The Finances of Marriage | #426

24:49Ben Felix:People on second marriages are probably more likely to get them, but it's something that people should be aware of the implications of and understand whether they should consider getting a prenup, even if they are younger. Why don't people tend to do that? Engaged couples, and this is based on one paper that found engaged couples accurately estimate the national divorce rate when they're asked, but they estimate their own chances of divorce being much lower. I mean, classic overconfidence, I guess, being exhibited there. So that optimism bias creates a real practical risk where couples who underestimate their likelihood of divorce may sign prenups that don't accurately reflect their post-divorce welfare needs since the agreement was designed without genuine consideration of the scenario that it's meant to govern.

25:35Ben Felix:The other thing going on here is that law and economics research suggests that the act of requesting a prenup functions as a negative signal, showing a lack of commitment to the prospective relationship, which makes it less likely for a partner to ask for one in the first place. You have these two things happening. There's the optimism bias, which suppresses uptake and signaling costs deter having the conversation entirely. And so you have these structural conditions where prenups are really underused. And when they do exist, they're potentially designed without the seriousness that the document warrants.

26:10I think this concept, the way you explained it, that everybody has a default prenup, that was first explained to me and concept makes sense by Dr. Moira Summers, who's been on previous episodes and I think coming up on an episode in the near future. But she explained it in such a way and it kind of made a light bulb go off in my head. Everybody has a default agreement set out by the law. If you're getting into this, why not create an agreement that's on your terms? But as you've said, there's this negative connotation that if you are thinking about prenup, you are thinking about the possibility of your marriage failing, which in reality, that is true.

26:48You're preparing for what happens in the marriage breakdown, which is an awkward conversation. But if it does happen, it's going to be split as the law says regardless. So the way Dr. Myra Summers kind of explained this was you have the opportunity to create an agreement that is drafted in a loving way that reflects your own wishes. You each have to get independent legal counsel. Yes. The environment doesn't appear particularly loving. So I understand the resistance, but of course it makes a lot of sense. And of course, I think we all would agree they're especially important if you're coming into the marriage with very different levels of wealth.

27:31Two young people who don't have a lot of financial assets, neither of them own a home. Is it important to get one? Maybe, maybe not. But certainly if you're coming into the relationship and from very different places in net worth, one stands to be harmed a lot more in a financial sense by a breakup. for sure makes sense to do it. Yeah, that's the most obvious case. I've got some good examples of that where we've had those discussions where there is an imbalance in net worth. And the way that some clients have approached it is having the large net worth spouse have their net worth kind of vest over time based on a trigger of say years or life events such as having children or if you were to pass away, maybe you get a much bigger portion, but kind of protects from the short-term marriage breakdown, but benefits for a longer-term relationship.

28:32If it goes longer, the lower net worth spouse is not penalized. They still get a more representative share of the overall pie.

28:42Ben Felix:So weird to think about. Your point, Dan, is right, but then you talk to people who did get married young and one spouse ends up being very financially successful doing whatever if they do end up getting divorced they are often pretty unhappy I don't know it's tough I don't have one I had nothing when we got married and I didn't know I'd have a successful career at all I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life when I got married and here you are And here I am. If I'm advising someone, should you get a prenup? It's tough to say. Like, you don't want to say everybody should get a prenup. I think what you said is right then.

29:22Ben Felix:The most obvious case is if there's an obvious financial imbalance, you almost have to get one. It's kind of crazy not to. But if you're coming in more equally, it's a tougher conversation. Yeah. And it's tough to predict how someone's career might progress. And the question of spouse partner roles, however you play, if one person decides to stay home with the children because they enjoy that or works for your family? Are you in pairing their ability to earn their own income? Therefore, that should impact how much they get if the marriage does break down. So it gets complex pretty quick. I agree.

29:57I'm in the same scenario. I got married young and we didn't have a prenup. And because of that negative connotation, I have my own personal bias that I probably wouldn't. But same thing when talking to someone, I would advise them to seriously consider a prenuptial agreement so that they can decide the path that makes sense for them as a couple.

