How To Make Life's Biggest Decisions - Abby Davisson - #603

Abby Davisson is an author, social innovation leader and career development expert whose research focuses on decision making in money management and romance. There are some big decisions we all need to make. What job to take, what city to live in, whether to get married or divorced or have kids. Having a prescriptive formula for this might seem impossible, but Abby helped run the most popular course at Stanford on exactly this topic, and today we get to find out what she's discovered. Expect to learn what the most common biggest single mistake that Abby has discovered in her research, how to use logic in romantic decisions without killing the romance, how to speak to your parents about care as they get older, the biggest mistakes that all people make when it comes to major decisions, if you should get a prenup agreement and much more... Sponsors: Get $100 discount on the best water filter on earth from AquaTru at https://bit.ly/drinkwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Go to my sponsor https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom for 10% off your first month of therapy with BetterHelp and get matched with a therapist who will listen and help Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (00:48) What’s Wrong with our Decision Making? (05:02) Making Decisions on Limited Information (09:52) Principles for Effective Communication (15:16) The Financial Aspect of Finding a Partner (23:17) Romantic Decisions in a World of Unlimited Options (35:11) Advice for Couples who Struggle to Communicate (39:20) Most Common Life Decision Regrets (43:47) How to Know if a Relationship Should End (49:45) Choosing Where to Live (53:29) Considering Elderly Care (1:01:01) Where to Find Abby Extra Stuff: Buy Abby's Book - https://amzn.to/3ZU5X44 Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Episodes You Might Enjoy: This Is How To Master Your Life - David Goggins - #577: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠⁠⁠ How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs - Dr Jordan Peterson - #712: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠⁠⁠ The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain - Dr Andrew Huberman - #700: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠⁠ Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Think as much about when and where that you're going to have the big conversations than the what of what you're going to say. That might mean not springing a big discussion on your partner as you are brushing your teeth, getting ready for bed. You have to make sure you're both mentally in the right place to have the big conversation.

• 0:21Chris Williamson?

  I have a friend, Alex, who tweeted recently, "The reason you're stressed is because you have decisions to make and you're not making them." How true do you think that is?

• 0:31Speaker 00

  So true. And by the way, not making a decision is in and of itself actually a decision. But decisions are stressful and no one teaches us how to make them properly. So I absolutely agree with Alex.

• 0:45Chris Williamson?

  What do you think is wrong about conventional decision-making wisdom?

• 0:51Speaker 00

  Well, conventional wisdom teaches us that money and love are two separate things. And if you have to make a decision about your career, or if there are a lot of dollar signs involved, you should think about that with your head and analyze it, run some numbers, use a spreadsheet, but do not let emotion enter that decision. And on the other side, that love and relationships are decisions that are meant to be made with your heart and really not let your head mess with those decisions. And that's completely wrong because any big decision has a component of money and a component of love to it.

• 1:34Speaker 00

  And if you are ignoring one of those big realms, you are missing part of the picture. You're more likely to make a decision that you regret and you're going about it all wrong.

• 1:48Chris Williamson?

  How do you try to operationalize or formalize the use of the heart when it comes to decision-making? That seems like an ineffable impossibility that poets have been trying to describe for a very long time. How would you formalize something like that?

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Well, the key is to use something that helps you bring in both elements of the head and the heart, or intuition, some people refer to it as, rather than the heart, your gut. And one of the ways that we do this is to suggest a framework, a process to go through, so that you're not left to your own devices and kind of groping about trying to make the best decision you can, but really following a structured but flexible process, so that it lets you access both the head and the heart in a way that kind of gives you a roadmap that you can rely on.

• 2:48Chris Williamson?

  That's the five Cs that you come up with: clarify, communicate, choices, check-in, and consequences. Clarify, to me, seems like, not only is it the first one, but most people, when it comes to decisions, decision-making, having clarity around it. What is it that you're actually trying to decide? What is it that we're even looking at here? That seems to be a very big stumbling block. In your experience, which of the five Cs or what are the other ones that are also large, and how can people get more clarity around their decisions?

• 3:23Speaker 00

  Well, you're right, that the first step is very important, because it sets the stage for all the other steps. And if you don't have clarity on what you're seeking, what's important to you, you're going to be hard-pressed to get to a decision that you feel good about, because you don't know what you're seeking. So that is a really important one, and it sounds simple, right? Just get, clarify what's important to you. But the truth is that there are so many influences that cloud what we care about, right? You have family members, you might have friends, you might have a manager who is telling you what you should care about. And so the big part of being successful in that first step

• 4:05Speaker 00

  is untangling what you want from all of those other influences, and just tuning in to what is important to you.

• 4:14Chris Williamson?

