Stop Keeping Score: Power & Fairness With Money Ft. Heather and Doug Boneparth (EP.228)

0:28We all need to make smart decisions with our money. of the Joint Account Newsletter. In this conversation, we unpack what fair really looks like in a relationship, how to keep resentment from boiling over, and the habits that make money talks easier. We also get into some practical and actionable ways to build transparency, such as shared access, a simple net worth table, and a clear view of cashflow, plus how to run money dates you'll actually look forward to. Now, if you'd like to access my own free net worth and cash flow worksheets, you can get that now by clicking the link at the top of the episode description.

1:06As always, we'll have links to that and everything that we mentioned in the show notes at thelongterminvestor.com. And now here is my conversation with Heather and Doug Boneparth. Welcome to the Long Term Investor. Today with me, I'm thrilled to have one of my favorite finance couples, Heather and Doug Boneparth. And today we're going to be talking about something that can make or break not just your financial plan, but your entire relationship. And that's the idea and the concepts and the dynamics of money and fairness. Heather and Doug have a new book out called Money Together. We'll be sure to link to that in the show notes.

1:45They also have a wonderful newsletter called The Joint Account. Heather and Doug, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Hey, Peter. Hi, Peter. Thanks for having us. You know, I've had the privilege of spending time with you guys socially, and it is just so clear to me that you guys are not just married, but like best friends, but they are also very different and you're super willing to make fun of each other. And it's delightful if we're all out in a social situation and I'm talking to just Doug or just Heather and one of them overhears the other one and they kind of make a little quip at each other.

2:16And it's just the best. And I think reading this book, You can tell how collaborative it was. I thought an interesting place to start because I found some of the conversations within the book on fairness and power to be so interesting. How would you each define fairness when it comes to money in a relationship? To me, fairness, it's a common thread that weaves throughout Money Together. And one of the most important things that I want people to understand in a relationship, that fair is about making room. It's about making room for your partner. That can mean a lot of different things. It could mean making room for them to have the time that they need to pursue things that they want to pursue or to find themselves again if they've gotten lost in the invisible load of becoming a parent or their job or not knowing what they want for themselves, what their version of enough is.

3:09Making room can also mean making room for who they are as a person, like understanding and loving them, having curiosity about their past, and making room for all the good and the bad, making room for their baggage and for their identities around money and how they're playing out and how you two can work together to create a common narrative moving forward. That's what fairness is to me. It's about making room for each other at the table in a million different ways, really. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's recognizing that fairness doesn't mean equal, right? Everyone's looking for 50, 50 splits here. Life will not give you 50, 50 splits.

3:47And everyone's version of fairness will be different because of that. And if you can recognize that, you can find this notion of balance for you, for what works in your life. Somebody could be doing 80 % of something and that 20 % that their partner is doing is enough, or maybe it actually is closer to 50-50, whether it's raising the kids, doing the chores around the house, or even what you're doing in your jobs and in your roles as professionals. Getting away from, hey, we got to do this right down the middle, that creates like tit for tat kind of behavior where everyone's now keeping score. And I think that is something that erodes relationships more than it actually supports them.

4:26Well, speaking of keeping score, and I have some more questions on the topic I've introduced, but I feel like I can't help myself, especially because I don't know the answer. Which one of you is the saver and which is the spender? Ooh, that's a really good question. Question. You know what? No one's really asked us that yet, shockingly. I have an answer, but what do you think? I mean, I'm definitely the spender. What? Oh, wow. I love that you disagree. Okay, go on. I'm a spender probably in a different way than Douglas is a spender. I do hesitate. Now we're cooking. I hesitate to spend on certain things because I've carried some scripts with me around guilt and around scarcity and not believing I deserve things.

5:03And so I hesitate. I'm not as decisive about the way I spend. But in terms of the mechanics of our family and how the day-to-day works out, I'm the one doing most of the spending for our family. And I'm the one that recognizes when something needs to be accomplished. And I usually get it done. so I am practically the spender, but emotionally, I have a harder time pulling the trigger on things that I really want than Doug does. Yeah. See, I was going down the road of like, who is doing the whimsical spending or like the I want spending, not the actual logistical in our lives. I mean, Heather's definitely doing a lot of the spending for what we need to do to get through a week or a month.

