The Money Disruptors

Do you and your spouse have separate bank accounts? Do you keep your money separated? Art Rainer says there may be a reason why that's necessary for some couples, but in general, it's a bad idea. There's a big shift that should occur when you get married. It's no longer my money or my bank account, but our money, our bank account. If we're saying that God's design for our marriages is to be one, Genesis 2.24, they're to be one. You go to then 1 Corinthians 7.4, and Paul says that not even their own bodies are their own anymore.

If our own bodies are not our own, then should our bank accounts be? This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Anne Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. The way we handle our money in marriage can either promote oneness or can push us toward isolation. We're going to spend time talking about that today with Art Rainer. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today. Thanks for joining us.

So did you ever have actual envelopes where you divided up the money and put some in one envelope, some in another envelope? Anne is over there laughing. She's laughing again. What's going on?

I think I know why. I want to hear her say it. Oh, go ahead. What are you going to say? I don't know.

I'm going to let you go. Well, I'll answer that. We always wanted to. We sat in with Dave Ramsey. We're like, yes, yes, we're going to do this. And then we never did.

But we needed to. We do it in a different way, Bob. It's basically an envelope. Our kids had envelopes. So as we were raising them, we used the, you know, here's your allowance. You get ten dollars. So one dollar goes here and one dollar goes here.

You got the other eight dollars. So we use that with them. We were more sophisticated than envelopes for ourselves that we were able to kind of divide it up and know what our allocations needed to be. But the envelope idea to have mental envelopes is not a bad thing for a married couple as they start to think about, OK, here's the paycheck. And it's worked for a lot of couples, at least in the beginning, and getting their minds straight and getting their head around it.

We know many couples still do that. One of the greatest things about it is it forces you to communicate about money. When it comes to money, communication may be one of the biggest reasons why there are money problems in marriage. Not money.

Especially when the money in the envelope runs out. That's right. Art Rainer is joining us this week on Family Life Today. Art, welcome back.

And thank you for having me. Art is the vice president of institutional advancement at Southeastern Baptist Seminary in Wake Forest. He's got an MBA and he has written a book called The Marriage Challenge. Actually, you wrote The Money Challenge first, right?

That's correct, yeah. And that's all about money and how we use it. The Marriage Challenge really takes those principles and talks about the relational tensions that can happen around money.

It places it in the context of the marriage. The thing I love about the book, you give couples a game plan. You say, look, here's step one, here's step two, here's step three, here's how you get on track. And it may take you a while to get to step four, five, and six, but that's okay.

Just stay with the steps. And then you talk about how couples get sabotaged and what the problems are. Communication is one of those issues that couples don't have money problems, they have communication problems, right? Usually when you hear of a couple that divorces because of financial issues, so they say that finances, the reason why they separated, that was more of a symptom of something that was going on in their marriage. So usually there's an underlying symptom that manifests itself in their finances. So when you look at the statistics on divorce and money, you need to read between the lines and realize that it's probably not just about money.

Certainly finances can cause stress, but more than likely when a divorce happens, there's probably something else that was under there. And communication, lack of communication, is absolutely one of those issues that you often see. I remember the two of us, if I would overspend, I would think, what's the problem? I apologized. Why are you so upset? And what I realized, they felt disrespected by me not adhering to our plan, which to me was like, I respect you.

I just want to spend more money. And we definitely were weak in communication. I was the guy who didn't want to talk about it. I wanted to talk about it, but I really didn't because I felt stress and anxiety.

And when you talk about it, it's all there. I remember one time sitting in Moby Gym at a Camps Crusade staff training. We were on staff with crew at the time.

And some missionaries on the stage, and they asked for money. And we had little cards, and I write down a number. They said, pray and ask God to write down a number. Send it in. Never looked at Ann. Never talked to her about it. I make a pledge as much as is in our savings account. Wow. I mean, we're talking $3,000. It wasn't a lot of money.

That's a lot of money. To not talk to your wife about what you're doing with it? And guess what happened after that little meeting? After we're done, she goes, so what'd you think? I go, oh, I'm sure you thought the same thing. I gave our savings account.

