Some couples realize they have issues regarding money in their marriage. But as author and researcher Shanti Feldhahn has found, when those couples sit down to try to get help for their money issues, they find that the help they're getting isn't really addressing the core issue. It has been all about, here's the technical ways you do a budget, and here's how you get out of debt. And, you know, here's some of these principles for, you know, building up emergency savings.
All of that is awesome. But what we found is that if you can't talk about money to begin with, you don't do any of that stuff well. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. I'm Bob Lapine.
You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. Some couples have real live money issues to deal with. But before you start to tackle those, ask yourself this question.
How good are we at talking about money? We'll talk more about that today. And welcome to Family Life Today.
Thanks for joining us. I have a presupposition I want to start today with. See if you agree with this. I love hearing Bob's presuppositions.
Here's my presupposition. My presupposition, you talk to people about what causes conflict in marriage or talk to divorce attorneys about what are the issues that bring people into their offices, and you will hear, you know, it's children, it's sexual intimacy, it's money, it's communication. I believe that there are oneness problems in marriage that manifest themselves in all different areas of our lives. But ultimately, what you're dealing with when you're dealing with problems in marriage are not money problems or kid problems or even communication problems. They're oneness problems. You're not one as a couple, and that's just showing up.
That's being exposed in different areas of your marriage. You might be the wisest man I've ever met. You're so smart, isn't he? Hey, he is amazing. I mean, we could just say, amen, the show's over. Wow. Is there any other amazing insight you'd like me to share with you as we begin today's program?
It's good, though, it's true. Yeah, and I agree, but I'd also say we fight about money. You guys do? Oh, yeah.
This is a biggie. Like still today, 40 years? We just don't talk about it anymore.
Okay, great. No, I mean, honestly, we're going to talk about this today, and it's a great topic to talk about, but it's something close to our heart. I bet you every couple would at least say, yes, we've had some real doozies over this thing called money. What do you think? I used to, at the weekend, remember, say there are some people who believe that credit cards need fresh air and sunshine every day in order to- Yes, amen. Well, other people are- I'm married to her.
More on the thrifty side of the street. Is that- okay, so now we're seeing where the conflict comes in. Well, you want to introduce who we've got in the studio with us to help us with this discussion? We've got Jeff and Shanti Feldhahn in here, and they're our friends.
Welcome. I'm sorry, we were trying so hard not to laugh. You guys were saying that.
I also saw you elbowing each other. Yes, so are there similar patterns in the Feldhahn marriage to what there are in the Wilson marriage? Well, I like to think of myself as being careful with money.
Perhaps cheap might be the other way of describing that. And Shanti has somewhat of another approach. I was fist bumping Ann. Yes, she did. Yes, we did. Yeah, so you guys decided we're going to write a book about this topic called Thriving in Love and Money, and many know you as authors. You've sold many, many books. We, honestly, for men only, for women only, two of your best-selling books.
You guys just might have saved our marriage. Thank you. And I don't want to say it out loud, but we've plagiarized you so many times.
Oh, you go do that. But one of the things we love about you is your books are written based on data. So it isn't just opinions, it's data-based, and it's so true. And again, and we didn't even mention this, I honestly believe the best teenage book I've ever read for parents is For Parents Only.
Oh, thanks. I quote it all the time and tell people to do it. We just wrote a book on parenting, and we used your material all throughout, and hopefully you'll get a footnote.
Aw, that's great. How many books have you written? You know, somebody asked us that the other day. This is going to sound horrible, but I'm not sure, actually.
You need to do a research project. Yeah, I think, like, if you count, like, Bible studies and stuff, maybe 25. Wow. That is amazing. Yeah. It's incredible for me to look back.
I mean, my very first book, I sat here in this studio 22 years ago. Yeah, hard to believe. Hard to believe what God has done.
It's amazing. And so someone might think, okay, the Feldhans wrote a book on money and marriage. Is that because you have problems in your marriage about money?
I'll let you start that one. Actually, to be candid, this never was a topic we even had thought of studying, which tells you just sort of how backward we were in this area. This was the one area in our marriage. After all of these studies, which we incorporated, you know, into our own, we were so not on the same page on this topic. We didn't really fight. Yeah, we didn't fight. We just didn't talk about it. We just avoided it entirely. But you had strong feelings about it based on your faces.
Oh, sure, sure. And we had assumptions about what was going on inside that other person. Somehow you were managing it. I mean, you may have had strong feelings, but were you having months where you were looking at the checkbook and going, whoops, or not?
Not really. It was more of a, you do your thing over there, I'll do my thing over here, and we'll just sort of get, we'll cope. We sort of get by.