5:37But from my point of view of like, who goes out and who spends, Heather hit the nail on the head. Like she will be hesitant to go for that thing that I wouldn't even question it. And I think what makes this question in general interesting for the two of us is no one's really out of control. I think like the standard deviation of like our spending behaviors is like one. Check in number two. Anything below a certain number, like we kind of know is fair game and that we don't really need to discuss it unless it's something we feel like we need the other person's input for. Feeling free to spend is very important to the two of us.

6:10Yeah, but I'll definitely go for the luxury good without hesitation, knowing it's okay more than Heather will. But in terms of saving too, I should mention like our goals are aligned AF. Like right now, we have never been more aligned. So we have no problem saving because we both want the same exact things right now. Yeah. You know, what's so interesting about that last comment you made is my wife and I, and she has a number, because I remember asking her like, what do you think is the right number to check in on? And her number was way lower than mine. And she's definitely the spender. And I thought that was interesting.

6:42She doesn't listen to the show, so she won't be able to dig into these comments. But the other thing that I found, the goals being in alignment, like being a saver, a lot of times I feel like saving gets incorrectly framed as like cutting spending, where it's really just kind of like aligning your spending with your goals. So I love that you kind of like threw that in there and really feel that personally in my money relationship in my home. But let me get back to kind of what I felt like was the most intriguing thing to me about the book. There's a lot of concepts in there, and I think anyone who reads it is going to latch on to something different.

7:16You make this big distinction between equality and fairness, and you touched on it a little in the opening, but maybe you could expand more on why 50-50 is often the wrong goal for couples. You know, Heather talks about it all the time is you don't want to be going tit for tat and competing with your partner here, right? This idea of, you know, there being a collective ambition that Heather's win is my win, my win is her win. And I think that's a big macro theme here when it comes to thinking about fairness and how equal it is. I also think just from a practical standpoint, that's very hard to implement and execute, specifically in like spending and savings too.

7:49In the formative years in which you meet your partner and you're figuring out who pays for what, and hopefully you find a way to like merge these things together and create a fluid system of your financial life together. But I'll focus on the practical side for just a moment here. Life will not do this for you. I think that you will find yourself struggling and you will find yourself in conflict if you try and maintain this idea that fairness is equal. We see this in a multitude of examples. I think with parenting particularly is where this really doesn't make a lot of sense. I think on any given day or any given week, depending on what our schedules look like and where we need to be and what the kids activities are.

8:33There's no way to split like taking a kid to and from an activity the same way every single time. That's just not how it works. Well, and I think your point is, too, that it doesn't play out only in money, right? It doesn't only play out and saying like, these are the expenses and this is how much money we earn. and we're going to split everything. There are times when one of you might earn substantially more money than the other person. We wrote about this in a chapter called The Croissant in the book, this concept of bean counting. I think more importantly than even 50-50, just this idea that you are keeping score and that you are in a constant exchange with your partner that you're really looking to reap and you're looking to get back every single thing that you've ever given them.

9:19that exchange is not healthy in a relationship. It's actually the opposite of fair. One, it's not practical. Two, it's not supportive because it's not reflecting the reality of what your situation may warrant. And how we see that play out in life. I mean, look, there are seasons in people's careers. It's another great example. Like I've been married to an entrepreneur. Like I've known Doug since he started building this business. There was a season that required more time, more attention, more emotional investment into what he was building than my corporate career. Now, where that goes from saying, okay, this is what fair looks like, is giving him the investment of all of our time and resources to build this.

