Most Replayed Moment: How To Talk About Money With Your Partner! The Mistakes Most Couples Make!

Ramit Sethi is a personal finance expert and bestselling author who’s helped millions build a “Rich Life”. In this Moment, Ramit shares the money truths couples avoid, the biggest conversation most people won’t have, and why financial stress in relationships is rarely about the bank balance - it’s about psychology, expectations, and trust. Listen to the full episode here! Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/oauqs52HTZb Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/m5eOYF6HTZb Watch the Episodes On YouTube: ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Ramit Sethi: https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Steven Bartlett?

  I had a conversation a couple of days ago, actually, with James Sexton, who's the divorce expert. He's a divorce lawyer by trade, but he knows more about divorce than anybody else. And he said to me, there's two things which cause people to end up in his office going through a divorce. Number one is cheating, infidelity. And the second thing is money problems in the relationship. So I find it especially pertinent to have this conversation with you about couples' relationship with money. Because clearly, one of the things that is most likely to end my relationship, or I guess prevent me getting into one, is this financial avoidance that most of us engage in. You've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of couples about money on your podcast. What have you learnt about our relationship with money in relationships from that?

• 0:48Ramit Sethi?

  I've learned that 50% of the people I talk to do not know their household income. 90% of the people I talk to who are in debt do not know how much debt they're in. And 100% of the people I talk to in credit card debt also have trouble saying no to their children. Isn't that shocking? Each of those things. 50% do not know how much income they make. Because most of us are simply living by looking at our checking account, and that's it. The debt part kind of makes sense. Why would you want to know how much debt you owe? You don't really want to think about it, so you ignore those emails and envelopes. And the credit card debt part, that is really interesting.

• 1:33Ramit Sethi?

  The idea that if you can't say no to spending, so you've racked up a bunch of credit card debt, the same principle applies to saying no to kids. For me, when I discover these, I find them absolutely fascinating. But the good news is you can also change these things.

• 1:49Steven Bartlett?

  And what's the difference between men and women in terms of spending habits in a relationship? Secrecy, avoidance, arguments?

• 1:57Ramit Sethi?

  Well, let's start with the roles. Men always describe themselves as providers. Always. That's what we are taught. It exists in culture. The problem is, of course, what happens when they are not the top earner, which is happening increasingly more now. So when I often ask them, who are you financially speaking if you're not a provider? And they're just stumped. But there's got to be something more than simply being a provider. You can be a provider and you can be a nurturer. You can be a provider, you can be a helper, a leader. There's so many different ways. Often, what you'll see with women is discussions about a secret bank account.

• 2:40Ramit Sethi?

  Keep a little money aside just in case. We have to remember that in the US, many grandmothers were not allowed to open up their own bank accounts. That happened in two generations ago. And so, there has been a rightful message that has been passed down orally. Keep a little bit of money aside, just in case. Whether it be physical abuse, financial abuse, divorce, et cetera. And I totally respect that message. I don't think you should have a secret account. I do think you should have an account that is yours only, but no secrets in a relationship.

• 3:19Steven Bartlett?

  What about arguments as it relates to money and relationships? What are the cause of the arguments? Is it someone spending too much? Is it hiding money? Is it something else?

• 3:28Ramit Sethi?

  It's usually not hiding money. That's very small extreme. The biggest phrase that I get from couples is, "He or she's a spender and I'm a saver." So it's creating this identity that they're a spender, I'm a saver, or they don't want to talk about money ever. Why can't I get them to finally sit down with me and get on the same page? That's a phrase that's tossed around everywhere. When I ask them, "What is getting on the same page?", the answer is, "I don't know. I just want to talk about it." So when it comes to money, yes, there are the numbers that we need to understand, of course. But what I often tell people, the way you feel about money is highly uncorrelated to the amount in your bank account.

• 4:13Ramit Sethi?

  That is why I speak to so many multimillionaires who still worry about money. They think if I just have 50,000 more, 500,000 more, $5 million more. Well, guess what? I've had all those folks on my podcast and they still worry about money. That means there's two things you need to do to master your relationship with money. One, you've got to know your numbers. This is a language you have to learn the basics of personal finance. Two, you have to master your money psychology. That means you need to change the way that you talk about money and behave with money so that you can ultimately change the way you feel about money. You do those two things, you're going to have a very healthy relationship with money.

• 4:53Steven Bartlett?