  Yes, there's one of my favorite blog posts of all time. It's written by a guy called Kyle Eschenroda. He wrote it back in 2017 now, and it's called What Do You Want to Want? And in it, he talks about the problem that our wants a lot of the time aren't ours. They are societal norms. They are the way that we've dealt with past trauma. They are paths of least resistance. They are any one of a million things. And what he says is that you need to program more deeply than that. You need to get down to the source code of your desires and work out what you want to want. And I've always loved using that as an insight because the things that you want aren't necessarily the things that you want to want. They just, they come from all over the place.

• 4:58Chris Williamson?

  So one, one consideration when it comes to making decisions, planning for the future, so on and so forth, optionality and uncertainty, especially in the modern world, an unlimited number of different routes that we can go down. How do you account for the inevitable unknown unknowns of the future? When it comes to making a decision with limited information right now?

• 5:25Speaker 00

  So I think that gets at our fifth C, which is consequences. And you're right, you can't know how everything is going to play out. But as humans, we have a bias, very strong bias to focus only on the short term. We see what's closest in front of us. And so what is important is to not just think of the short term, but try to play out your decision on the medium term and the longer term. So thinking about those different time horizons will help you realize that even if there is something you haven't anticipated, because there will absolutely be something that you don't anticipate, that you have tricked your mind to overcome that short term bias

• 6:07Speaker 00

  and start to see that sometimes things can be, you know, lead to better, better outcomes in the longer term if you just play them out. And I'll, I'll give you an example, which is my older son switched schools this year. He's in fourth grade and he did not want to leave the school that he had gone to from pre-K. And we were trying to explain to him that yes, even though this year is going to be uncomfortable, you're meeting new people, it's a new environment, there is new things to get used to. You actually will be able to go up to eighth grade in this school. So you won't have to change next year. You'll have a longer time to be with your friends.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  And you know, it's hard to get a nine-year-old to do a lot of things, let alone see many years into the future. But that's an example of how we all think, right? We all just think of, I want to avoid the discomfort of doing something in the short run, but it actually might lead to more comfort in the long run.

• 7:06Chris Williamson?

  Given that a lot of people have concerns around the consequences of their decisions. And as we said at the very start, one of the reasons that you might be stressed is because you have decisions to make and you're not making them. I imagine that people can become so mired in considering the consequences that it actually encourages them or discourages them from making decisions. It encourages this sort of nihilism, apathy, fear, anxiety around the future. How do you suggest that someone work out the consequences without getting too stuck?

• 7:43Speaker 00

  Well, I am someone who is prone to analysis paralysis, so I understand that.

• 7:47Chris Williamson?

  The lady that wrote the book about decision-making, surely not, surely not.

• 7:51Speaker 00

  But I've learned how to overcome that. And part of it is to force myself to go through this process, right? So where I might want to linger in thinking about something from all different angles and to kind of play it out on, you know, micro-time horizons. I realize that that's actually not going to get me closer to a better outcome, that sometimes you do need to decide. And by going through the process, you give yourself more confidence that you have turned over the right rocks, that you have consulted the right people, that you have importantly communicated with the others who are going to be affected by the decision. And then my co-author has this phrase which she got from her father, which is,

• 8:35Speaker 00

  "You've done your best, angels couldn't do better." And so there is some confidence, and we've heard from readers of the book, that they do feel more confident making the decisions, knowing that they have gone through this process, that they've approached it the best that they could. And that even if the outcome goes sideways, like it sometimes does, they couldn't have anticipated that and they couldn't have done better.

• 8:59Chris Williamson?

  I think the consideration or the feeling that you could have, would have, should have foreseen whatever it was that was going to happen, probably not only in the moment, looking back, causes people to have regret. But right now also makes people concerned because you can almost project forward the future regret if you make a bad decision. You think, oh God, I don't want to have to deal with the fact that I should have got that job instead of this job. And you go, well, as we said at the start, I had Peterson on the show a few years ago, and he said, you have to consider the price that you pay for inaction, because people presume that inaction has no cost. And it's like, no, no, no, inaction is also a choice. Choosing not to do, you don't have the choice to not do something. Everything that you do, even not doing something, is doing something.

• 9:43Chris Williamson?

  So we've got clarification, we understand why that's important and consequences. So we've bookended the five Cs. Communication, when it comes to that, what are your principles around effective communication for decision making?

• 9:58Speaker 00

  Well, so often when we think of communicating, we think of talking. And if there is someone else who's going to be affected by the decision, we think about a lot about what are we going to say to that person? How are we going to convince them about our point of view if they might have a different one? But really, a huge part of communication and good communication is listening. And it's about setting up the conditions for a good conversation. And so one thing that I have really taken away from all the research and the work we've done on the book is to think as much about when and where that you're going to have big conversations than the what of what you're going to say.