30:17Ben Felix:I think that's where it's interesting that with this document in place, you can deliberately design your financial arrangements to reflect what makes sense for you. If you're getting married, there is a default based on the law where you live. It's, you got to know kind of baseline, what does that mean? And then if that arrangement does not make sense for you, you can draft your own version of it and you can get creative. Ben, like you mentioned, we've seen some people get pretty creative in terms of how they want to divide assets in a hypothetical separation over time and triggered by different life events that you can do all kinds of stuff if you're doing it yourself.

30:53Ben Felix:But I think it does have to start with an honest conversation about property and savings and income, future income, and what each person would need to be financially secure if the relationship were to end taking a very cold and rational approach to something that is not a very cold and rational thing which is i think why it's hard i think sometimes even having that conversation helps i've seen people that i've gone through the exercise and not formally set up the prenup but it's helped them conceptualize okay something does happen we've discussed this and i'm okay with the default outcome or not.

31:30All right.

31:31Ben Felix:Next one I have is how much should you spend on an engagement ring, wedding, and honeymoon? Kind of following the arc of a marriage, choosing a partner, prenup, and wedding. There's a common perception that cheaping out on an engagement ring signals a lack of commitment or care from the proposing member of a couple. Whereas prenups act as a negative signal, a bigger ring often acts as a positive signal and an expression of love and affection there are many drivers of this signaling most notably i remember learning about this when i was doing my mba as just like such a crazy marketing case advertising from jewelry companies or diamond companies in this case like de beers who first pushed the two months salary spending standard on an engagement ring ads like that link the price of the ring to the permanence of the marriage i remember seeing ads a diamond is forever when i was a kid haven't seen those in a long time brilliant marketing campaigns.

32:27Ben Felix:Yeah, I mean, they created a market, I think, for diamonds, which is why it was such a crazy case. Is that pre-tax salary? I think it's gross. Didn't look into it. I think it's gross too, but it's funny though, eh, how supposed societal conventions come. It's like, it was a diamond company who convinced a bunch of guys that they should spend two months' salary on an engagement. Look, whether that's appropriate or not, not for me to say. I just think it's also not for De Beers to say. It's bizarre how that has entered into the consciousness, but good on them. People still do it. They still blast money on engagement rings.

33:07And honestly, two months seems low on, I've heard like three or six months. Inflation. Yeah.

33:14Ben Felix:I certainly know of ones that were more than that. Yeah, for sure. That's the diamonds. The interesting thing is it's not limited to the ring. I mean, we all kind of know this, there's a similar perception around the wedding itself. I've seen, separate from PWL stuff, just in my personal life, I've seen some wild weddings that I've been invited to or attended. It's just like, man, it's crazy what people will spend on a wedding. There's a 2021 paper in the Journal of Consumer Policy that found that consumers routinely attach elevated importance to wedding products that allows them to excuse excess wedding spending compared to other categories on the basis that it's a once-in-a-lifetime event that requires once-in-a-lifetime spending.

33:59Ben Felix:And what that's resulted in is a two-tiered retail market for products. We've heard about this. CBC's covered this. It's a real thing where wedding items are marked up from their regular non-wedding counterparts. So think like floral arrangements for a wedding versus a non-wedding event. This begs the big question, which is, is the tendency to spend more on wedding related items benefiting the future of your relationship? Does spending more make for a better wedding or more importantly, does it make for a better marriage? And this is where the findings from this paper are super interesting. So they have survey data from over 3 ,000 married survey participants.

34:35Ben Felix:And they find that after controlling for variables like income, demographic, and other relationship factors, that the opposite is true. Higher engagement ring spending was linked to a greater risk of divorce among men and higher wedding spending was linked to greater risk of divorce among women. Wedding related debt stress might have been one possible mechanism. Couples who experienced the lowest divorce rates spent less than a thousand dollars on their wedding, which is just fascinating. Personally, my wedding cost around$300 back in 2013. It's a very small wedding outside in Ottawa. It was awesome.