She's like, what? And so there we were. Newlywed couple, nobody had taught us anything about money. And one of the first things, talk. Absolutely. Talk, communicate about money. And also, what I'm hearing is the need to understand each other's money personality.

Yeah, and to go deeper into it. You're right. That's absolutely right. So when you marry your spouse, they're likely to have a different money personality than you. And in the marriage challenge, I have four different types of money personality. So you have the saver. That's the right one.

The biblical one. You have the spender. You have the investor.

And then you also have the ignorer. Now, as you mentioned, the saver often gets the praise, right? They're the ones that everybody says, well, they are the ones that have everything together.

I wasn't praising Dave about that. And it's the spender that often gets the bad rep, right? They're the ones that you often say, well, I can't believe they're just the spender. And it's important to understand that regardless of your money personality, regardless of your spouse's money personality, there's strengths and there's weaknesses. So for the saver, your strength is you like to save money. And that's a good thing. You like to set aside money for retirement.

That's a really good thing to do. The downside is that if you go on a vacation, you're opting for the tent as opposed to a hotel. It's not because you can't afford a hotel. It's just because you save money by going with the tent option.

Did you say go on a vacation? I made some assumptions there. For the spender, the negative that's often pointed out is that they're quick to swipe the credit card. That they're very likely to spend money without asking the other spouse. And that is a negative.

That's not good. At the same time, the spender is the one who often thinks of others first. They're the ones that are more willing to buy gifts for other people. And that is the true spender that I am. It's not on myself.

I want to buy for other people. And that's a good thing as long as it's within the context of the budget. But you're probably thinking about it more than you are.

Hey, hey, watch it. I'm not saying that you don't love people. It's just your money personality. The investor likes to take risks.

That can be good and bad. They're willing to invest for retirement. They're not scared of stocks and mutual funds and these types of investments. However, they can be a little bit too risky at times. That's the downside. The ignore, the positive is that they're not really phased by money. So that doesn't really bother them. The downside is that they're often detached from the actual financial dealings of the house, what's actually going on.

They don't know whether they're in a financially healthy spot or not. Where do you think these patterns come from? Are they nurture, nature? Is it what you grew up in? Is it the way you're wired?

A little bit of both. So you have what's called your money story, right? How you learned about money. And that's derived in part from just your upbringing, your experience with your own family. You also have sometimes generational effects. So in 2008, that had a big impact on millennials and how they thought about investing. And they were somewhat delayed for a while because they were fearful. They watched their parents lose massive amounts of money in the retirement accounts and even jobs. And so they're hesitant to invest. When you look at the depression era, if you know somebody from the depression era or if you have known somebody from the depression era, likely they were pretty frugal.

And it's because they went through a very difficult point in our nation when unemployment rate was at 25 percent. And so those had a major impact on how they viewed money, how they managed money. And then, of course, you have your natural personality. And so it's just really a combination of those things that develop your money personality.

Well, it's interesting. As you talk about marriage dividers, one of them being this communication thing, talk about how a married couple should talk about this very thing. Before marriage, in marriage, we never had a discussion about money before we got married.

How naive is that? So talk about how do we communicate about money as a married couple? Well, it starts with just simply the words that you use and how you describe the finances in your home. There's a big shift that should occur when you get married. It's no longer my money or my bank account, but our money, our bank account. So every married couple should join their accounts. Yeah, that's something that I'm a pretty big proponent of. I like the idea of joint accounts because of what it brings to the marriage.

And as I've dealt with couples that are in premarital classes, that's often just a big surprise. So you're saying I shouldn't have my own account? I think even for blended families, that can even be a bigger situation. Absolutely, and I understand that. But if we're saying that God's design for our marriages is to be one, Genesis 2, 24, they're to be one.

You go to then 1 Corinthians 7, 4, and Paul says that not even their own bodies are their own anymore. If our own bodies are not our own, then should our bank accounts be? And I understand there's accounts out there like your retirement accounts where you can literally only have one person on the account.

