from the opinion section about the are women ruining the workplace? Like imagine that. This is the message that women receive. And the message that men in finance receive is that they have a child and it improves their business. Pretty fucked up.
Yeah, it's wild. It's dripping in all kinds of weird male privilege themes and what have you. And yet here I am hearing that from someone who I generally felt meant it in a way that like this is going to energize you. And it didn't have the deeper meaning of, well, that's because someone's going to be handling that kind of stuff. No, but I think it's an interesting thing because I think that many women from a career standpoint are meant to feel in the early years of motherhood, as I was, which I call the Bermuda Triangle of my career, which are the five years during which I had my two children and had to go back to work and sort that all out. I think that for a lot of women, you really find yourself questioning whether there are institutional failures or whether they're failures of your own. And I internalized a lot of the lack of support and the institutional failures that I experienced as my own ineptitude to survive as a corporate warrior and a mother.
And so there's that too. Point being that understanding Heather's perspective and her mind goes a long way in making these types of decisions together because it is our child. It is our lives now that are more entwined than ever before. Thus only emphasizing how critical it is to not only have that perspective, but to make decisions around it when it comes to your money.
Yeah, I'll share my experience and I'm curious to hear yours. But in working with thousands of couples, it feels like a lot of people don't think about the part that you just brought up as what allowed for you to afford the children. Are the trade-offs, willingness to accept what may need to change? I find that a lot of times there's a difficulty or a lack of wanting to accept what will need to change.
We wrote a whole chapter in the book about this. It's called When You Know. You Know. And it's meaning that so much about your life changes when you have children. You don't know what it's going to be, but what you do know is that your life, which may have been static before in the sense that we have these routines, we spend X dollars on this, we like to go to the gym three days a week, we go to brunch with our friends every Sunday. Those things are all going to change. The one thing you do need to embrace when you move into that season of life of becoming parents is fluidity. That's what you need to embrace. The idea that you might do things where the math doesn't math the way that it once did before.
We give a great example of that from our own lives in the sense that like we had a baby and we thought we were going to stay in the city for another. We never wanted to raise kids fully in New York City, but we thought we would stay for a while, have the second baby, maybe five, six years at least. See how it goes. See the opportunity that it could evolve into that. And we were willing to see how it goes. The minute we brought Hazel, our older daughter, home from the hospital, I said to him, I am being done. I hate this. I hate this. This is not a place to raise a child. I mean, I was like manic over it. Whether that's true or not, no judgment on anybody who does. But that's what was going on in my postpartum mind. I didn't like the childcare construct. I didn't like the apartment. I didn't like the neighborhood. It was done. I was done. And the math did not math for us to move to the suburbs and purchase our first home. I was trying to make those numbers work and it was not comfortable to say the least, but possible. But the point being, you only know when you know.
So I think it's very easy to say to somebody else, oh, they should have waited. Oh, they should have whatever. When you are in that situation, you have to allow for some fluidity in your finances because you just don't know what that's going to bring. And that stays with you throughout the parenting journey. We don't know what next year will bring. Now we've got a tween and we have two kids in elementary school that help us. It's a totally different ball game, but like a new set of challenges. Like one set of challenges begets the next, but it also begets new amazing memories and opportunities to share with them too.
Of course, of course. Yeah. Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequence of my own actions. My favorite. You love that line. I said one today. That was like, ah, well, you look at this, it's an item on yesterday's list, making it to today's list. I love, oh, there's so much more stuff to unpack there.
But moving back on to the topic of couples and money, I came across another stat that 34% of partnered Americans say that money is a source of conflict in their relationship. So I'm curious about the topic of financial compatibility. Curious your thoughts on whether or not that's a thing. Can you actually be financially incompatible or is that something you can overcome? How do you test for it? There's actually a really cool book about this called Tightwads and Spendthrifts written by Scott Rick. He's a wonderful professor out of Michigan, University of Michigan. Cool book. It definitely is identifying, putting people into two categories there, and he's in the book and we relied on him for some of that there.
But I think focusing on the whole first section of the book, which is about beginnings. This is the part of the book where we have you do the self work and look inward to understand where your identity with money comes from. And I think that it's not as black and white like, oh, I get along. Heather and I, we just talked about being opposites. It's a Venn diagram. Maybe that's why we chose it as the cover of our book. There's a lot of overlap, but you got to be able to find the pieces that obviously don't overlap. And that goes to understanding your culture, your religion, your trauma, and all the things that help you understand who you are. And then you need to do that with your partner as well. And understanding why they think differently. Yeah, and really making room in your life for the empathy to accept that they think about it differently than you do is the first step to you finding that compromise.