35:12Ben Felix:And I'm still married. How many guests? It was my sister, Tessa, my parents, and my wife. There you go. And that's it. To kind of pull this back to the tightwad spendthrift continuum, I don't think anybody would argue that the pressure to spend more on, I don't know about rings, but certainly on weddings has increased a lot over the last 10, 15 years, whatever period. People who are more inclined to be tightwads now have a lot more pressure on them if they want to resist that. And people who are inclined to be spendthrifts kind of have free reign to indulge that now, because you can spend an awful lot on a wedding without kind of judgment that you might have had to endure in years past or without the kind of judgment you might endure if you spent that money on something other than a wedding.

36:08So I think if you have a conflict between a tightwad and a spendthrift partner, you're going to see it clash pretty heavily when you're planning the wedding. Yeah, it'd be a very good early first test. Like if you got a spendthrift that wants to do a flashy wedding and a tightwad that wants to do it as fiscally responsible as possible, how you handle that discussion will set the tone for the marriage. But more importantly, I think the social pressure on that couple is going to be much more difficult to endure for the tightwad. For sure.

36:44Ben Felix:Yeah, because it's become such an accepted, normal, expected even thing to do. Exactly. I always look back at my wedding. I'm like, yep, glad we did it that way. I did not do my wedding as cheap as you did, Ben, but I was pretty close. And going to the engagement ring, I went the sentimental route. I bought a gold ring and I knew my wife had a diamond ring from her grandmother that she wanted to be incorporated. My wife will tell you a funny story that I went and stole the ring from her parents' house, which is not completely true. I had permission anew, but they weren't home. I used the garage code to go grab the ring at the time and then turned it into a beautiful ring for her.

37:25And I wanted to do the traditional thing of asking her parents to have her hand in marriage. And at that point they like, so you came in and took the ring and. That's pretty funny. It's pretty funny to look back on. But then our wedding was not crazy expensive. I think it was maybe 5 ,000 total, but we got 150 people, like mostly family and some friends. we used as many free options we had we had a free photographer someone gifted a dj we had a friend who made cakes and favors so we saved money as much as possible and i don't regret doing it the way we did it may also be a reflection of the time like we didn't have much money we got married relatively young but i don't regret doing that and don't think we missed out we had a great time and lots of good memories.

38:12Ben Felix:The other counterintuitive finding from this study is that there were two types of wedding spending that predicted longer marriages in this sample. One was having more guests at the wedding and the other was going on a honeymoon in both cases regardless of the price. It kind of shows that a wedding and honeymoon don't need to be and I would argue should not be shows of wealth but they can still be great experiences. You shouldn't go broke buying a ring and you don't want to max out a credit card on a wedding venue, but there are still ways to do. I mean, having a nice honeymoon and having lots of people you care about at your wedding without having to spend a whole bunch of money, if that's even possible.

38:53Ben Felix:I don't know, having a whole bunch of people together at a venue, if anyone gets a hint that it's a wedding, it's going to get more expensive. Yeah. Well, I had 150 people at my wedding and did it for 5 ,000 bucks, had a buffet, no open bar, worked pretty well. Yeah, that's good. this one's one of my favorites i think on this topic because i remember when i was early in my financial planning career and i would spend a lot of time talking to young couples this is always one of the first questions i would get asked is how should we structure our finances should we have joint accounts should we combine our finances should we have separate finances and it seems like this pretty innocuous financial decision but it can actually have a huge impact on your financial life?

39:34Ben Felix:And there's tons of potential answers. I mean, I've seen every possible combination of bank accounts that you can think of for a couple, but what tends to work best, the evidence is pretty strong, which is that couples should manage their finances together. Some of the research does suggest that means joint accounts, but some of it suggests it doesn't necessarily have to be. But the main idea is that combining finances has some pretty clear benefits. There's one 2022 analysis across six studies and more than 38 ,000 participants that finds that couples who fully pooled their finances reported greater relationship satisfaction and were less likely to break up, which held cross-culturally, which is interesting.