  We'll go into all of those things and how you do them. On this point of gender roles, obviously, society has changed in the last couple of decades in terms of equality and more women are in work at higher level positions in corporations, in the C-suite, earning much more money. This has caused a shift, I should say, in the sort of typical gender roles and assumptions of what each gender is supposed to be doing in couples. And I'm wondering now, with more women earning more money, in many cases, they're going to be earning more than their husband in heterosexual relationships. Have you seen new dynamics and new issues created because of this?

• 5:33Steven Bartlett?

  In terms of like insecure men feeling emasculated or the woman not being happy that she's contributing more? And I ask this because I had someone on my podcast a couple of months back who said to me that I think it's 70 or 80% of women expect that their romantic partner will earn more than them, but that gap is closing now because women are earning more and more money. I'm just wondering if you've seen in those couples scenarios where the woman earns more and it's causing problems?

• 6:00Ramit Sethi?

  I've seen it all the time. I've seen it all the time. I think that we see different gender dynamics. I recall one episode where I spoke to a young woman and her boyfriend. She was around 40 years old. She made way more than her boyfriend. Care to guess how much she makes per month? Twenty thousand dollars? Two hundred thousand dollars per month.

• 6:25Ramit Sethi?

  She has a business, it's doing very well, she's around the age of forty. Now, her boyfriend was never taught about money when he was growing up. Most people are not. He never learned about investing, certainly no one was telling him about a Roth IRA when he was twelve years old. And he had started his own business and he was on the upswing, he's making a few thousand dollars a month. Good for him, she's making two hundred grand a month. Her parents started talking to her about investing when she was five years old. So here we already see a difference, not just in gender, but in socioeconomic status, okay? And over time, that progressed. So they come to me and she says, "I want him to pay for dinner occasionally." Fine, super reasonable.

• 7:10Ramit Sethi?

  He even said, "No problem, I want to." So he would take his credit card out and he would offer to pay, and she would say, "No, I want you to contribute more to your IRA." So in many ways, she wanted him to pay, she wanted to feel taken care of, which is totally reasonable. But when he offered, she said, "No." So this is the kind of thing that I often see, which is, "I think I want one thing, but when I get that thing, I don't actually want it. It doesn't make me feel the way I thought it would. I want to earn fifty K more, I think that'll make me feel safe, oh my god, I am earning fifty K more. It doesn't actually change the way I feel." So, I worked with this couple,

• 7:52Ramit Sethi?

  and I helped them understand why they both felt this way about money. And, you know, from the outside, it's like, "This is so irrational, if you make more, just pay more, if I were in that situation, etc., etc." None of that stuff matters. When you are in the couple, in that relationship, you will feel a certain way, and we gotta work with you individually, not what everybody else says. In the end, the conclusion that they came to was, she wanted him to occasionally pay for dinner, but she also wanted him to fill up his IRA, so this is what they did. Every so often, before they went out to dinner, she would give him her credit card. And she would say, here, I want you to pay for tonight. And he said, cool. He understood it. They went out and that's what they did.

• 8:36Ramit Sethi?

  Now, to us sitting here, we're like, this dance makes no sense. Why don't they just do it this way or that way? Guess what? Every single one of us has some irrational thing we do with money. Every single one of us. And I think that we are ready to actually have conversations about how we are irrational. Money is not just dollars and cents on a page. That's why you don't feel good about money, even when you have more than you ever thought you would. That's why you worry about money, but you have never read a single book on personal finance. We are all irrational, including me. And when you get into a relationship, you gotta acknowledge that. And then you gotta say, hey, what is our vision of a rich life together? Let's build that.

• 9:18Ramit Sethi?

  If it means we do a little dance about the credit card once every two months, fine. Do we both feel good? Is it fair? Then I'm good with it.

• 9:26Steven Bartlett?

  What's going on there with her? Because it it sounds like there's this battle between her mind and maybe her heart. Or it's almost like the social expectation is coming in, but then her her brain is saying, no, invest in the IRA. And an IRA for anyone that doesn't know in in other parts.

• 9:40Ramit Sethi?

  It's a retirement account.

• 9:41Steven Bartlett?

  A retirement account. So she's saying, invest in the future, but also buy my dinner.

• 9:44Ramit Sethi?

  Well, it's the same. We all have these things that society has told us. But then we don't quite agree and we're not sure what to do. Last time I was here, we talked about how you don't necessarily need to buy a house in order to live a rich life. And in my case, I have rented for the last 20 years by choice. And I made more money renting and investing the difference than I would have by buying a house. And this is shocking to people. Like, we saw the comments last time. People went berserk. How can you talk about renting? You're just throwing money away on rent. And this is something we have been fed constantly for generations that in order to be successful, you must buy a house.