Yeah, two people can have completely opposite views of money. It doesn't mean they're not going to have a successful relationship. We met with a couple where one of the partners was incredibly risk on, worked in tech, was willing to invest, really viewed like you need to take risk to make money. His wife was one of the most risk averse people truly. She was fixing a roof before it needed it. He was willing to like, that's the best illustration, someone who would fix a roof that wasn't broken just out of the risk of it breaking at some point in the future. She really wanted to hold on to cash, was afraid to invest. They found that mutual ground.
I truly believe that whether it's just a day to day mindset or something like investing for the future, the best compromises leave everyone a little bit uncomfortable, which means you are both going to have to move a little bit from your position, right? Because you're trying to figure out what your shared values and priorities are as a couple. You can do that even if you approach money differently. You can, but you need empathy, you need to communicate and you need to just be willing to find a little discomfort. We all should live with a little bit of discomfort in a good way because we don't know what tomorrow is going to bring. I want people to feel positive about the uncertainty that's coming down the road because if you're doing this as a team, you know that you can lean on each other when those moments come. And that's where the growth comes from. You're not going to grow by being comfortable all the time. You got to get into it.
I'm curious on two topics, one when there’s disagreement and there's very little overlap in the Venn diagram, and the other one that comes up a lot is when there are completely unequal incomes. So let's start with the first one. How do you split expenses or share expenses when you're not very aligned? You know, all the studies and research out there will show you that you should be operating jointly. So when it comes to spending, if you're really existing in your own silos, I make what I make, I spend what I spend. We'll split these things 50/50. That may be good in the early days of your relationship, but not very practical and doesn't build good habits later on. You begin doing tit for tat. Chapter 8, The Croissant is a fan favorite, talks a lot about that. The way you overcome a lot of this is by focusing on the goals and the things that you both want for yourself. Get out of the “hey, this is what I do, this is what I earn, this is what I spend.” You have a partner, you're living a life together. So what are the things that you want to do in the short, intermediate and long term together? Because that will force you to focus on the things you need to do together and the things you need to do independently to actually get to that. That's what bridges the mindset of “hey, I'm going to exist here.” Also, again, it's just not practical to scale this into later life. “Hey, I make one third of the money around here. I should be paying one third of the formula for the baby” or stuff like that. Just not realistic.
Because I think as people move into different seasons of their lives, you realize that our careers, I think that we're all kind of lulled into believing early in our careers that careers move in one direction. We're all optimizing to move up and up, but that is not reality. People take pauses, they downshift their career, they move into a season of caregiving, or they move into freelance work. Sometimes they ramp all the way up. I don't think if you are basing either the agency, the power dynamics in your relationships exclusively on income, you're going to find yourself getting in trouble.
There is an amazing person who does work in this space to really highlight women moving through all seasons of their life. Her name is Neha Roush and she always says that marriage and relationships are an interdependent organization, meaning I don't care if your husband's earning all the money. The work that you do, you are a provider too. And that is an important concept that we really thread throughout all of these conversations when we talk about couple equity, household equity. What does it mean to provide? What does it mean to contribute? It's way more than a paycheck, the way that we care for one another. And I think when you view things holistically you stop focusing on “well he earns three times my salary so his time is worth more, or his opinion is worth more, or his dreams and visions for our future are worth more than mine.”
Can I add something there? Sure. No, what's the next question? No, you can. What do you have to say? I think in a lot of these instances where people get caught up in these old traps of like “I make money or more money, therefore I'm contributing the most,” I feel like it's such a fallacy because the only— a lot of the times the reason that person can create that kind of income or generate that kind of money is because the other person is there to support them in doing that. So to me, it's— I always laugh when I hear that. It's very antiquated and it's just not the truth. But that's why it's so much better to seek fairness and to seek equity than it is to seek something that's even Steven. Yeah, right. Because it's not going to work. It's not going to work. And it doesn't reflect the reality of life.
So then do you suggest, because there's this debate out there of do you share things equitably or like 50/50 proportionate to your income or 50/50 regardless? No, I would throw the whole pro rate based on earning out the window. I mean, if you had to pick from those— yeah, yeah, yeah. Equitably. Yeah. But fairness is not equal. I think you got to get that concept through your mind here. As Heather would point out many times, it's extremely subjective. So you got to find the mix that works for you. And if it's again tied to the things that you're trying to do collectively for your family, for your joint goals, you're on the right track. And that's why it just doesn't feel right. It's not congruent with how life works, so I'm going to put that one off to the side.