And in that situation, I would say, well, make sure that your spouse has the user ID and password, that they have access to it. Try to be as unified in your finances as possible. So it goes back to changing the language and the way that you think about money. So when you're communicating, it's no longer my money, it's no longer my paycheck, but it's our money, our paycheck. At the same time, it's no longer your expenditures. So you're not saying you spent this, this is your expenditure, but it's ours. Because when you're married, expenditures don't happen in a vacuum. They affect one another. So it truly is our expenditure.

And that's a good question. So I'm out on my own and Anne's at home and I want to buy a pair of shoes. What do you tell a married couple?

How much communication? Do I check with her to buy a $50 pair of shoes or do I only check with her when I want to buy a $15,000 motorcycle? I'm going to provide a very clear answer on that one. It depends.

There you go. And so it's going to depend on what you all decide as a couple. Is $50, is that the limit?

Is $15,000 the limit? I doubt it would be $15,000, but is there a limit where you all are comfortable saying, yeah, if there's a purchase under $40, I'm fine with you doing that. But this goes back to communication. That conversation has to happen. So you have to sit down and figure out, okay, what is that amount for us? Because it's going to vary from couple to couple. And this communication presupposes that we've got some basic principles where we're in alignment and in agreement. I think a lot of times you're not having good communication because when you try to communicate, you've got clashing presuppositions, not just personalities, but clashing priorities or clashing, like one person says, I started an IRA when I'm 16, like you did.

I'm weird, I know. And so, you know, retirement, saving for retirement is a big deal. And the other partner is looking and going, so we're putting money in our retirement account and the kids can't have a new pair of shoes to go to school with because we want to have money for retirement.

And can we look at them and say, he's right, she's wrong, she's right. We've got to figure out how we get to oneness around these priorities. And one of the tools that I provide in the marriage challenge are the eight money milestones. And so wherever you are on your financial journey, these eight money milestones can maybe provide some clarity for what steps need to be taken in your finances as you pursue financial health for the sake. And I always want to make sure you put this in there for the sake of advancing God's kingdom, for the sake of living and giving generously. That's why we pursue financial health.

So those eight money milestones are in there and they really guide a good section of the book to hopefully provide clarity. That's really the heart of the book. As we're dealing with the obstacles to financial oneness and things like communication being a tripwire, we're really jumping past the heart of the book to say, well, let's talk about where couples find discord. And communication is not the only place. One of the things that's a big issue here is selfishness, is I want what I want and I earned that money or I deserve that money or you got your thing, so I should get my thing.

And that's a big one. Not for me, but for most other people who are selfish. Well, aren't you even saying in your book that you didn't realize how me-centric you were until you got married?

How did you discover that? Well, pre-marriage, it was all about me. I'm the only one that I had to concern myself about. So with my finances, I was taking care of myself and nobody else. Now, I have my spouse. I have Sarah. And I have to think about somebody else, not just with finances, but in every aspect of life.

Whether it's even scheduling a trip, going out of town, I need to check with her first. I did not have to do that before. So my eyes were opened quickly to see how selfish I was because my world revolved around me. And I'm going to say now that we have three kids, I've really understood how selfish I was. Marriage opens your eyes to see how selfish you were. I can honestly remember, I mean, this is decades ago, standing in a sporting goods store, looking at a pair of Nikes that I so badly wanted and having three boys at home, knowing I can't buy these. I mean, I can. I'll be the most selfish jerk in the world.

I need to take the money I would spend on those and spend it on my kids. It was a hard decision. I know some people don't make that decision and they don't even communicate about it. So you've got selflessness and communication destroying their marriage, right? That was nice of you to do that.

I got them a different way. But you have some signs of our selfishness. You don't compromise.

You blame. You take the it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission approach. You hide your purchase.

So there are some real signs of selfishness. And hiding purchases. And I'm going to bust myself here because I went to the grocery store one time and I came back and said, would you get the grocery store? And I told her some of what I'd gotten at the grocery store. I did not tell her a lie.