40:16Ben Felix:The 2023 study in the Journal of Consumer Research found that joint accounts promoted communal norms, shared goals, and better feelings about managing money as a team, which are all linked to greater relationship and life satisfaction. Now, interestingly, this is the part that I mentioned that the benefits of combined finances may not even have to come as a consequence of actually combining finances, like using a joint account. Simply thinking about your finances as combined can produce positive results. So there's a 2025 paper, Talk About Shared Money, which is by Johanna Peets, who was actually a guest on this podcast many years ago.

40:52Ben Felix:She found that, well, yes, the act of pooling finances caused couples to communicate more openly and frequently about money. Simply redirecting people's attention toward their existing joint accounts rather than their separate ones was enough to produce a similar effect. So I think couples who are thinking about their finances as ours rather than mine and yours tend to talk more and more productively about money, regardless of how the accounts are actually set up. And then the other big benefit, and this, Dan, you alluded to when we first started talking about this topic, the other big benefit of combined finances is that the effect of combining finances seems to make the relationship between wealth and life satisfaction stronger, which is interesting.

41:31Ben Felix:So the 2022 paper, My Wealth, Your Life Satisfaction, which finds that increases in jointly held wealth led to greater life satisfaction, whereas gains in individually held wealth did not have any significant impact. Yeah. So then practically speaking, like you actually need to combine your finances. I don't know. In my household, we do everything in a main joint account and that's it. Like that's where everything happens. The research says it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. I think it's a pretty efficient way to do it though. But the main thing is thinking about finances jointly, even if they aren't physically or whatever, electronically joint.

42:10The joint accounting is going to be really important. Again, if you've got this kind of spendthrift tightwad dynamic going on. And again, I don't have any research to back this up, but my intuition tells me if the two partners, one was on the tightwad side and one was on the spendthrift side, the tightwad would probably be happier with separate accounts because they feel like they could build a little bit of a fence around kind of their account. And if their partner is inclined to spend more freely, then there's at least that separation. Whereas if both of them were on the contented side, or frankly, if they were both tight wads or both spend thrifts, the joint account would be much easier.

42:56I think it would be difficult to share a joint account with someone who was at a very different part of that spectrum. The closer you are, the more likely the joint account seems to me to be the right way to go.

43:10Ben Felix:that's tough and i think you're right when you look at what the research on this says is you're less likely to have shared goals life satisfaction is decreasing but it speaks again to just what the first piece of research that we talked about says is that if you are on opposite ends of that tight wad spend thrift spectrum it does lead to marital conflict and it does lead to lower marital satisfaction and i think that you're kind of pointing out a practical mechanism i agree with you it probably does make sense to keep accounts separate if you're very different but that's in itself a problem. Many people, it doesn't have to be all the way one side or the other, right?

43:45I mean, I certainly know a lot of clients or other couples who've just shared, like, they have a joint account for their joint expenses, and then they each have their own account. People can be very mechanical about how much each has to contribute to the joint account each month. Whatever, you can work that out among yourselves. But for a lot of couples, that compromise makes sense you know you have mostly shared expenses in the house but each one feels like you know what i want a little bit of money that i can spend myself without you checking my bank statements and depending on the relationship dynamic i'm sure it can work well also i agree i think it comes down again to communication like if you agree okay you each have a budget of x amount per month to do what you wish with the tightwad saves most of it the spendthrift spends then it's less likely it's going to cause conflict if you have agreed on principle these are the guidelines for how we manage our finances and we'll save this much jointly then that can work i find where if people have a joint view on how they manage their money having additional accounts not one way that's right or wrong i think just adds more mental overhead and complexity like if you agree that what's ours is ours and if you have to move money from individual account to joint account and switch money all around just adds more to think about and if it works for you then that's great but there's other layers that you need to think about when you're setting up your joint banking i agree on that it's all about communication

45:18Ben Felix:if my wife or i want to spend money on something substantial we will just have a conversation about it rather than having a budget for stuff that we don't have to ask each other questions about yeah exactly i've heard of couples that have like a threshold like anything over five hundred dollars or a thousand dollars we should talk about it first it does start to lead into another topic that i want to talk about which is financial infidelity where i think talking about what works for a couple if you do something that doesn't work but you kind of agree to it but one person doesn't really agree to it but they say they do then you end up with financial infidelity, which is not great.

