Should Couples Merge Their Finances?

On this episode of The Long View, we are joined by Doug and Heather Boneparth, co-authors of a new book called Money Together: How to Find Fairness in Your Relationship and Become an Unstoppable Financial Team. Heather is a former lawyer who now works with her husband, Doug, a certified financial planner and founder of their family business, Bone Fide Wealth. The pair breaks down the struggles that couples face when it comes to money and why it is so important for couples to understand their own money histories, and they also share how they built their financial future together.

Listen to the full episode of The Long View. Doug and Heather Boneparth: How Couples Can Find Financial Harmony

Here are a few highlights from the Boneparths’ conversation with Morningstar’s Christine Benz and Ben Johnson.

Pro and Cons of Couples Merging Their Finances

Ben Johnson: In all instances across all of the conversations that you’ve seen, where are you net out on merging finances across a couple and where it might make sense to keep certain elements of couples’ financial lives separate? What are the pros and cons to each approach?

Doug Boneparth: Yeah, all the studies and statistics that we’ve looked at bear out that couples that join their finances together and operate as a team tend to do better overall. And that’s financially better, relationships better. So, in practice and personally, I believe the best thing that you could do is create a shared financial environment to operate out of. Now, having said that, truly the thing that works is what works best for you and your own household. I’ve seen every configuration imaginable and even though I might recommend something different, I’ve seen a lot of other setups work.

So, a lot of that really is there being autonomy for the individual. So, people still like to feel like they have a level of independence. So definitely have your own checking account. There are just things that go on in the lives of people where you want to be giving gifts and you don’t want your partner to know about that. You just want the feeling of the independence. Fine, I get all of that. But I think maybe greater than that is maybe having a shared number when it comes to spending. Is there a number you should check in with with your partner? So, you don’t really need to worry about individual accounts versus joint accounts. It’s just a matter of, hey, you have systems in place to make sure that the decisions you’re making, whether that be on a daily basis or throughout the year, are ones that you both agree with.

But again, for me, and I do like that the statistics bear out, you’re playing a team game here. And also, just from a transparency point of view, I would add everyone having access and the ability to see everything, again, just creates better teamwork and a better framework around money.

How Couples Can Handle Student Loan Debt Together

Christine Benz: I like that the book discussed a lot of common problem spots that couples might run into with money. And one of them was student loan debt, and especially if one partner has a lot of student loan debt and the other doesn’t, and it’s sort of this burden on the shared household. Can you talk about that? And I thought your stories there, your personal stories, were illuminating in this context.

Heather Boneparth: I think that my story juxtaposed against the other couple that we spoke with was just the quintessential example of how two people can experience something incredibly similar and take away completely different feelings around it. And it was the perfect example of that. And the danger in calling something a mistake is the shame that comes with it. And shame is such a damaging feeling for you as an individual and for you as a couple.

Doug Boneparth: Absolutely. In Heather’s own story around her student loan debt from law school, this was a very big piece of our financial relationship as things became more serious and even into getting married. And you’ll see how we tackled that throughout that story. And it took me a while to realize that what was getting Heather down was the shame she experienced through the decisions she made to go to law school in the first place and carry that into the relationship. And it formed into something that wasn’t allowing us necessarily to move forward.

Heather Boneparth: Brené Brown said that shame is not I made a mistake, shame is I am a mistake. And I felt like my student loan debt was not a number on a ledger, the way that the other couple felt like this was a financial hurdle that was part of their life that they had to tackle. My debt was me. I was the deficit. I was the person that wasn’t deserving of the job. I wasn’t deserving of the love. I wasn’t deserving of the support. And I didn’t deserve to have a driving seat in our family finances when Doug and I started getting more serious in talking about marriage and building a life together. I really believed it. It is so incredibly powerful in a bad sense.

Doug Boneparth: Should I share what we did to break through that?

Heather Boneparth: Yeah, sure.

Doug Boneparth: So, I realized there was not a lot of lip service or words that would really help her through that. I could tell her every day, “You’re doing great. Don’t worry about it. We’re working hard. We’ll overcome it.” But ultimately, it’s actions that will speak louder than words. And we had the opportunity to refinance that debt. And the way that we would be able to do that would be if we both signed off on that loan, if I joined her on that note. And for me, it was a no-brainer. We were together. We were committed to each other. This was a financial opportunity of a lifetime. And I would discover that those actions of putting myself in her shoes to alleviate the shame that she was experiencing would ultimately be the action that allowed us to move forward and her to reconcile those decisions.

Heather Boneparth: You entered the fog with me. But it’s true. It was somebody for the first time—and again, I’m a product of divorce. I’m an only child and grandchild on both sides of my family. Those are unique circumstances. And I had not had someone be willing to reach out a hand to me and say, “Your burdens are my burdens. And I believe in you.” I cannot tell you how powerful that was in my life. But I want to also give this caveat anytime we share this story that Doug doesn’t hold himself out as my savior.

Doug Boneparth: No way.

Heather Boneparth: He is not a white knight with a savior complex that is common and swooped in and saved me as this damsel in distress. It may have felt like that at the time. But I commend my husband, and I make this point in the book as well, that he could have held this over me my entire life. And instead, we’ve used it to empower me to pull me up to his level. And for us to say, “No, you deserve a seat at the table here, too,” not in any sort of negative power sense that he would hold this over me my entire life.