Money Matters: Lessons from a Failed Marriage

Unwinding the financial tangle of marriage reveals all of our fault lines. Will our intent to be amicable survive the war?

“Make sure you are on the same page about money!”

It was the warning that we heard time and time again as we planned our wedding. Tales of the destruction of one partner saving while the other was spending along with the horror stories of the conflicts that would be littered the cautions.

My soon-to-be ex and I both came from relatively poor, working-class families where we watched the issues around not having enough money for basic needs become fodder for frequent fights in both of our homes. Each of our parents had a vastly different value about how the available funds should be allocated and the tensions those differences brought provided ample heat for fiery and often destructive explosive arguments.

We both agreed that we did not want that dynamic to continue in our home. Overall, we seemed to be on the same page. Live within our means and avoid extravagance. It seemed simple enough and that we were on the same page enough to avoid perpetuating the volatility of each of our families of origin.

But things are rarely as simple as they seem.

As we are unwinding our three shared decades, one lesson that continues to surface is deciding what not to do is not the same as deciding what you will do. In our rush to agreement built from a desire to not be what we saw in our own parents, we missed some key things that continue to complicate everything.

Definitions Matter

The experiences that we had in our family of origin around money remain powerful influences. We actually never had a conversation about how we each define “living within our means.”

In my family, my dad loathed debt of any kind. Part of the reason we often struggled is that if we couldn’t buy it with cash, we couldn’t afford it. In fact, in the mid-1970s when my dad bought our family home, he couldn’t bear the idea of losing all that money to interest. He worked an extra job. We ate veggies from our garden that he tended and meat from his hunting and fishing. We heated our home with wood that he cut and wore hand-me-down clothes from families with a little more means. He fixed his own cars and picked up whatever side jobs he could. We were a single-income family and he paid off the house in five years. To this day, he does not use credit and watches each penny as if it were a $100 bill.

The story was a bit different in my soon-to-be ex’s home. His home was also a single-income home, but his dad believed that any funds that you had access to were to be included in the equation of what it means to live within your means. If you could get a credit card, then the available balance was fair game. And if you needed a car or a motorcycle, you bought it. If you could no longer afford it, they would simply get re-possessed by the bank or lender and you could try again another day. They frequently moved and seemed to be looking for some sort of magic wand to solve the revolving debt. His family filed for bankruptcy numerous times and continues to see whatever credit can be found as disposable income.

When these two mindsets combined in our home, it meant that though we were using the same words, we meant incredibly different things.

If there were a “try again” button, having a clear defining conversation about our understanding of this much-used phrase and how that aligns with our individual values.

Stuff Matters

We all have “stuff” in life. Whether we own lots of things or a minimal amount, the value we place on those items matters in some ways that we never considered. How you decide what to acquire, how things are taken care of and maintained, and when they are let go and tossed are all value decisions that often go undiscussed.

What should we buy? My soon-to-be ex and I have very different approaches to how we purchase things. His buying tends to be impulsive for small items and resistant to larger purchases. He does not see that 10 trips to the local Dollar Store that cost $30 each are exactly the same as the $300 that is needed to replace a worn rug. I would never even go into a Dollar Store or Walmart without a list of things to purchase. I would rather save for the larger purchases and not have to figure out what to do with more stuff. It has always fascinated me to see how easily he becomes overwhelmed with managing stuff he claims to not care about but is also unwilling to quit purchasing.

This has only become more complicated as we have completely divided our finances. Suddenly his budget does not support these impulsive purchases and he is having to figure out how to do all of the management to keep things afloat in his world without my money or my skills to help.

How do we take care of things? We also hold vastly different views on how to take care of things. To his credit, he is driving a car with over 400,000 miles on it and has mostly done all of the maintenance to keep it on the road for over 20 years. More on that later. However, when it comes to things like changing the filters for our home’s HVAC system, he finds that to be an expense that he can’t tolerate even when the neglect has cost a lot of money in repairs. He believes that general maintenance is not important and sees no point in the time or investment.

It is important to me is taking care of the things that I have. This has clear lines to growing up with not quite enough to get by and a deeply held gratitude for the things I do get to have. As a child, I remember counting the pieces of a 500-piece puzzle to make sure they were all there when I put it away so it would be ready for next time. I tend to believe if you can’t afford with your time or money to take proper care of something then you can’t afford to own it in the first place.

This has generally led to a pattern of me being responsible for the care, cleaning, and maintenance of everything with his car as the one exception. Asking for assistance is viewed as dictatorship and using resources to hire someone to help has always been taken off the table immediately as a ridiculous expense.

So, I quit. I no longer clean up messes that others make.

The house is a mess more immense than I am able to live in comfortably, so I have moved into our upstairs and maintain that space as my refuge from the chaos of his stuff.

What does it mean to get rid of things? In my world, if something is broken, it should be repaired before it is put away. If it can’t be repaired, it should be let go and tossed. If it hasn’t been used or served a purpose in the last year, it should also be tossed, donated, or repurposed. It takes time and intent to make this happen and I am not nearly as proficient as I wish to be, but I regularly clean out and purge spaces throughout the house.