10:04Where that goes to becoming unfair is that, all right, well, you've built the thing. I've been holding down the fort and keeping this corporate law career going for over a decade. I've got goals and ambitions of my own that aren't being met. And now we've given enough to you and now it's time to give to me. I think that's why even and equal is not real because our lives are constantly in motion and our needs are constantly evolving. Like the only thing we know for sure is that nothing ever stays the same. So if you are so hyper-focused on constantly trying to make sure that every little thing balances out, like you are missing the grand scheme, you're missing the bigger picture and you're missing a way for you each to feel content with your life and to feel truly supported by your partner in everything you're both doing.

10:54One of the things in that response that you guys referenced directly from the book was the croissant. And it was actually reading this sort of case study, if you will, that generated my next question for you. And it's, how can partners recognize when this resentment is building and what's a healthy way to reset that dynamic. I think it's one of the hardest things to do. Look, we let it go on for far too long. That's how you reach a moment where a croissant, or like with me, a sock on the steps. People say, well, why was it that sock? Why was it that croissant? It was not. That's the point, was that it wasn't.

11:30That was just the final micro moment of months and months of emotional buildup and resentment that led to that point. Now, what is the constructive way to get there before a massive blow-up, talking about things constantly and checking in with your partner on a regular basis, incorporating the practices of really being in tune with each other's needs and being sure that everybody feels like... Also, I think time plays into this in a big way, being sure that everybody feels like they have the time and, again, the space, back to this concept of making room for one another, that everyone's got the space not only to do what they want, but to be heard for what they were experiencing.

12:12If we had taken the time to sit down and communicate the right way, by the way, you're always communicating. So this idea that you're like not talking, like we're always communicating whether we think we are or not. Like I was communicating that I was burnt out and I was exhausted. I was huffing and puffing around the house, slamming down laundry bins and screaming at my children and my husband all the time. I was a freaking miserable person to be around. So I was communicating. I just wasn't saying the thing that needed to be said. And I think that's like a point that I would really like to drive home as well.

12:43So the best way to do it is to not let it get to that point and be checking in often enough in whatever structure that works for you so that it doesn't get there. And you could say, OK, you feel overloaded. You feel like your time isn't being valued. What can I do to make that feel better? So you mentioned a number of times like the caregiving, the logistics, the emotional labor, like these contributions that go beyond income. I think one of the challenges about the topic that your book tries to tackle is there's not a one size fits all playbook to make all this happen. You interview so many different experts on the topic.

13:22You draw from your own experience in your own marriage, as well as coaching clients. Maybe if it's not too much to ask, do you think you guys could share like a framework for how people can think about valuing these different contributions that do go beyond income? Yeah, absolutely. If you haven't figured it out already, the largest theme on this entire book is communication. And no one is going to just overnight have that one conversation that fixes whatever's broken in their relationship or fixes what's not working at that given time. So the idea here is to create some level of practice, to create consistency and discipline, just like you would in an investment strategy, just like you would at the gym, just like you would for anything that is, quite frankly, a long game.

14:10Anytime you want compounding effects, you have to keep at it. And this is one area where Heather said, you're communicating one way or the other, but now you want deliberate, consistent communication around this. So from the money perspective, we can talk about money dates. From a life perspective, we can talk about there being actual check-ins. And they should be about things that touch on values. They should be things that touch on the specifics of how you're spending your time so that there is little ambiguity as possible of how people are feeling about a specific thing going on in their lives.

14:46And to your specific question about how to value time with respect to caregiving and these other are tasks that feel more ambiguous and amorphous and invisible oftentimes. I mean, we didn't reinvent the wheel. We refer readers to Eve Rodsky's Fair Play because there is no better system that exists for making the invisible visible and helping people who may not see a partner, who may not see everything that's going on in their partner's mind right in front of them. So there is a framework for doing that work, but bigger than just divvying up the cards and reshuffling those cards. So Ivorodsky's Fair Play has also been turned into a deck of cards with like 100 plus cards and micro tasks that people can discuss and hand out between the two of them and decide who handles what and really kind of create a space to redistribute the load in the family.