Like, we talk about when we have to, but we really don't like it because we have such different values in different areas. So how in the world did you write a book on this topic? Why don't you share that? Because it really was a God thing. Hey, Jeff, I'm noticing something. You're throwing all the questions inside you.
I like it when she talks. Well, to be candid, this really, honestly, this was a supernatural story because it was really clear, I feel like God wanted us to study this. And we're probably guinea pig number one because we needed it so badly. The short version of a long story is that after our last research-based book was done, we had no clue what we were supposed to do. It was the first time in 20 years that we had no idea, and the business model had changed where we had no money to do a research project. The publishing world had changed so much. The publishing world had changed so much, and these studies are incredibly expensive.
I mean, you're talking 50, 60, $80,000 to get really good, rigorous data. And we thought, you know what, we're never going to be able to pay for this again. God, do you want us to do something else?
I can go get a job as an analyst somewhere, like, you know, I don't have to keep doing this. And we started praying very specifically after the previous book launch. March 1 was when I went, Lord, I have no idea. And March 9, out of the clear blue sky, we got a call from a company that we had actually never heard of at the time called Thrivent Financial. And it's a financial services company that's sort of missional. And they said, look, we are starting an initiative. We know that money is a huge issue in marriage, and we don't think it has to be.
And so how would you feel about making this your next research project and us funding it? Wow. It was unbelievable. And you can keep all your independence.
You know, we're not going to try to steer you in a direction to find something that would work for us. You know, wherever it leads you, that's where you go. And it was unbelievable. And we looked at each other, we started crying because I'm like so clearly it was his answer to prayer. And then we went, oh, shoot. Well, that's what I wondered.
Was there this little sliver of fear that started to come up? Oh, absolutely. One, I thought as we talked about it, I said, you know, we're the perfect people to do this. One, because we want to get to the answers.
We want to do the research. We want to be rigorous, and we're like case study number one of what not to do in how you handle money in a relationship so that your relationship thrives. Instead, we live two separate lives along that way. And what would happen is even though it was two separate lives, it wasn't like it was neutral. What would happen is Shanti would choose a particular course of action, usually around spending, and mine would be the other. And I would have a certain temptation.
I would literally in my mind would go, she's doing that because she has a character flaw. That's the bucket I put it in. Because certainly not spending is the most godly way of approaching anything. Amen, brother. And it's the right way. And it's really interesting. That's what we were digging into in the research.
It's not how to have a great budget because there's plenty of wonderful resources out there, and you wouldn't want our advice on that anyway. This was how to have a great relationship around money. And it comes down to, it turns out, understanding all that stuff that you're thinking and all of these sort of underlying factors that are going on under the surface. Did you have any idea that Jeff thought you had this character flaw? Oh, he had never put it that way.
But, you know, you see the smirk on the face, and you see the what, you know. And I would not have been able, he would not have probably been able to articulate it that way until we started doing this. And I would not have been able to articulate when you talk about, for example, that spender-saver dichotomy, which is, by the way, extraordinarily common in marriage. Because even when you have two savers, usually one of them is more of a spender than the other.
So you almost always see this. And I wouldn't have been able to articulate, well, yeah, I want to be wise with money, too, of course. But, you know, God also says that he's come to give us abundant life. And we can trust him to provide.
And what about that guy who stored up all the money in barns and then never got to enjoy it? And shouldn't we be, you know, giving ourselves some grace for that? Like, I never would have been able to articulate that either. And so that was one of the things that was so transformative for us is suddenly we had a language to talk about it. I remember talking to a wife who was so frustrated with her husband. This couple was $25,000 in debt at this point in their marriage. It was a source of great anxiety for her, much less for him. And they were at church, and there was somebody that night who was talking about the work that they were doing in Africa, and she watched her husband pull out the checkbook and write a $100 check to support this work in Africa. And she was freaking out, thinking we're $25,000 in debt, and you think God wants us to spend $100 helping people in Africa when I got credit card people calling me saying, when's the next payment going to come due? This is how the reality of this works out in so many marriages.
So many. Well, and here's basically what we found, the bottom line that was so helpful, is to recognize if you have any tension around money, which most people do, not everybody, if you have any tension about it or avoid it or whatever, it's not about the money. Yeah, that's right at the beginning of your book. It's huge.
And I want to know, what in the world does that mean? Because honestly, you found that out from research, so if it's not about money, what's it about? Could you analyze Dave and I while we do this, too? Because we need this. Pleasure.
