Get passionate about pensions

Don’t let financial fears ruin a good relationship

After infidelity, money is said to be the top cause of relationship breakdowns.

The key to a happy relationship is communication, however – and I don’t just mean talking.

Communication means listening too, you hear me?

Do you know what your spouse or partner wants to achieve in their professional life? Are they looking to progress in their career?

Do they want to stay in their current job until retirement? And when do they plan to give up work?

And outside of work, what does your partner want to achieve?

It’s important you discuss this now so there are no surprises in store later.

After all, if you don’t know what each other wants from their life, how will you ever be able to achieve it together?

Pensions and paying mortgages aren’t exciting, but what they can do for us is. When we attach an emotional feeling to them, the results become far more real and meaningful.

If you said, “By forgoing [fill in your blank] and investing into our pensions, we can travel the world in 12 years rather than in 20 years,” you could both be more inspired to follow through.

That’s why I recommend you have a date night each month, as an opportunity for you both to forget your other roles in life and be a couple again.

Remember, time is precious and it never stops ticking so we need to make life happen, not just have life happen around us.

Have regular date nights to forget your roles in life and just be a couple again

Stronger together

Spending money is an emotional area and from my experience as a financial planner, it can cause a lot of conflict between couples. Secret spending, worried purchases and resentment can quickly snowball. But if you scratch beneath the surface of the arguments, it’s not the actual spending that causes the conflict – it’s the breaking of each other’s values.

For example, when my wife Nicky and I first got together, she would go shopping with her friends.

All I would see when she got home were the bags full of purchases.

I viewed her spending money like that as moving away from what I wanted, which was financial freedom.

I didn’t see, at the time, the happiness it gave her. Instead, I assumed my values of financial freedom were not important to her and she was trying to jeopardise them by shopping.

When we spoke about this, she shared her thought that all I wanted to do was invest our money. Needless to say, the talk worked – we started to understand each other’s values and our relationship with money took off.

We resolved things by putting the Bank Account System into place.

I developed this early on in my career and I encourage all readers to use it. It helps take routine thought and emotion out of everyday banking and puts your financial journey on autopilot, while allowing you to retain your precious independence.

I encourage you to make your future together bigger than your past and always to have plans and aspirations. That’s true no matter what your age. You can find more about how to set up the Bank Account System in my book The Money Plan, or at warren shute.com, where there are also free resources to download.