Yeah, sounds like the name of the game, and we completely agree, is you operate as a team. So when you're operating as a team, curious your thoughts on how do you build in room for autonomy? I'm sure— well, actually, I'm not sure, Doug— there are some things that she buys that drive you absolutely crazy. Not really. I get kind of cheap sometimes. I like nice things, but I have a hard time pulling the trigger on them. Pay for the quality so you don't have to in a year go back and get the same crappy thing again. I'm always looking for a sale. Yeah, it's more like Doug collects tequila. So sometimes I'll come home and I'll just see a bag and I'm like, oh my God. Like I know. That's more of my obvious collector 90s kid thing going on here.
But there isn't really anything that she does. I think we do a very good job. We have a check-in number. This is a good one that helps a lot of people out. I don't want to know if she spent $100 on something, but I would love to know if she spent $2000 on something. Not because I'm going to say no. It's because out of fairness and respect and to make sure that this is a decision that we both agree on, I think is the appropriate way to go about it. We want to have the feeling of being free to spend. I think that was a question we asked every couple that we interviewed. Do you feel free to spend? And we ask them each separately. And I think that it speaks a lot to the perceived autonomy that that check-in number as a feature goes a really long way in your relationship. Set that number, ask each other what number would you feel comfortable with knowing that I didn't check it. Anything below that. It's super empowering.
If you also need to maintain separate accounts and pull out X percentage of your paycheck into a separate account for each of you so that you feel like you have that capacity and freedom because that's important to you, that's fine. Not everyone needs that to feel that way, but some people do. And I would tell you, go for it. Go for it. I actually like it when you still have your own individual checking account for purposes of gift giving and autonomy. And there's also functions of your life that it's best served to put some money over there. Micro payments, dealing with friends. We live in a cashless world. It's all those apps you have on your phone. Not sure I want to see a zillion $5 transactions in the operational account, that joint account. Venmo is like the Swiss bank account for suburban moms. The number of like $8 transactions on my Venmo. Yeah, I know she's greasing the wheels of our children's social lives and all the things that I'm oblivious to for better or worse. So those Starbucks ain't going to pay for themselves. Whatever, it's all good.
But that check-in number, I think, is just a wonderful tool for helping people have the ability to feel autonomous and the freedom to spend.
You guys are hilarious. OK, we've talked about a lot of healthy money habits, periodic check-ins, operating as a team. What is one of the most destructive money habits that you've seen in couples? Having an allowance. That was a good one. I was thinking you were going to say one. Yeah, Heather is not long on giving. Allowances are for kids, not your spouse. Yeah, I gave my wife an allowance. Yeah, 1951 called. They want their person back. That's bad. Lying. Yeah. I was going to go with the classic of financial infidelity. It's twofold. It's not only you did something you know you should not have done. It's the active then covering it up. And also keeping score. Like keeping score. And I don't just mean with spending. I mean with things like responsibilities, things you do for your kids, really trying to keep this rigid. Again, back to that idea of 50/50, being like, well, I put them to bed the other night, so you have to do it. This is not the way that a team operates. Sometimes one of us has the capacity to operate at 100% and the other one of us is on zero. And guess what you do in that regard? He gives 100% because I've got nothing to give. Got nothing. That is a better way to operate. Not like, well, you did it for the last three days. It's my time. Those behaviors do not turn out well. And oftentimes I tell people like it doesn't come from a bad place. Usually when people fall back on that keeping score, it's because someone feels like their work isn't being seen and they feel like that is their way to articulate that. They feel like their partner isn't acknowledging the work that they're doing.
I wanted to throw in one more, if that's OK. You know, it's not a race to the bottom. People feel the way they feel. If I had it rough as a kid growing up and my partner had it not as bad, but they feel that hey, there was trauma there, it was rough for them too. You shouldn't be talking about “well, mine was worse.” You feel how you feel and you're trying to gain the perspective of your partner so that when you're making decisions together, you can keep how they felt in mind, regardless of how much worse it objectively could have been for you. And there are obviously some terrible things out there that you can experience. Empathy matters. It comes down to that. You should never be in competition with your spouse. And that's like an emotional competition. You don't want to go there. You're not going to get to where you both want to be. I mean, there's really no competing with you, so I kind of just gave up a long, long time ago. What can I say? Make sure you're being seen.
And again, so much more to unpack there. These conversations, it seems like one question spurs into like 700,000 ideas and side tangents and “but what if this, what if that?” So yeah, everyone's just got to go get the book and learn all the things from you geniuses, is what I'm hearing. Why stop at one book? You got to buy like eight of them. Wow, you really, really put the sales in there, Doug. Why buy one book when you can buy eight? Call me PT Barnum.