Of course. Honestly, the thing that was really incredibly powerful for us was recognizing that when we're avoiding talking about it, which is what you have to do when you're avoiding that, and that it's not about the money, what is it about, it turns out it's about how money makes you feel and how it makes your spouse feel, and about all these expectations running under the surface that you don't even know are there, and these worries and insecurities and beliefs about how money should work. It's all of this other stuff. And once you understand that stuff, it's really amazing how talking kind of comes naturally. Well, and the fact is that most of us don't understand that sort of stuff, and statistically, 77% of couples, the research found this, couldn't talk about money or money issues without a level of tension and discomfort. So it's not just you guys. And for me as a guy, when I would always hear talking about something helps, that really didn't help me, because in order to talk about something, one, I need to try to understand my spouse, which I found difficult in a lot of ways, but as a starting point, I had to understand myself in order to be able to articulate what I was feeling, and I couldn't do that in this area. And it wasn't until all of the research, all of the focus groups, all of the interviews that I began to hear things from guys all over the country that I went, that's me. That's what's going on inside of me. And women, too.
Now I can talk about it. And women, too. One of the things we found is that there were very few things that were gender-related, by the way, in this.
There are a few, but it is mostly non-gender-related. Yeah, I know that we got to the point, and again, I never got to the root of this. We didn't talk about it, except in anger, which was sort of based in fear, but here's how bad it got for us. And again, there wasn't a surplus of money, so when we would pay the bills back in the day when you wrote checks, I would literally hear Ann paying the bills, the check ripping, and I'd have to leave the house. I couldn't hear that sound. I got so scared.
I got depressed. I'm not sure these checks are all going to clear. I wish she's not even paying them, but of course we have to pay them.
Now, why is she paying them, by the way? Because I can't even do it. Wait, wait, I was going to say, and the only reason I started paying the bills was because when our kids were little, it was Christmas. I used to do our Christmas shopping for the kids in one day, and so I've got this cart that's just jam-packed at Toys R Us or whatever, and so I get up there, and there's a line behind me. I've been waiting in line, so I get up there. I do my credit card, and the cashier gives me this kind of embarrassed look, and she says, oh, I'm sorry, that credit card didn't work.
And so, you know, you've got the people behind you, and I'm starting to sweat a little. I hand her another credit card, and she says, oh, I'm sorry. Okay, that's enough of that.
And so I have to leave my cart. I go home, and I say to Dave, like, nothing worked. Like, what happened? What happened was we'd had a bunch of bills that bounced because there were insufficient funds because Dave hates to pay the bills because it creates so much stress. That is so common.
You would not believe how common that is. And so we didn't talk about it. We just sort of fought little snippy fights, and then, you know, I live in that world, like, hey, don't talk about it.
It's okay. And so I said let me at least do the bills so that they're getting in on time, but Dave would hear the rip and leave. And that did force us to say this is something we have to talk about. So what does a couple do?
How do they start talking about it? Well, the most important thing is to recognize, like I said, what's going on under the surface. And we identified most of that, probably not all of that, but we identified five of these big factors, I guess you'd put it, that tend to be very, very common with people. It's interesting, by the way, Bob, you said the thing about oneness.
And that was one of the big factors. Hey, hey, please don't be blowing up his head right now. He's so smart. He already knew. He knows. Everything comes back to that, right?
And it is really interesting. In what aspect? What do you mean about oneness? So it turns out we are avoiding being one in marriage anyway, and it's coming out in how we handle money. And that example of Jeff and me sort of I do my thing over here, you do your thing over here, and this is extraordinarily common. It's about half of all couples who have separate bank accounts for convenience. And, you know, there is convenience involved.
I don't deny that. But like significant non-access bank accounts, like at least we tried to do money together, sort of, where we could each access each other's bank account. But half of couples, that's not the case, where it's like you pay your utilities over here, you pay these, I'll pay the mortgage over here.
And, I mean, literally some young couples are like, could you Venmo me $52 for your half of the gas bill? Was it surprising for you to find that? Huge. Yeah, that really was surprising. But it's taking it to the next level.
And it's really interesting. Some people listening to this may go, well, that's not me. You know, I don't have that issue with oneness.
You know, we share the same bank account. And maybe you don't. Maybe that's not a big issue for you. Maybe ask yourself, do you ever try to pull the Amazon package off the front step before your spouse sees it? So they don't know what you ordered?
That's the same level of kind of just trying to do what you want to do that causes other people to separate accounts entirely. You know, why did you have to go there? That is just a little too close to home and wrong. Me too.
Me too. Here's one of the things you said in the book, you said, here's the key. If you aren't thriving in the love part of love and money, it will be difficult to come together enough to do the money part well.
And unfortunately, that right there is where a lot of people live. Where in sort of the church world, it has been all about, here's the technical ways you do a budget. And here's how you get out of debt. And here's some of these principles for building up emergency savings.
All of that is awesome. But what we found is that if you can't talk about money to begin with, you don't do any of that stuff well. All of that is predicated on the ability to talk about it, which, like we said, 77% can't do. And 23% can.
