Investing in Relationships
Think about your life in the past three days.
If you were to write a history of the last 72 hours, it would probably include at least one of the following:
1. working,
2. buying food,
3. refueling your car,
4. paying bills, or
5. using an ATM.
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Earning, spending, and saving money encompass a large part of your life.
And, if money consumes so much of your time, it’s certainly going to affect your relationships—especially your marriage.
In my new book, Your Money Map, I tell the story of a couple, Matt and Jennifer Mitchell, who were in deep financial trouble. When they began filling out a financial statement I had given them and taking an in-depth look at how bad their problems were, they ended up in an argument.
As they shared the experience with me, I saw color creeping into Jennifer’s face. “It was bad news,” she said. “We had no idea how much trouble we were in. The reality of owing a lot more than we owned triggered a lot of emotion, and we didn’t handle it well.”
Money
a top concern
Matt and Jennifer are no exception. A study by the Creighton University Center for Marriage and Family shows that among couples ages 29 and under, top concerns include their household financial situations and debt brought into marriage. By the way, the extent to which debt is brought into marriage may surprise you. Reporting on a study of more than 1,000 couples, the June 2005 issue of the Journal of Extension said that “[s]eventy percent of the husbands and wives who participated in this study brought debt into the marriage.”
The most common types of debt found among survey respondents were automobile (55 percent), credit card (48 percent), and education (23 percent) debt.
“Both husbands and wives who brought even relatively small amounts of debt into the marriage had significantly lower...marital adjustment and marital satisfaction scores than those with no debt,” the Journal said.
Communication
an open door to success
Whether you’re suffering from debt brought into marriage or other financial issues, and whether you’ve recently married or been married a number of years, a key goal you must achieve in dealing with financial problems is to establish good communication.
This point is illustrated in the National Survey of Marital Strengths, which involved 21,501 married couples (both husbands and wives) from all 50 states.
Within this huge sample, researchers found 5,153 happily married couples and 5,127 unhappily married couples. The rest were excluded because their marital satisfaction scores were both moderate or because one partner’s score was high and one was low.
Couples in the happy and unhappy groups were asked whether they agreed with certain statements, such as, “Making financial decisions is not difficult.” Eighty percent of happy couples agreed. Among unhappy couples, only 32 percent agreed.
In response to the statement, “We agree on how to spend money,” 89 percent of happy couples agreed, but the agreement rate for unhappy couples was only 41 percent.
You get the point. Without good communication, the atmosphere for making meaningful financial changes is very unpleasant. And, it’s even worse when one partner is dishonest with the other regarding money.
As I noted in Your Money Map, “God requires us to be completely honest because even the smallest ‘white lie’ makes our consciences increasingly insensitive to dishonesty. This single cancer cell of dishonesty inevitably multiplies and spreads to greater dishonesty. ‘Whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much’ (NIV).”
Cooperation
a first step toward victory
Think about the first time you saw your spouse. Think about the qualities you saw in this person that made you want to know him or her better. Then, think about the love for this person that you developed over time.
Love is one of greatest gifts of all, so instead of letting financial problems drive a wedge between you and your spouse, view your money challenges as an opportunity to grow closer to one another.
Walk down the road to True Financial Freedom together. Get a copy of the Crown Money Map, and when you reach another destination on that map, stop and celebrate together.
Not dealing with financial issues can put you on the road to long-term unhappiness in your marriage or, even worse, on the road to divorce.
This can result in even worse financial consequences, according to a study by Jay Zagorsky, with Ohio State University’s Center for Human Resource Research. When people divorce they become “single” again, but Zagorsky found that their weath after divorce is only about 25 percent of what the average single person has.
Another divorce study, conducted by researcher David Schramm, looked at almost 10,000 divorces that occurred in the state of Utah in 2001. Schramm found that these divorces cost the state and federal governments $300 million in direct and indirect costs.
This did not include the $178 million spent on personal expenditures like legal fees, lost work productivity, and relocation.
Action
a giant leap toward freedom
Preserving your family relationships takes effort, so break down the barriers that keep you from talking about money. If you’ve avoided conversations about financial issues, start communicating now.
Work to maintain a close relationship with your spouse, and when differences arise, be flexible and creative in developing solutions.
Make an effort to understand your spouse’s side of things, and don’t be a controller. Instead, work with your spouse to develop a spending plan to help you get out of debt.
As you develop this plan, don’t avoid reality by pretending your financial problems don’t exist. Deal with them head on and don’t believe that if you ignore them they’ll simply go away.
List your debts in black and white to get the facts on your current financial situation. It’s a necessary first step in creating the plan that will set you free.
Also, while you’re traveling the road to True Financial Freedom, don’t fall for promotions telling you it’s possible to “get away.”
Going on a vacation you can’t afford lets you turn your attention away from your problems, but it doesn’t make them go away. And, when you return, you’ll owe even more than you did before.
Finally, I encourage you to meditate on God’s Word and ask Him to give you and your spouse the wisdom, discipline, and persistence to get out of debt.
Satan may tell you that you don’t have a right to pray for such things because of past financial mistakes. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Remember that God still cares deeply about you. And, regardless of your financial dilemma, He still desires for you to become financially free.
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Howard Dayton is the cofounder of the Crown Financial Ministries.