45:55Ben Felix:The definition of it is engaging in financial behavior you expect your partner would disapprove of and then hiding it. And it's actually pretty common in marriage. There is a recent paper that looks at what happens when one partner is much more prone to it than the other. And couples with that kind of mismatch are more likely to end up with individualized rather than shared financial goals. And this also predicts lower financial well-being and lower relationship satisfaction and interestingly this finding holds up even after accounting for other mismatches between partners like one being a tightwad and the other being a spendthrift that's of course harder to do if you stick to joint accounts that is potentially one argument for joint credit card joint bank account and then you just have this understanding like look whatever i buy my partner is going to see it i mean if you want to buy a gift or something there's ways to do that and keep it a secret but it'd be pretty hard to hide major spending chronically if you are only working with joint accounts it's not to say that it's only appropriate if people don't trust each other it's just a matter of transparency not usually a bad thing yeah if there is transparency but the case we're talking about here is financial infidelity so if Someone is intentionally trying to hide it.

47:16Even if you started with a joint account, it could result in a separate hidden account being created and it could cause some serious conflict because it's no longer just finances. You're breaching trust with your partner. So it could get messy pretty quick.

47:31Ben Felix:I kind of think that bird's going to get flushed over regardless. Like if someone's conducting financial infidelity and you say, all right, we're doing joint accounts, then they're either going to find another way to do it or it's just going to bring the issue to the forefront and you're going to get separated. It's a bigger problem than we can solve with our financial planning guidance. It's for the counselors or the divorce attorneys to deal with. Yeah. Whether finances are combined or joint, I think another big question that every couple grapples with, and we see this as financial advisors a lot.

48:04Ben Felix:The other big question that households have to grapple with is how much each spouse should be involved in household financial decision making. Again, as advisors, we see this all the time. It's very common for there to be a primary financial spouse, whereas the less financial spouse is sometimes not even super engaged in the financial conversation. You can have a lot of conversations that end up being dominated by one spouse and that can be with an advisor, but good financial advisor will try and check that and engage both spouses. but I think if it's just the two people on their own, a lot of decisions can end up being dominated by one spouse.

48:39Ben Felix:And it's not because the concepts are too complicated for the other spouse to understand, but it can be difficult to step back and be objective about your own financial life without defaulting into how things are usually done. If your spouse in either direction just always makes these decisions or does stuff and tells you about it after the fact, then it's kind of hard to step back and say, well, hey, maybe we should approach this decision differently. And I do think that being mediator is not quite the right word, but being somewhat of a financial mediator or neutral third party between couples does end up being a big part of what advisors at firms like PWL Capital do for couple clients.

49:16Ben Felix:It's just a different conversation when there's a third party who's not part of the relationship in the room. Research on this does tend to point toward male-dominated influence on important household decisions like asset allocation. A 2026 paper in the Review of Financial Studies shows that the average Australian household incorporates 60 % of the husband's risk tolerance, but only 40 % of the wife's into the household level asset allocation. The authors state that this implies a 20 percentage point gap in bargaining power. Half of that gender gap is driven by observable characteristics like income and employment.

49:50Ben Felix:And then the other half can be traced back to a gender effect as the authors describe it. the average bargaining power for husbands is 69 % in Germany and 61 % in the United States. But the authors do say that the three countries, Australia, Germany, and the US are statistically indistinguishable from each other in terms of husband bargaining power, but all of them are above 60%. What's most surprising here is that discounting a wife's financial input cannot be attributed solely to her lack of financial knowledge. The 2021 journal of finance paper, who wears the pants, finds that U.S. households with a financially sophisticated husband are more likely to participate in the stock market than households with a wife of equal financial sophistication.