• 10:39Speaker 00

  And so that might mean not springing a big discussion about if you're going to move. On your partner as you are brushing your teeth, getting ready for bed, or you are trying to get the kids out the door in the morning. It might mean actually making an appointment with that person, which can seem weird if they're the person we see all the time. But you have to make sure you're both mentally in the right place to have the big conversation. And so even just simply saying, hey, I have something on my mind. I'd love to speak with you about, can we think about a time, maybe this weekend, that we can have that conversation? And then leave your house, leave the place that has all the day to day stresses, the dishes that are in the sink, the laundry that's not folded. Go outside.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  I mean, my husband and I have had a lot of luck going on hikes and talking about big decisions. Our kids are running up ahead and we're in an expansive state of mind because we see beautiful scenery and we're actually letting ourselves think differently than when we're mired in the day to day. And those conditions and really listening to the other person when they share what they're thinking are two often overlooked elements of the communication step.

• 11:56Chris Williamson?

  I think that's, that's a very good way to put it, that it's not just about what you say. It's the setting that you put it into. What about choices?

• 12:03Speaker 00

  So choices is, I love choices, actually, because when we are faced with a big decision, we often focus on binaries. So we think about, do I marry this person or do I break up with them? Do I go for the promotion or do I quit this job? And the truth is that there are so many options in between, and that's where you can get really creative. And the choices and the check in step actually go hand in hand. Because when you're really in the thick of a decision, you might overlook some of the options available to you. And so checking in with friends and family and trusted resources allows you to generate more options that get you out of that tunnel vision

• 12:47Speaker 00

  that let you see, oh, right. I thought that, you know, I'll give you an example from my own life. To get more space, I need to move. I need a bigger house. I need to, you know, find a way to get a home office, for example, which is something that I very much did not have at the start of COVID and then, you know, needed. But what I found by checking in with other people and seeing what solutions they had creatively come up with is that you can rent a space that is outside of your home, which is incidentally where I do my best work. And that would not come with all of the hassle and the expense of moving, but would actually get me the outcome of having additional space where I can do my

• 13:30Speaker 00

  work. And so that is a very key element of generating additional choices that you might not come up with just in the moment when you are thinking about a decision.

• 13:40Chris Williamson?

  Is the main difference about decisions regarding money and love that they're just grander, that they have more impact on our life? Or is there something particularly special about them outside of that?

• 13:55Speaker 00

  I like that way of putting it, that they have more impact on our life. They often are very personal, right? They're, they're, they're not ones that other people, you might want other people to tell you what to do, but they're not ones that other people can really choose for you and have them have the, be in the alignment with your core values.

• 14:24Chris Williamson?

  So they're very idiosyncratic. It's, it's not like saying, uh, this particular dish is the best pizza at this pizzeria. You should get that because I had that last time to go, well, the difference, the degrees of freedom you have in pizza taste is probably not as wide as it is in ideal relationship or financial or marital setup.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  Yes. And they're, and they're, they have life-changing effects on us. And so if you have a piece of pizza that somebody else recommends, you know, you might have a, a good meal or, you know, a not so good meal if you didn't like that piece of pizza, but it's not really going to affect your life. And so the, the fact that your life's trajectory can actually be altered by these decisions make them higher stakes. And when they are higher stakes, then they are more daunting and more, can be more paralyzing.

• 15:17Chris Williamson?

  Why do money concerns influence our love decisions? I thought, I thought that we should be marrying for love, falling in love, you know, why is there a financial component to the person that we're going to spend the rest of our life with?

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Well, because when you connect your life with someone, then their financial decisions have an impact on you in a very real sense of that debt collectors can come after you, that their debt becomes your debt, that their windfalls in places that are community property states become your windfalls. And so not only are there actual impacts to the dollars, but then your career is powerfully influenced by the person who you connect your life with. And particularly if you want children, very particularly if

• 16:13Speaker 00

  you are in a heterosexual relationship and you are the mom, you are by default by society, often expected to do more of the caregiving. And if you do not have a partner who sees eye to eye on sharing the work equally, doesn't need to be split down the middle, but but really having a true stake in caring for the loved ones that you've committed to caring for, that that can have real implications on on women's careers. We saw that during COVID, when so many women stepped out of the workforce, millions of women to care for children

• 16:58Speaker 00

  who were no longer able to be in school. And so there are really real implications financially for for the person who you decide to spend your life with.

• 17:08Chris Williamson?

  What sort of assessment or decision criteria should you go through when looking at settling down with someone and thinking, right, well, I guess I'd better get the self assessment tax return out? What do you do?