15:41But a concept that is incredibly important to doing that and to valuing and honoring time in a much more constructive way is this idea that you can't just do something. You have to own the thing that you're doing. So this idea of conceptualized planning and executing. I think that a lot of couples fall into this space where a spouse, sometimes a husband, not all the time a husband. Just tell me what I need to do, honey. Yeah, just tell me what I need to do and I'll do it. Peter, have you ever said that to your wife? Yes, a lot. The question is, did I always follow through? And she's not listening, so let's go with yes.

16:17I try to follow through as best I can. Right, but I would argue that you can take it one step forward than following through and executing. There are things in your family's life that you can own from the very start rather than waiting to be told to do it. And so I'll give a great example from our own life. Like Hazel, our older daughter, is on a competitive swim team. And there's like a million emails that come through for it. It's like chaos. My eight-year-old's on a competitive swim team, so I get it. I get it every day. It's chaos. Said to Doug, just because there were always last minute changes and a million emails and we're all doing a million things.

16:54And I was like, I would do anything in my life to not have to deal with swim ever again. And I said, I want you to handle swim. I want you to become swim dad. So swim dad does everything from puts all the meats on our family calendar. He orders the swimsuits. He attends the practices and deals with the carpool to even make it to swim. All I have to do is show up to the meets and smile and wave my hand at everyone, like sometimes, no offense, like a dad does for some other things. And that's what I get to do for Swim. So that is an illustration of one way in which we really can create greater equity in your household.

17:33I absolutely love that. Thank you so much for sharing. And for those of you who are watching us rather than listening to us, don't forget, you can always subscribe to the long term investor wherever you get your podcasts. And you can go to the long term investor dot com for extraordinarily detailed show notes and links to resources that are being mentioned during the episode. Heather and Doug, I want to broaden the framework a little bit from fairness to teamwork. And it sort of feels like you're talking about that in the household chores, duties, whatever arena, but like in investing where I'm so often focused, transparency and trust are essential.

18:09And so I'm curious what you guys think financial transparency looks like inside of a relationship. Yeah, I love this one because the first thing I would tell you is access, right? I look at couples and their ability to actually have access to bank accounts, financial information, technology that you have, right? When we think about estate planning, it's not just where your stuff goes. Can she actually get into the stuff that I have to access the things that they're going to need here? You should both have the same banking apps on your phone. You should know the usernames and passwords. You want to operate in radical transparency?

18:45Start with access. If we're talking about greater financial fairness as well, we're going to talk about the knowledge that you possess around your financial life. You have to get to the numbers at some point. How you go about getting to the numbers is critical. We can talk about that, but let's just focus on, hey, do you understand three very important things? How money comes in and out of your life? Who earns what? Where the money goes spending? So basically cash flow, right? Do you understand where everything is? Nothing better than a net worth table to show you asset location and value. It's my favorite piece of planning when I'm sitting with a couple so they can see where everything is.

19:21And then obviously the broadest one, the goals and the values, what are the things that you are both equally wanting so you are aligned when it comes to looking at those ones and zeros and where your money is and where it is going. And if you can get this part down along with access, this is the foundational area of it all. Then you can get into investments and what your risk profiles are and what your appetite is to go into certain securities or investments. And I think it's very difficult. You will get there and you'll have an easier time with these more, let's say, nuanced or technical conversations, because there's nothing like talking about that 80-20 portfolio with your spouse when you haven't figured out the foundational components of your financial life.

20:06I think the investment conversation becomes quite moot if you don't have these layers figured out first. I just wanted to say on that point that transparency isn't just what you have. It's about what you want. So if you're not in a position, yes, to understand what you have and all the things Doug just said, but to be able to listen to one another about what it is you truly want out of this life, both of you individually, and then bringing that together to come up with a joint shared vision of the future, then you're missing out on an opportunity to be fully financially transparent with one another.

20:44Love it. Amazing insight from both of you. Something that you, I don't know if you call it this in the book, I actually forgot, but I've heard you already say like the words money date. My wife and I were much better about routine money dates. And what we would do is we had a worksheet with our goals on it. We had our net worth statement. What's difficult sometimes for someone in my profession is, you know, we definitely delegate like you all do, like Doug is swim dad. I'm soccer dad, but also she's school mom and I'm finance dad. And there's these roles, but you try to keep each other informed.