He lives in a world of “just in case” where nothing can be released. His dresser is covered in receipts from the grocery or hardware store from months ago in case he needs to take something back. Ironically enough, while he struggles to toss any of his own things, there have been several times that he has thrown out my things without notice, warning, or care, only to find my horror at his actions to be misplaced. It has been a difficult journey for us on more than one occasion.

If there was a “try again” button, we would talk through all of these things. There is no easy solution, but it would have been helpful to recognize that we come from such vastly different places and these differences are deeply connected to the day-to-day experiences of living together and sharing a home. Perhaps having an honest conversation earlier would have saved a lot of heartache.

Credit Matters

As we have separated our finances, we came across the hurdle that threatened to derail the whole amicable unwinding process for us. It turns out that all of the debt in our household, except our mortgage, is in my name. All of the credit cards are in my name with him as an authorized user. The car loan is in my name. All of the bills are in my name.

I felt really stupid as I discovered this. My financial advisor offered some comfort with this thought: “We don’t enter into these things with an expectation that they will fail.” I suppose he is right. Until this process of separating started, it wasn’t my debt and his debt. It was just our debt. But with divorce comes the end of “our” and something has to be done.

Imagine my surprise when I told him he would need to take half of the credit card debt to a card in his name and he balked at me.

“Are you trying to ruin my credit?”

His question dumbfounded me. One of the cards he had solely been using had a five-figure balance. A pull of the records showed that he had been using it for business expenses that his employer had reimbursed. He never applied the reimbursements to the card!

I was horrified. My assumption was that he shared the goal of having no debt. While I also have a card that I used for business expenses, every penny of my reimbursements is paid back every single time without exception.

Should I have kept a check on his card? Probably.

Am I responsible for what I didn’t know? Sure.

When you are in a partnership, you assume that the other person has been honest in their dealings.

Unfortunately, that is not always the case.

When I pushed him on this matter, his response floored me.

“It’s practically free money.”

Umm…no! While the interest rate is lower than most cards, it is not free because there is a real cost associated with it. It was clear he had no real intention of paying this card off ever and had taken no steps to significantly lower the balance.

After some long and heated discussion that threatened to derail everything, he did agree to transfer the balance to a card in his name and much to my surprise has actually followed through on that.

My “try again” button for this would have a lot of clarifying conversations about debt and how credit is viewed. For me, it is a “once in a while, only for something important or something that could be paid off quickly” tool. Honestly, this conversation likely would have been a dealbreaker for me if he had been honest about his views. But, we never had that conversation so here we are.

Wealth Building Matters

Our early marriage is like many that you hear about. We didn’t have a lot of resources. We bought used furniture and learned to stretch leftovers. Ours was the quintessential love story of “we don’t have much but we have each other.” But over time, that changed.

We supported each other through the poor, busy days of grad school — each taking a turn to be a student and a supporter. Then the careers began to build. We had opportunities to advance and promote. Neither of us is a corporate ladder climber, but with hard work and time advance has come. And with advancement resources have been built.

This has been particularly true in my career. I am highly motivated and truly enjoy my work. For the first time in my life, we have more than we need. Many years ago, I started a conversation with a financial planner because I know that is an area have little knowledge and no experience. My soon-to-be ex pushed back and refused to participate in the conversations or practical applications of the knowledge that was shared, so I quit going. (I know…in hindsight that should have been a big red flag.)

The hard truth that I am just now understanding is that my soon-to-be ex has so much of his identity tied up in being downtrodden. This is all compounded by his negative bias about people who are successful and have resources. The words “hoity-toity” and “uppity” are frequent in his vocabulary when he talks about others. There is clearly a divide in his mind and sense of self that requires him to stay poor no matter the balance in his bank account.

For a long time, I didn’t understand his choice of cars. He drives a hunk of junk with over 400,000 miles like a status symbol. We have had the resources to buy a newer car for a long time. I understand that not having a car payment is always a win, but it was only when I understood how tightly tied his pride was to this that I understood it has literally nothing to do with the car.

I have never been one who wants to be flashy. I happily drive a Honda sedan and will likely always have something like that. I like smaller homes with charm so the chances of me owning anything over 2000 square feet are unlikely. But to my soon-to-be ex somehow having nicer things, even if they are a far cry from what most would consider a luxury, is seen as a character flaw fueled by materialism.

If I had that “try again” option, the conversation would be more future-focused. So much of our early conversations as we prepare for marriage are based on how we survive our early years together rather than around the values we have and how they inform our planning for the future.

Money Matters

This part of the unwinding of our marriage has been much harder than those “Oh, look how much we agree on!” conversations from the early days of our relationship would have let on.

As it turns out, how we view money is tied to a lot of different spaces in our lives.

When the topic of money enters the conversation, we aren’t always talking about the balance of the bank account. It touches our sense of safety and security, our tolerance of risk, our values, and all that we learned from our family of origin. These are complex and complicated spaces that many people don't even understand in their own lives, much less how their views intersect with a partner.

We don’t get that “try again” button — at least not in this relationship. Too much time has passed and no one has the will to actually do the work it would take to try again. Our fault lines have been revealed. We make choices and tie our lives to people that we think we know and understand. It is only later when the unthinkable has happened that the differences become so clear you wonder how you missed them the first time around.

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