Like the people who are listening to this who are in that 23%, you happily skip to budget meetings. Like, I'm so jealous of you. I just, I really am.
But the rest of us, we need a little help. And you provided some help not only in the book, but you've got an assessment. In fact, we've got a link on our website at familylifetoday.com where people can go and spend a few minutes going through this and get an idea of where are the strengths and weaknesses, where are the challenge points, the tension points. So if you think, we've got tension here, but I'm not exactly sure what it is or why it is or where it is, the assessment will help you put words to and categories to what it is that you're experiencing. And let me just say, I haven't taken the assessment.
But if you're thinking, I'm not taking that assessment. I don't want to know. Because if I know, then I won't like what I see.
And I've learned enough to know this would be one of the wisest things you do. Because it's going to start a discussion. Yep, it'll be scary. It'll be awkward.
It may be really hard. It may even, you may end up in a fight at some point. But once you get reality in front of you with your spouse, that discussion, am I right, leads toward freedom.
It does. And, you know, I mean, I'm like you, Dave, in that I kind of liked living in my world where I was correct in my perceptions of how money should be handled and how Shanti should adopt my view. But that's just not reality. And what that does is it keeps us from becoming one.
It keeps me from learning how God made this person that I'm married to so differently than me. Well, besides taking the assessment, give us a little baby step of what's something we can do that would just get us started on the right path. So probably let's start with taking a audit of where we really are in this oneness thing.
How much do we really kind of want to do what we want to do with money? And the assessment, by the way, will help with that. But you won't just learn on that side, like, Dave, what you said, that I don't want to know what I'm doing wrong. It'll also identify the things you're doing well.
Like, what are your areas of strength that you want to keep going on? And where are you starting? Because if you guys know we kind of want to do what we want to do, and that's a big area to work on, if you all can then go, okay, are we willing? Like, especially during a time of economic uncertainty, like what we've been through, I mean, seriously, a lot of people have to talk about money for the very, very first time.
And they've learned that, but they don't know how. The place to start is going, are we willing to do that? That's a good baby step. It's pretty amazing, isn't it, as you look back, that God brings this money to you to do research. None of us knew what was about to come in our world, and now you've given a gift to the world to say, we're all in a struggle, everyone, and there's a gift to help you navigate where God wants you to go out of that.
That's a blessing from God. And to go again to familylifetoday.com to take the assessment online to see how you think differently about money, and then to get a copy of your book, Thriving in Love and Money. In fact, we're making the book available this week to Family Life Today listeners.
If you'd like to get a copy, get in touch with us. Go to familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY. If you can help with a donation for the ongoing work of this ministry, we'll send you a copy of Jeff and Shanti's book as our thank you gift for your support of the work we're doing here at Family Life Today.
The assessment is free online. The book is our gift to you when you donate to support the ministry of Family Life Today. And again, you can donate online at familylifetoday.com or call to donate at 1-800-358-6329.
That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word TODAY. I think what you guys have written about in the book is going to be a breakthrough for a lot of couples who find themselves in conflict, and they think money is the issue, but this is going to help them see there's more at play here than just your bank balance. So I hope our listeners will get a copy of the book. And again, it's our gift to you when you make a donation to support Family Life Today this week. And by the way, because we know that a lot of couples have been under a ton of stress in recent months, we've put together here at Family Life an online resource that is called Taking Your Marriage From Good to Great.
We're making this content free to anybody who'd like access to it. You can go to our website, familylifetoday.com. There are two online mini courses, one about resolving conflict in marriage, one called Lightbulb Moments in Marriage. In addition, you'll have access to messages from Paul David Tripp, Gary Chapman, Vody Baucom, and Julie Slattery, as well as a number of downloadable resources available, all of these designed to help you shore up the foundation of your marriage. If your marriage has experienced some stress and pressure, if you've felt that in your marriage, this is a way for you to breathe some fresh air back into your relationship.
And it's all available for free. It's the Taking Your Marriage From Good to Great resource. When you sign up to get the content, we're also going to automatically enter you in a giveaway. One couple is going to be chosen to fly to Family Life to sit in on a Family Life Today recording session, and then to have dinner that night with David and Wilson.
So, we thought that might be an extra incentive to try to get you to work a little bit on your marriage. Go to familylifetoday.com to get access to the Taking Your Marriage From Good to Great, and then maybe we'll see you here as our guests for a Family Life Today recording session and dinner out with Dave and Ann. Again, all details are available online at familylifetoday.com. No purchase necessary.
You can see all the rules online. Now, tomorrow, we want to talk, among other things, about whether our personal view of money and finances is shaped more by our life experiences or by our personality, our temperament. Jeff and Shanti Feldhahn will be with us again tomorrow. Hope you can be with us as well. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas. A crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.
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