21:17And the only way to really make decisions jointly is to try to create a safe place or have some sort of ritual to get to that place. I'm curious, unless I've already buried the lead, you know, like what's one ritual or habit that you find yourselves recommending to couples to adopt to keep the money conversations productive? And maybe even especially like when things get tense. I think it's really important to recognize what you shouldn't do as much as what you should do It is really hard to exercise restraint with the person that you're most comfortable with, okay? So, like, I'll give you a great example Doug would have something happen at work, which obviously would impact our family finances, right?

21:57Like, back in the day, before I worked at the firm And he would come upstairs, like, during COVID, when we were all working from home all the time And he would come upstairs while I'm trying to, like, make the kids dinner there was like a baby crying. And he'd be like, Ben, guess what just happened? XYZ? Or like, this thing stressed me out. I'm really worried about XYZ. And I'm like, are you kidding? Like, now is not the moment when you're going to get my full attention or receive any input from me on this very consequential thing that you just brought up. So I think it's just as hard to recognize the wrong times as it is the right time.

22:32The idea of the money date is really just to crystallize a time and place that you both feel really good about, almost to the extent that you would look forward to getting together to have this conversation. So find something that you actually want to do. For us, we love to walk. I guess this is a byproduct of living in New York City for so long. We always have been big walkers. We used to walk till like... Tackle the block. We used to walk till midnight every night around the city. So for us, walking is one thing that we like to do. We still do it. But we also like to go out for a cocktail. We like to have a nice drink.

23:05So like we would go downtown and we would schedule a night. We'd hire a babysitter. And we knew that that quarterly date out for us was all about money, our goals. We would bring receipts like this is what this is for. And we would look forward to it because we knew going in, that's what this is for. I would want to build on that. So time and place is critical here, right? So the 430, getting the kids ready for their dining experience. While we're getting to the end of the day where Heather would do the same thing I was doing to her, which is 1130 at night. I just want to zone out the TV. Can I tell you all the things that are stressing me out right now?

23:40It's like, this is the worst time for that. I mean, if the Sunday scaries, but it's like every night. It's like real. I'd be like a good time to talk. I'm like, well, certainly not at 1130 p.m. You know, on a Thursday night is not the time for sure. And we're both obviously culprits here. But when you are having the conversations and you find the time in the place, it's often tweaking them a little bit or turning them on their heads. For example, For all the guys out there that want to, Peter, like you and I, we're financial professionals, right? We got the spreadsheet ready to go. We got the analysis and it's right there on the table.

24:13It's like, come over here, honey. It's date time. I got these spreadsheets to go over. And then she's just like, dates canceled. This sucks. Don't want to do that. So maybe you don't start there. So I think a big piece is know how your partner learns and how they like to learn. I think meeting them where they're at is important. But back to this example, maybe you should talk about the thing you both really want, whether it's the family vacation or experience you're going for, that big goal you have for yourselves. Maybe start with the thing that's going to attract everyone there because it's a great back door into, OK, cool.

24:44We agree we want this. We're excited. Can we go over some of the numbers of how we get there? Because you inevitably do need to go there. And now that door is wide open for you to walk through and you're getting to the meat of the situation. So little tricks like that, obviously just learning where and how your partner likes to learn and maybe starting with things that are actually attractive to the conversation as opposed to things that are like, hey, that's not going to be something I want to dive into. Well, and to further that point, it's not just starting with your positive goals, but it's also starting with what you're doing right.

25:14Right. Don't start with like, don't start with like, hey, you spent too much this month. Like, here's all the ways this impacted us negatively. Yeah, going with the you and accosting the person, definitely not going to work. And that voice, it was that voice that Heather did that I think is also kind of. Here's what we did wrong. Why don't you start with those wins, right? Why don't you start with the things that actually make you feel good about what you're doing together? Because you're going to have to get the things that you need to improve on. And if you think everything, you know, is going great, just you wait.