• 10:27Ramit Sethi?

  So when somebody like me comes around and says, actually, you should run the numbers because sometimes renting can be better. People are shocked. Same thing with if you want to be taken care of, or you want someone to treat you, or you want someone to pay for the first date. Same thing when men come and they talk about being a provider. But in certain relationships where they actually earn less, I'll say to them, if we look at the numbers, you're not the provider. So who are you? And they're stumped. And that is when we need to start grappling with the idea that maybe what we were told is not exactly true for us in our situation today. And that's okay.

• 11:05Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think it causes more problems when the, in terms of the relationship dynamics and that sort of emasculation and, you know, that the man not feeling like a provider when the woman earns more money than the man, from what you've seen?

• 11:17Ramit Sethi?

  Not necessarily. I think that it is a different framework than we're used to.

• 11:22Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 11:23Ramit Sethi?

  When we think about my parents, for example, my mom stayed home with us. My dad went to work. Single earner. Simple. Everybody knew where they stood, what the roles were. It was very simple. It's very difficult to do that today. Housing is historically expensive. Healthcare is expensive, especially in the US. And so you have two people earning. In, in urban cities, you have young women earning more than men in their twenties. A lot of us are trying to figure out, what does this role mean for me and for my partner and for our relationship? That makes it tricky.

• 11:58Steven Bartlett?

  I wonder if a lot of men are just choosing to remain single until they've kind of worked on themselves. Because I think actually that's probably the path I would have taken, if I'm being completely honest. Or what I kind of did take is, I didn't have a relationship until I was able to really provide.

• 12:13Ramit Sethi?

  Oh, the P word.

• 12:15Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 12:15Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. And where did that word come from? Provide.

• 12:17Steven Bartlett?

  Like watching my father, watching movies, everything.

• 12:20Ramit Sethi?

  Exactly. Yeah. No one ever says like, you are a provider, but we learn it from a million different perspectives. And yeah, I hear a lot of guys. I mean, when I was living in New York and I had a lot of single friends. Topic of conversation was, I'm not ready to get married. I need to get to a certain point in my career first. We have all these words for it. And, deep down, there's a feeling that we're often expressing. Maybe I'm not ready, maybe I'm not enough, maybe I need to do X, Y, Z before I do the thing that I want. And so, part of what we talk about when it comes to relationships and money is like, let's actually shine a light on that. Let's not be shy about it.

• 13:02Ramit Sethi?

  If you want someone to pay for your dinner, fine, that's totally fine. Let's have that conversation. If you want to be the sole earner in your household, okay, let's see what it would take. And, too often, we don't have those conversations. We just dance around them for 50 years.

• 13:18Steven Bartlett?

  Who should pay for the first date, then?

• 13:20Ramit Sethi?

  My answer is, doesn't matter. It would be nice if the person who suggested the date pays. But I think we spend way too much time focusing on the first date, and way too little time thinking about the next 14,625 days. It's like a couple who's obsessed with the wedding. Fine, you want a nice wedding, great. What about the marriage? Same thing with money. First date, okay, we can have that conversation. But aren't you more interested in how your partner thinks about money? And talks about money? Are they a cheapskate? Are they generous? Are they abundant? Did they grow up the same or different than you? That is something we don't talk about. Meanwhile, we have 5 million YouTube videos on who's gonna pay on the first date. We are missing the real point.

• 14:06Ramit Sethi?

  The point of money in a relationship is not just about the first date. That's fun for clicks. But it's about, do we see money the same way? Do we connect? Are we gonna be rowing in the same direction? Or are you gonna be doing that, and I'm doing this, and we can never get aligned?

• 14:23Steven Bartlett?

  You can only make her first impression once, right? And if you are a guy, this is just how I feel anyway. If I go on a date, a first date with a woman, and we have a wonderful date, you know, it's a nice restaurant, and then it gets to the end of the day, and then I turn to her and say, shall we split the bill? I couldn't even say it with a straight face, frankly. I couldn't, I definitely couldn't ask her to pay.

• 14:44Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah.

• 14:45Steven Bartlett?

  I just, I just could never. And if, I think if you anonymously polled ten of my female friends and said, how would you feel if on the first date, the guy asked you to pay? I think privately, they would say, that's a bit of a turn off. That's a red flag. That's an ick.

• 15:00Ramit Sethi?