50:34Ben Felix:And the authors argue that this pattern is best explained by gender identity norms rather than by differences in competence. So they also run a randomized experiment in the paper, which points to the mechanism. Female identity suppresses the wife's willingness to contribute ideas while male identity makes husbands less receptive to a spouse's input. So that paper is in the Journal of Finance. It's interesting to have that topic covered in that journal, but there it is. A short 2018 conference paper by the same author extends the pattern internationally. So that paper was just looking at the US.

51:13Ben Felix:The second conference paper, shorter conference paper, finds that households in countries with stronger traditional gender norms are less likely to participate in the stock market with suggestive evidence that the pattern holds among wealthy households as well. Now these norms carry a real financial cost through the stock market participation channel, which is really a shame given what we know about how the sexes actually trade differently. In Barbara and O'Dean's 2001 study of 35 ,000 households with brokerage accounts, men traded 45 % more than women, consistent with the prediction that overconfidence produces excessive harmful trading.

51:52Ben Felix:That activity in their study was costly. Trading reduced men's net returns by 2.65 percentage points per year versus 1.72 percentage points for women. To be clear, both groups hurt themselves by trading too much. Women just did less of it. Whatever the return consequences, I do think that a household that systematically discounts one spouse's preference is making decisions that only one of the two people actually endorses and that seems worth fixing for its own sake it's always hard to make generalizations and i hesitate to do so but i will say like based on my experience working with client households client couples mostly i get a male female couple i would say the one who is my primary contact about the planning and investing is the woman as often as it is the man.

52:47I'd be shocked if it wasn't really close to 50-50. But to take it a step further, this idea about it affecting stock market exposure is really interesting because I would say in the households where the man is more likely to be our primary contact, we talk more about the portfolio and more about investing. and in the households where the woman is primarily our contact, we spend more time talking about the planning. I haven't quantified this in any way, but that's my intuition. And I think that there is some social pressure on men who think that they need to know about markets and investing in a way they're expected to know about sports and cars.

53:37I don't know if this sounds like a stereotype. But to me, I think I see a little bit of that because from time to time I will talk to like a male client who I get the feeling is kind of bluffing, asking questions that he feels like he thinks he should ask, but it doesn't really feel honest. It feels a bit more performative where you almost never hear that. I never hear that from our female clients. I don't take that for what it's worth.

54:06Ben Felix:That shows up in the financial literacy literature where men are more likely to be overconfident. They're more likely to answer, confidently answer a question incorrectly. Whereas women are more likely to say that they don't know the answer to the question, even if they actually did. They tend to be underconfident. You're correct. I think that as an advisor, it's really important for you to try to be aware of that dynamic and do everything you can to bring both partners into the conversation whenever possible. You'll see it sometimes in a meeting, one spouse will be going on and on. You have to make the effort and turn to the other one and say, what do you think?

54:45Do you agree with that? Where are you coming from? Because it's something I think that just in general, trying to do a financial plan for a household is going to be a lot easier and a lot more satisfying for them if they both feel some ownership and some engagement in the process. And it leads to such a better balanced conversation. A less dominant spouse tends to have a completely different perspective than the more dominated spouse and just gives different perspectives, planning, kids or trips or gifting or all these different things that can come up in financial planning conversations that would not necessarily be top of mind for the opposite spouse.

55:26It's good to get both sides, whether you're doing it on your own. So if you're a DIY investor, even if you are the main partner managing the portfolio, you're going to want to think about the more broad financial planning picture and include your spouse in those decisions and discussions. And I often hear, well, my spouse is just not interested. You don't have to be interested in the details of portfolio management and tax strategies to care about what's important to you. Your money is a means to do things to achieve the goals that you want to achieve. Everybody cares about that to some extent.

56:04So being part of those conversations is important, even if you're not interested in the money aspect or the technical aspects of the conversation. For sure.

56:13Ben Felix:Continuity too, right? Where if one spouse makes all the decisions and does not involve the other spouse and something happens to the primary financial spouse and they don't have an advisor, that can be very difficult for the spouse who's kind of been in the dark the whole time to carry on after the fact. That's definitely a reason why we've had a number of clients come to us quite late in life. And that's a very common reason why, right? Where the one spouse who's been managing the finances will come to us and say, I'm just concerned about what might happen if I go first. My partner would not be able to manage on their own.