I just didn't tell her the whole truth. What I'd forgotten was that the grocery store had started printing out on the receipt itemized descriptions of what you bought. And she found the receipts. And she said, where are the Doritos? You didn't tell me you got Doritos and ice cream? You got ice cream too? And here's what I learned from that.

It's not an issue of whether I can buy Doritos if I want Doritos or not. But I had just sowed seeds of distrust by not being disclosing with my wife when she said, would you get? And I said, I got any oranges and I got this and I got that.

And I just left off the Doritos and the ice cream. Well, I had just sown seeds of distrust. Now the next time she says, what did you do?

Where did you go? She's wondering, what's he not telling me? Well, and you have a good heart with that because my reasoning would be I would tell you if you didn't get so upset about it. And so I would blame CAST. Yeah, right.

I don't know if my heart's good on that or not, but that's very generous of you to offer me a good heart on that one. Just as a heads up, it's not only the itemized receipt, but it's also now the coupons that are based on what you bought. Why are we getting all these ice cream coupons all of a sudden? So it's becoming very difficult to hide ice cream purchases. But this issue of building trust around money, this may be the biggest hidden explosive in a marriage when one of you is not being disclosing. You are doing what your mom did. Don't tell dad about what we bought.

That's toxic, not just for your money. That's toxic for every part of your relationship. In the marriage challenge, there's a fictional story that goes along with what I call the core content. And in the story, you have Chris, who gets really upset over some undisclosed debt that his wife, Claire, has brought into the marriage. They're newlyweds, they're on their honeymoon, and then he finds us out.

For those who are going to read the book, I'm not going to spoil it. But the reason why Chris is so upset about the loans, it's not that he's somewhat scared for their financial future, but he's also concerned for their marriage because of what that type of thing did to his brother, who is now divorced. And it became a trust issue. It was all about trust.

It once again manifests itself in the finances, but there was actually an underlying issue there, and that was distrust. And he was concerned about that. What do you say to the listener who right now is listening and going, Should I tell my husband?

Should I tell my wife? I've got something that I haven't. Maybe it's bigger than Doritos.

It likely is. If there's something hidden, it's likely that it's bigger than a Dorito. What should they do? You should tell. You have to be forthright with this information, isn't it?

It's the only way that reconciliation can happen because it is going to show up at some point. Whether it's with that particular purchase or another purchase in the future, it's going to reveal itself, and it's going to be ugly and can be disastrous in the marriage. When I first started out in banking, I had a couple sitting in front of me that had just been turned down for a loan. And so they asked the natural question, Why? Why were you being turned down? And so I pulled up their credit report and said, Your credit score is low. Let's start walking through some of these debts. And I started going down the list of what was on the credit report. And I hit a particular credit card, and immediately the wife said, Well, that's not ours. And my initial response was, Great. Let me start helping you contact the credit bureau and figure out how you actually get that off your credit report.

Because that's one of the things that's pulling down your credit score. It wasn't the only thing. As I started having that conversation with her, and they were sitting across from me, both of them were looking at me, I started looking at the husband. And he had started growing very red and clearly just uncomfortable. And as the conversation goes, he just quickly interrupted us and said, Don't worry about it. Of course, the wife looked at him and said, Are you joking?

Why would you not worry about that? And then as she looked at him, she saw what I had been seeing, that his face had grown beet red and he was very uncomfortable. She immediately knew that something, that whatever that debt was, first of all, is hidden, but it also probably represented something very embarrassing. And so she looked at me and said, Art, I'm very sorry. We're going to have to leave. And so she got up, went out. And I wish that I could say that, hey, they came back and everything's great.

I have no idea what happened to them. But I say that and I tell that story because eventually it's going to come to head. You can't keep doing that without it. It's wrong in general to hide these from your spouse. But eventually something's going to happen to where it will come to head and will come to light.