  I think probably that's true. And again, goes to the power of socialization, right? Like, culture is very difficult to change. We gotta admit that. We gotta acknowledge that. And when I was dating, I paid for dates. So I don't have a problem with it. I like to be generous. I think that when you are in a relationship, you like to know that your partner is generous too. Now generous comes in lots of ways. It could be paying for dates. It could be planning a trip. It could be being thoughtful and, you know, buying extra toothpaste because we're running low. There's so many different ways to be generous. But generosity for me would be a value. Paying for a date, sure, I paid for dates. I'm happy to. I like to do it.

• 15:42Ramit Sethi?

  But generosity to me is way more important to talk about that in a relationship versus the date itself.

• 15:48Steven Bartlett?

  Because chivalry, you know, this, this idea that the man is to lead in that regard and to, you know, open the door.

• 15:56Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah.

• 15:57Steven Bartlett?

  And open the car door and pull out the chair.

• 15:59Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, but think about it. I agree with all that stuff. I, I'm, I support it. But think about what message that sends when you tell men you're supposed to be chivalrous, but there's no real context, no, no real teaching around it. And let's say you have a twenty-six-year-old guy now who's earning less than his girlfriend. So he wants to be chivalrous, but for him, he's like, well, look at our bank accounts. And so what I want to emphasize to people is you can be chivalrous, you could be generous. Money is just a small part of that. Let's not over-fixate on who's paying for tapas, okay? And let's actually think about the important things. When it comes to money, we are so obsessed with three-dollar questions. People are obsessing over, should I buy this coffee? Can I afford this appetizer?

• 16:44Ramit Sethi?

  On and on and on about three-dollar questions. We totally neglect the thirty thousand dollar questions or the three hundred thousand dollar questions. Is this person financially aligned with me? How do I even find out? Am I investing 5 to 10% of take-home pay every month? Are we doing it together? Do we talk about money regularly and proactively and positively? Those things matter, and they're actually worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. These $3 questions, including who's paying for appetizers or should I buy a latte? Irrelevant. In fact, get the big answers in life right, and you can buy all the appetizers you ever want.

• 17:25Steven Bartlett?

  What are the financial red flags in a relationship, then?

• 17:27Ramit Sethi?

  Number one is they don't want to talk about money. If you don't want to talk about money, red flag, the biggest red flag of all. Because we could differ on how we see money. We can even have different values for a few things. But if your partner simply will not talk about money, you have a huge problem.

• 17:46Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 17:46Ramit Sethi?

  If you can't talk about money, then you can't even understand where they're coming from, and they are not curious about what you want. So how are you ever going to get on the same page? Think about this. A lot of people think we need to have the conversation about money. The conversation, as if it's one conversation. Would you have the conversation about raising kids? No, you'll have thousands in your life. That's the way it should be. Money is very much like parenting. Not like, uh, should we play pickleball or tennis today? Irrelevant. So we want to have lots of conversations about money. And that means we need to, first of all, be willing to talk about it, and then we need to find a way to have fun doing it.

• 18:30Steven Bartlett?

  Why don't we? And who doesn't? Is it men? Is it women that don't do it more? Or who's not talking about money, and why aren't they talking about it?

• 18:36Ramit Sethi?

  It's not about gender. It has nothing to do with gender in terms of who does or doesn't talk about money. There are avoiders. That's one of four categories, money types that I've identified. Avoiders hate talking about money. And they will use a series of conscious and unconscious techniques to avoid talking about money. They'll say things like,

• 18:59Ramit Sethi?

  Uh, why, why do you always have to talk about money? Can't we just have a nice night out? Or you're so much better at this. You just handle it. You're just so much savvier at this stuff. That's an avoider.

• 19:11Steven Bartlett?

  Do they know their own financial situation?

• 19:13Ramit Sethi?

  No.

• 19:14Steven Bartlett?

  So they don't know their own financial situation and they don't want to talk about it?

• 19:16Ramit Sethi?

  Correct. We, and by the way, we all have something like this. It could be our fitness. It could be our relationship with our parents. There's something in our life that we know we should deep down, but we avoid it.

• 19:28Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 19:28Ramit Sethi?

  And there's no, there's no immediate consequence. Like if I don't call my college friend, it's fine. I could probably call him tomorrow and you can go on and on and on like that until one day you can't. Same thing with our fitness. It's very easy to procrastinate on fitness or money because it's not like your house is being taken away or even your cable's being shut off. You'll probably be fine until one day you hit this brick wall and it's not.

• 19:57Steven Bartlett?

  So that's the avoider. That's the first money type.

• 19:59Ramit Sethi?