56:49And then you feel like the sharks are going to start circling. The bank's going to call you. And they will, is the thing. So they're like, you know, I just want to know that if it's not me, somebody I trust is looking after my family. It's very responsible, I think, for a person to be that humble, but also that forward thinking and not in denial that at some point that could happen.

57:12Ben Felix:It's usually a good time to reach out. Yeah, we definitely do see people reaching out for that reason. There was a really interesting paper out a few years ago now that showed that there can be significant issues with cognitive decline that goes unnoticed leading to poor financial decisions. So death is one thing and leaving a less financially sophisticated spouse to figure it out. But cognitive decline is a whole other issue. We've seen people come to us as a hedge against that as well, which I think is another pretty interesting reason. The other thing I've heard from a ton of people, and I don't really know if this is the best way to do it because like you said, Dan, the sharks will be circling, but I've had a ton of people tell me that I'm not going to become a client, but I've written into my will that if I die, I want you to be the first phone call that my wife makes.

57:59Ben Felix:I'm always like, oh, well, that's the best time to do it. Maybe not the first phone call, but yeah. Yeah. Interesting comment. That's a huge responsibility. I mean, I think any advisor would really take that responsibility very seriously, right? I mean, that's a huge compliment. Huge compliment. To be told, I trust you with my family's finances when I'm gone. I've heard the same thing. In fact, I know people who have done that for sure. We'll cover quite a bit here. The questions we talked about drawn different bodies of research with distinct financial implications for couples. I think if we kind of step back and think about all of them one clear pattern emerges which is that the couples who are going to set themselves up the best financially and emotionally are the ones who approach finances of marriage as a team and have open communication there are multiple ways that can be accomplished based on the stuff that we talked about the research we talked about understanding you and your partner's spending tendencies lets you understand where each of you are coming from aligning on the legal implications of marriage for your situation and whether that's a prenup or the default through open conversation before the marriage makes a lot of sense.

59:08Ben Felix:Prioritizing shared experiences like a honeymoon over material displays like a huge rock or lavish wedding. Taking a joint approach to your finances or at least thinking about them as shared even if they're not actually set up as joint accounts rather than maintaining separate financial lives or at the extreme secret financial lives in the case of financial infidelity and then ensuring that both partners are involved in financial decisions rather than delegating everything to one person which empirically is often the male spouse at least based on some of the research that we looked at those are all pretty good ways i think to open lines of communication and make sure everybody's on the same page and on board with the household financial strategy that's it any final comments no should we go to the after show

59:57Ben Felix:So we have gotten some feedback that people miss the after show. The good old days when Cameron would tell us about the shows he was watching on Netflix. We joked that there was six people who stuck around this long. Yeah, the six people in the after show. We do have a couple of reviews to read, so we can go there. I do also want to mention, while we're here in the after show, we did an episode, a special episode, on a Tuesday as opposed to a Thursday, with two of the folks from One Digital. The episode was not well-received. So I just wanted to say they acknowledged. We heard the feedback. We saw the feedback.

1:00:35Ben Felix:People were very willing to share their perspectives on how much they disliked that episode and the reasons why. That's kind of all I want to say about it. We saw the comments. We understand. The feedback is well taken. We'll move on from there. Yeah. a couple of reviews here i'll do the disclaimer we have a few reviews from apple podcast to read under sec regulations we're required to disclose whether a review which may be interpreted as a testimonial was left by a client whether any direct or indirect compensation was paid for the review or whether there are any conflicts of interest related to the review as reviews are generally anonymous we are unable to identify if the reviewer is a client or disclose any such conflicts of interest uh read the first one dan yeah so this one is titled best financial show No.

1:01:21Disclosure, I'm not affiliated. This is one of the best financial podcasts there is, applicable for both U.S. and non-U.S. citizens, which is great because most of the podcasts are U.S. citizen biased. The only downside of the podcast is that it makes you go into the rational reminder forums, install the deep dive, which is a never-ending loop of learning, even for people like me, not that savvy and who don't work in finance. Can't wait for the leverage podcast. And this is from V-B-A-E-N-B 1992 from Israel.

