Financial Power

I  find it interesting how often couples don’t talk about money, or when they do, they fight about it. Money is a necessity and its part of our daily lives, so we like it or not couples have to talk about money and have an open communication about how they spend it.

Money talk is often a source of tension between couples. It’s important to express your concern and wish, but you have to have an open ear to your partner.

I grew up in a family where my dad was controlling the money. I wouldn’t say he was in charge of our family finances; he was just controlling and abusing my mom how to spend it. My dad is an abusive control freak and I understand that he went through a really rough time as a teen when the communist regime took over and his dad lost everything they possessed when they had to “surrender” (they were forced to give up everything or they would be dead) their land and belongings.

That unfortunate event brought destruction to entire countries and my dad’s family became poor which transformed my dad’s view of money in a negative way. He wanted to control. I guess because his dad wasn’t able to control the family’s finances, my dad became a money control freak.

The reason I’m sharing this is to highlight that our way of growing up affects our ability to talk about the money and financial issues. I remember as a little girl I always hated money fights. It was non sense. My mom wasn’t a spender at all. She managed our finances all the time, but my dad was never satisfied. She was smart and if my dad would of ever listened to her; they would be in a much better financial situation. My parents all well financially, my dad worked really – really hard, but he never invested wisely. He always chooses security and he missed the greatest potential of his lifetime because he was afraid to risk. I know it goes back to his childhood experiences.

As you can see our past might influence how we handle our finances and how we talk about money and finances. When we got married for long years we couldn’t talk about money. In the second my hubby mentioned or disagreed about something I would just get so emotional and broke down. ( To be honest, even after years of being a financial planner I sometimes can get emotional. I can sense the emotions in my clients life too if there are issues talking about money.)

Money talk can become really personal and emotional. I will share later some ‘How To Talk about Money’ later and what helped us.

So the question remains: Do you and your honey talk about money? And what helps you to have a ‘normal, emotional free’ conversation?

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Tags: Money, Money Talk

This entry was posted by FP on Saturday, May 21st, 2011 at 3:31 PM and is filed under Money Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.