  Yep. Next up, optimizer. I have a soft spot because I am an optimizer. Optimizers, we love to live in the spreadsheet. It's like, let me sit and calculate this and what if I run a compounded interest calculation or Monte Carlo calculation and what if we do this, but not that? I love calculating everything. And left alone, I would sit there and do that for the rest of my life. Okay. The problem is you can take it a little too far. Now, I don't think I've taken it too far. I think I'm perfect on my spreadsheets, but my wife has taught me enough's enough. We, we've won that part of life. Let's focus on another part, connection and fun and experience.

• 20:40Steven Bartlett?

  Are these people often thought of as boring?

• 20:42Ramit Sethi?

  Yes, they are, they are, deep down, they are boring. I was boring when I was sitting there thinking money is only about numbers. It's not. Money is about adventure and possibility and generosity. And you will often find optimizers, I'll give them a challenge, I'll give them a hundred dollar challenge, also you have to take a hundred dollars in the next week and spend it on yourself. They cannot do it. They will spend it on their dog, they'll spend it on their kid, they'll spend it on their partner, but they will not do it for themselves. And I go, why didn't you do it? They go, "Rameet, do you know that if you put $100 in the S and P 500 and you compound that for the next 45 years, it'll turn into this much?" I go, "I don't give a shit. Spend the money." Because money is not simply meant to be hoarded, right? It's meant to create a rich life.

• 21:26Ramit Sethi?

  And when you have optimizers, the thing is, they can get you to a very good place. They will probably have your account set up, dialed in. They'll be investing. Great. They're gonna be very proud. "Look at the compound interest returns." All that is fantastic, but it can be taken too far.

• 21:44Steven Bartlett?

  These are the people that die, and then you figure out that they had like $9 million

• 21:48Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, what a waste.

• 21:48Steven Bartlett?

  in some saving account.

• 21:49Ramit Sethi?

  What a waste.

• 21:50Steven Bartlett?

  They never tasted the caviar, but they've got...

• 21:52Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, like, people send these newspaper articles around like, "Oh, local librarian discovered to have $9 million." And I go, "What a tragedy. What a tragedy to live a smaller life than you have to." I want you to save. I want you to invest. But I also want you to try a nice meal. Or if you don't like nice food, or you don't want a nice T-shirt, also, fine. Get super generous. Give that money. Surprise the people around you. Tip 50%. So those are optimizers. The third category is worryers. They love to worry. Typically, they picked up worrying from their parents, almost always, and their entire relationship with money is worrying. "Are we gonna have enough? What if we run out of money?

• 22:37Ramit Sethi?

  What if we don't have enough to pay at the gas station?" And oftentimes, it's very surprising, because I told you that 50% of couples don't know how much they make, right? So they'll say like, "We need more. We don't have enough right now." And I'll ask them, "How much do you think you make?" This just happened a couple of weeks ago on a podcast episode. They thought they made around $70,000 a year, okay? We add up all their stuff, they make $120,000 a year. So I go, "Well, here you go. You wanted to make an extra 40K. You actually make 50K more than you thought. Do you feel any better?" And she goes... No, because the way you feel about money is highly uncorrelated to the amount in your bank account.

• 23:21Ramit Sethi?

  So, worryers worry, that's how they relate. They can't imagine any other relationship to money. And my job is to help them realize, first of all, let's actually look at your numbers. Let me help you understand what it means. Do you have enough? What does it take to have enough? And then, can you start to develop a new relationship with money? It's almost like a new taste bud. I'm never gonna tell you to eat tomatoes if you hate tomatoes, but I am gonna teach you, maybe you like okra, and we can develop a new taste for that. Finally, the dreamer. The dreamer believes that success is one deal away. If we just close this deal, if I just get this thing, and they tend to fall into get

• 24:06Ramit Sethi?

  rich quick schemes. Lots of scams, MLMs, a lot of crypto shitcoin scams, like all this BS. But they are extremely resistant to calm, low-cost, long-term investing. In other words, the way that most people build real wealth. They think it's boring, they even have little phrases like, "Ugh, I don't wanna be stuck in a nine to five like those suckers." I'm like, "That sucker makes 10 times what you make! What are you talking about?" But they have simply been surrounded with the idea, "One more deal, and I'll finally make it."

• 24:39Steven Bartlett?

  They must be hard to be married to.

• 24:40Ramit Sethi?

  It's impossible. It's really, really difficult. Not only do they not wanna talk about money, when they finally do talk about money, they're almost living in a different world. Often, you will find that dreamers can only dream because they are being subsidized by someone in their life, usually their partner. And if their partner were to leave, for example, the house of cards would collapse. And actually, that's usually the only thing that gets them to truly change.

• 25:07Steven Bartlett?

  What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you wanna listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.