1:01:56Ben Felix:Pretty cool. The rational mitre community is the situation. People can get sucked in there. Never ending loop. I do love that since we started doing a disclaimer for our reviews, people started adding disclaimers to their own reviews. Okay, let's do the next one here. Great podcast. Thanks, Ben and team. I've been listening to this podcast for years. and look forward to my Thursday commute every week for the new RR episode. I'd love to see an episode focused on optimal asset allocation and life cycle theory for defined benefit pensioners, of which I imagine there are certainly quite a few in Canada from the public service.

1:02:33P.S. Just to make this fun, I'll have you know that your podcast brings me such great comfort. I listened to it while I was getting minor surgery by Moist Towlet from Canada. That's quite the name.

1:02:45Ben Felix:Nice. that's a very funny name and also a very funny story go to the next one future investor as a 22 year old mechanical engineering student and massive excel nerd this podcast is right up my alley i transitioned here from the wealthy barber and dave's podcast and the level of data-driven nerdy detail you guys provide is unmatched even though i have zero assets to invest yet every episode gets me incredibly excited to graduate and start my financial journey you guys make complex financial topics understandable and entertaining. Keep up the amazing work. And that's by Gordy from Canada. All right, we'll wrap up with this last one.

1:03:22In-depth financial analysis. I found rational reminder from an interview on the Bogleheads on Investing podcast. Since then, I've been going through the archive, excellent interviews, and in-depth dives into the data. Looking forward to the next 400 plus podcasts and that's from E.F. Schuller from the U.S. of A. Very nice. Hopefully there will be 400 plus more to come.

1:03:47Ben Felix:I mentioned the rash reminder community being a situation and how people can get sucked into it. Looking at the all-time stats for the community in terms of time read, so time people spend reading topics on the community, one person to spend three months, three months of their life reading topics time well spent like i hope so that's the biggest outlier but there's 67 days 71 days 49 days does it have your stat bet 44 days there you go near the top near the top but not at the top but i'm in the probably the top 10 percent or so maybe the top five percent nice you can't actually sort it by days red i don't know why they don't let you do that because it would be too alarming maybe maybe i can sort it by posts red that seems like a pretty good proxy someone's got 74 days of red time 62 days it's a fun place i guess it's a lot of time reading it's a lot of time reading yeah hopefully they were doing something else while they were reading.

1:04:56It's like the dishes or cleaning the house or something. Yeah. Big commitment. I'm not good at chitchat. I don't know. What else do you guys got? I mean, when this episode comes out, we've got a cool event that PWL is going to be at. This comes out on September 10th. We started last year doing a PWL summit. So the whole team is going to come together and grow in a lot. So we get a chance to just hang out, learn a lot. It's got some cool guest speakers coming in. Excited for that, to hang out, meet some people in person that we've never met. So we've kind of grown across the country and have people working remotely.

1:05:33How big is the group now? I think there's going to be 140 plus people there.

1:05:38Ben Felix:Pretty crazy. Like you said, Ben, we did it for the first time last year and we've grown a lot. We became remote when COVID started. We never went back to being in the office. And there's something about getting everybody together. And we've been so fortunate to attract, interestingly, actually, partially at least, and partially maybe understating it because of this podcast, we've been able to attract so many incredible employees who are just so bought into the way that we think about the world and think about portfolio management. It really is special getting everybody together in one place. Yeah, we used to do just like a Christmas party.

1:06:13That was our big event of the year, but this has been so much better. It's a multi-day event and everybody can come to nerd out on the stuff that brought us all together in the first place. That talks on leadership, talks on planning, then just time to hang out and chat about how we're growing and what's working well, what's not working well. Should be good.

1:06:35Ben Felix:Good stuff. All right. Hey guys, good to see you again. Yep. Good to see you. Thanks guys. And thanks everybody for listening. Cheers.

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