And the result's going to be disastrous. Yeah. And in a sense, Jesus, I mean, it reminds me of Jesus' words, you know, what you do in the dark will be broadcast. That's right. At some point, whether it's financial, sexual, anything done in the dark, as long as it stays in the dark, can destroy you. Obviously we're talking about money in this, but it could be anything. So, well, I would say here's what I would say, because the fear of exposing this to my spouse or to anyone is honestly, I can't trust God.

That's right. And when you bring it into the light, you are not saying I'm going to trust my spouse because they may not respond in a great way. But there is a God that even through that exposure will meet you in that. And it would be the best thing you ever do. And today could be the day for somebody to say, OK, I've got to come clean, whether it's money, whether it's porn, you know, you name it. Today is the day I'm bringing it into the light. I'm going to trust God's going to meet us and maybe a little messy for a while, but he'll eventually meet you right there.

And there's a freedom that comes in that because that secret's heavy to carry. And I'm thinking a couple may need to have a conversation where they go, OK, let's just let's just ask ourselves, is our communication healthy when it comes to issues of money or are we dodging each other? Are we avoiding these conversations when we have the conversations? Are we teammates or are we adversaries around these conversations?

And how can we become teammates? How can we not accuse or polarize ourselves from one another? And is there any reason that we don't trust one another? And are we hiding anything? And why do we hide things? What's behind that? What's the motive there?

And how can we safely bring these things out into the open so there doesn't have to be hiding? And then my selfishness. I mean, let's just acknowledge this is bone deep in all of us. We are predisposed, pre-wired toward being selfish. Even those who would say, well, I'm not spending money on me. I'm spending money on other people. The reason you're spending money on other people is because you feel better when you're doing nice things for other people.

There's still a selfishness motive that can be at the heart of that. So let's expose some of these things. Let's have the conversation where we address these things so that we can start to get healthy in how we pursue oneness around money. You know, it's interesting. In the back of Art's book, it says, God has a plan for your marriage and your money. It starts with a challenge.

Will you accept? And I was just listening to you, Bob, thinking there's the challenge. It could be a great night. It could be a date night that you talk tonight's theme.

It could be a really dangerous night is what it could be. But if you want to get healthy, sometimes you've got to go to hard places. It's necessary. And Art, you line out these challenges in one section in the book. I'd encourage a couple to get a copy of the book and say, let's read through this chapter together. And then let's just be honest with one another. Can we trust one another? Can we have this kind of healthy communication so we can get to where we want to go?

And the place we want to go is where we're handling our money in a way that honors God, that advances his kingdom, and that takes care of the needs we have in this life. We've got copies of Art's book, The Marriage Challenge, in our Family Life Today Resource Center. You can go online at familylifetoday.com to order a copy or call 1-800-FL-TODAY. Again, our website is familylifetoday.com. The name of the book is The Marriage Challenge by Art Rayner.

You can also order the book by calling 1-800-358-6329. That's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. You know, underneath the whole issue of money, as we've talked about today, is really the issue of oneness. Are we pursuing oneness in marriage because that's what God intends for two to become one?

Or are we drifting toward isolation? Here at Family Life, that's one of the key principles of this ministry. We want to do everything we can as a ministry to help couples move in the direction of oneness, move closer to each other, move closer to God, and have the kind of marriage and family God intends for us, the kind he defines for us in the pages of scripture. And we're able to do this because of you, because of listeners like you who don't just listen to Family Life Today. You make this program possible through your donations that support the ongoing work of this ministry.

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Again, there's a book for husbands, a book for wives. And we're going to send you a flash drive that has some conversations Dave and Ann and I had recently talking about the most significant lessons I've learned about marriage and family from guests we've had on Family Life Today throughout the 28 years that I have served as co-host for this program. We recorded those conversations, made five episodes out of it, and we're happy to send you those five episodes along with some of the standout programs from the last 28 years. All of that is on a flash drive that we're happy to send you along with the books from the Ivies when you make a donation today. And again, you can do that at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to make your donation. And we hope you can join us again tomorrow when we're going to continue our conversation about marriage and money and oneness, how we come together as husband and wife and how we can manage our money well. I hope you can join us for all of that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, got some extra help from Bruce Goff and 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.