Before I let you guys go, I think after all that money talk, we're probably ready for a bit of a palate cleanser. I'm not sure if you know, but we always end the show with a segment that I call Best Bite. I'm a huge foodie and it sounds like you guys are too. So I'd love to know what is one of the best things you guys have eaten recently. It could be at a restaurant or maybe something that you made at home, but I want your can't miss recommendation for where I need to go and what I need to try.
We love sushi. Yeah. We're like— you'd say that? Big sushi. Love a solid omakase. If you find yourself in New Jersey, Sushi by Sea in New Jersey is one of the most special omakase as I've ever been to. Would you agree? If you're willing to travel a little bit outside the city, you can have one of the most caliber omakase experiences out there. I think about it all the time. OK, SEA or— CSE. It's so sushi focused, like the best bites that we've had. I'm struggling to get out of— we love like you get a little swirl if you put a little, you get a little twirl with a little uni on top. Throw some caviar eggs on top. You know what, you know, it's a classic and I'm sure you've been there. I'll go for something that was more like, you know, land animal protein. Very good. I visited Monkey Bar for the first time in a long, long time and I think I had one of the best meals this year at a classic establishment. It was good. It's great when the classic establishment still hits because the opposite happens too, like quite often. You know, like you remember something in your mind from 10 years ago. Yeah, like in the millennial arts when we used to go to a fancy corporate dinner and I'm like, oh, it's so great. I can't wait to go back. And like it like lost its soul. Slapped so hard. It's good.
I think it's the Altaval group. They're absolutely killing it across the city. Is it Altaval and also 4 Charles? Yeah. You can get into these places now. They're having a moment here and for good reason. Yeah. I recently went to Raoul's on Spring Street, also an institution. Also still hits but I'm a big meat eater, so this is— and I am a huge sushi fan. The only thing I don't eat, like literally of all foods in the entire world, the thing I do not eat even though I do actually taste it every time I go because I want to see if I can like it is uni.
That's fair. I understand. It's definitely an acquired taste. Briny. You have the texture to get through. You got the brininess to get through and if you actually know what it is, you got the visual of it in your mind. We need to talk steakhouses. We'll do this sometime. We should. I'm talking, I went to MASA and had the uni and if I can't handle it there— if you can't handle it at MASA, I think you may just not like uni. But you can do oysters and the scallops and all the other— love. OK. Our daughter has like just unlocked her food potential. She went from like food curious to eating like an adult. She's a great eater. And over the summer, I was shocked. We got a dozen oysters and she's like, yeah, I'll try it. She threw it back. She did it. She did not like it. She did not like it, but she did it and she was not high drama. She was just like, that's not my taste. I don't need another one. But I was like, I was like Doug. I was like, let's go. Respect. You got to take her to Oyster Bar in Grand Central just because the vibe is so good. And eventually, I don't know if you guys have been to Grand Banks. Now we're just talking about food.
It is called the F word so it works. Food and finance. All right, you guys. OK, we need to get together and talk about food and eat food and all the things. I really would love that. That would be a blast. OK, where can people find you? Where do they go? How do they get your book, your stuff, your social handles? Give it to us. Yeah, let's do it. Want to learn more about the firm? Bonafidewealth.com. You want to learn about the book? Domoneytogether.com. They're all dot coms. You want to subscribe to The Joint Account, our weekly newsletter about couples and money and everything in between? That would be readthejointaccount.com. Just Google our names. She's at— say it— Average Joelle, and I'm at Doug Bonaparte on all social. I can't give you any more ways to get in touch.
We're going to follow all your channels. Doug and Heather, thank you guys so much for helping us dial in on what it actually means and what it takes to be a financial team. We'll drop a link, as I mentioned, to all of your handles and channels and book in the show notes so everyone can get a copy of Money Together. And I agree, they should get eight. I think it would make a great holiday gift.
Hey everyone listening, if today's episode got you thinking differently about love and money, please share it with a friend, your partner, or that couple that says they never fight about finances. The more that people talk about money, the more we normalize it, the more we're able to take control of it. If you have 30 seconds to leave us a quick rating or review, it obviously helps people find the show. That's what we want. All right, that's it for today. Thanks for listening.
Thanks for listening to the F word with Priya Malani. If you like what you heard, hit subscribe wherever you're listening and leave us a review while you're at it. We're approval junkies. Don't forget, you can find a ton of great resources, content, courses, and other freebies at stashwealth.com.
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