On Your Romantic Partner's Spending
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Love, science, and the most outrageous news. It's all here. The Last Show with David Cooper.
Does your partner's spending style affect your relationship more than your actual bank balance? New research outlines how financial happiness isn't always about the numbers. It's about whether, to you, your spouse feels like a saver or a splurger. Let's dive in with someone who worked on that research. She's a financial planner and lecturer at the University of Georgia, Jamie Lynn Byram. Jamie Lynn, welcome to the show.
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
So with your research, are we actually talking about money or are we talking about what money means in your relationship between you and your partner?
Both. So what we looked at was how couples perceive themselves and their partners in regards to whether they're a spender or a saver. So this work actually came from my dissertation.
How can your partner's spending habits affect your relationship?
So I created a survey and had married couples separately and quietly complete the survey, and the study went from there.
Well, let's dig into the study. My understanding is that the perception of how your spouse spends or saves is more important than your actual financial reality. To me, that feels almost dangerous, right? We can kind of be in a blissful idea of the other person and that could ignore the kind of reality of the facts in the marriage with money.
What does research say about financial happiness beyond just numbers?
True. Also, the opposite of that is common. People in relationships sometimes incorrectly assume that they know their partner, their perceptions of their partner are correct or could be incorrect. As a financial planner, I've seen several times where one person believes that their partner is a spender when And in actuality, looking at it from my point of view, that person is most definitely a saver. It just may be that that person spends differently than their partner. So they're going to perceive it differently.
Or perhaps they spend a lot, but they always spend within their means. And they're also very good at saving. The other partner might get annoyed by that, but there's actually nothing wrong with it.
Exactly. That idea itself is what sparked my desire to do this as a dissertation. I had a client, a married couple, both senior level partners in their jobs. They had fully funded retirement, fully funded education goals. They were on the path and doing very well. And it happened, the wife got a bonus for her particular work that season, and she bought herself a purse, a four-figure purse. And when her husband found out about it, he hit the roof. And, you know, thought she said, even said that she was going to, you know, spend them just into bankruptcy, which was far from the case. I mean, they were, you know, A plus if I had to grade them as clients as far as reaching their goals. But in his mind, you know, she was a spender and was going to cause them financial harm.
And Another interesting piece of it, she was done with his behavior towards her spending and other things, and she was thinking about divorce.
Wow, I'm loving this example. I'm on the edge of my seat with this example.
So he thought the marriage was fine. He had no understanding that there was an ounce of problem within the marriage. And she'd already seen a divorce attorney. So it was fascinating to me how you could have two people in the same marriage who perceived one another so differently in not only financial satisfaction, but also marital satisfaction. And so that started my path of figuring out, is this common? Because sometimes when you see things, you think, well, this is how everyone does it, but then you have to realize that's just one couple. Out of, you know, who knows how many. And so I wanted to broaden it to see, is this really something or is it a one off?
When you did broaden it, when you did research it, did you find that it's really perception that can boost or I guess negatively affect relationship satisfaction, not the reality?
Yes, yes. It was all perception meant more than reality. And the person's perception of their spouse meant more than their perception of themselves.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–1:06
2
How can your partner's spending habits affect your relationship?
1:06–1:35
3
What does research say about financial happiness beyond just numbers?
1:35–7:58
4
Why is perception of spending more important than actual financial reality?
7:58–9:21
5
What common misconceptions do partners have about each other's spending?
9:21–9:23
Speakers
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