• 17:25Speaker 00

  I mean, it's not the most romantic thing for a first date, but certainly if you are deciding to move in together, I mean, even to to spend time with someone, we go through in our book, big conversations that you should have before you might feel ready. And this is something that when I took my co-authors class, I was dating someone who I had been seeing for less than a year, and we were making decisions about, do we look for a job in the same city after we graduate? Do we live together if we end up in that same city? And, you know, it was awkward to have those conversations. We had, you know, certainly would prefer to push them off. But

• 18:03Speaker 00

  talking about, what does it mean to us to live together? Does that, do we, are we doing that with the expectation of getting engaged or not? How would we contribute to the rent? I mean, all of those things actually forced us to have these big conversations that, number one, were, enabled us to see that we were compatible in ways that we might not have known otherwise, and actually made us feel more close to each other, because we had had those vulnerable conversations and shared what we were hoping for our lives and careers, and, and actually brought us closer. And so, we outlined some of those conversations in

• 18:47Speaker 00

  the book. And, and I would say, you know, I was, had certainly dated people before, made decisions about being, you know, moving in with people before, and not had those conversations. And I saw the difference in really how having these types of big discussions, and using this shared, those shared conversations to determine, you know, okay, is this person, someone who I think I want to spend my life with, just makes such a huge difference in your confidence in that that relationship is the right one, and that it's going in the right direction, that you want the same things in the long term.

• 19:28Chris Williamson?

  What are those sorts of conversations? Or what are some of the biggest and most important ones that people should have at an uncomfortably early stage?

• 19:36Speaker 00

  Well, certainly about your career aspirations. And so are you somebody who, you know, what is your level of ambition? What type of career do you want? What do you, do you want one that you're moving around all the time? Are you expecting someone to be picking up and moving with you when that happens? So that's a huge topic, a topic of children. Do you want them? How many? When? That's another huge topic. The topic about money that we just talked about. So, you know, do you have debt? What do you spend reckless amounts of money on? Things that are, you know, seem theoretical at first, but then if you just do decide to spend

• 20:19Speaker 00

  your life with somebody, actually have real implications on, you know, if you're marrying someone, if you want to spend your life with someone who always wants the latest gadget and they're going to get the new iPhone when it comes out and they're going to get, you know, upgrade their car every few years. I mean, that might mean you can't take the vacations that might be important to you. Right? So those types start to tease out the trade offs and the compromises that you might have to make. Talking about family and what that means to you. Do you want to live near them? The where you want to live is a big topic of conversation and certainly one that with more and more remote work is actually can create more choice, which is not always such a good thing.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  So making sure you're on the same page with a future partner about where you want to live. Is it important to you to be near family? Do you want to be in a city? Do you want to be in, close to nature? All of those things are important to talk about.

• 21:20Chris Williamson?

  I know that it might sound quite odd to be discussing the wisdom in asking some of the most basic questions that are going to impact your compatibility with a partner. But it is rare to front load those sorts of conversations early in a relationship because people don't want to come across as being too keen. They don't want to scare the other person away. It's this big, you know, these decisions inherently are difficult and challenging and front loading them, deciding, okay, let's discuss many of them or even all of them now, just feels, it feels effortful and challenging and scary. But the alternative is to continue down this path with somebody up until the point at which you are.

• 22:04Chris Williamson?

  Further invested and potentially so invested that it's very difficult to turn around or make a different decision. And now you're stuck having to make trade offs, which is going to cause conflict. So yeah, I mean, make sure that the person that you're with has values and a life plan that aligns with yours. Sounds kind of obvious, but is also, I think it's pretty rare.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  It is rare. And every year that my co author would teach her class on work and family that our book is based on, she would have students who would email her or write to her after the class and say, I just want to let you know, thanks to your class, I've broken up with my long term partner. And it was really painful, but I realized we did not want the same things. And the more that we continue to be together, the more I would be compromising what I want. And she would write back and say, you know, I'm sorry for, you know, the pain that this has caused you and congratulations, because that is a very brave and courageous decision to go after

• 23:11Speaker 00

  what you want and find someone who will support you in what you want.

• 23:16Chris Williamson?

  Have you considered the challenges in the modern dating world with unlimited choice, online dating and Instagram and so on and so forth? That's a choice as well. That's a decision too. How can people cut through these sorts of unlimited choice scenarios?

• 23:33Speaker 00

  Well, what I love is that there is research on this. One of my other professors at Stanford, who I studied with Baba Shiv, has done research on the effects of two types of choice. One is sequential choice, which is the type of choice you have on the dating apps. You can always swipe and find someone else. And there is this eternal quest for the best that helps you, makes you think that there's the perfect person is just, you know, one swipe away and I'll just, you know, continue to date and find that person versus what he calls simultaneous choice, which is when you bound the choice. And he talks about, he's from India. And so when he decided that

• 24:17Speaker 00

  he wanted to find a partner and get married, he told his parents, they presented three different potential suitors. He met them at a similar timeframe, same few months, went on several dates with them. And found the one that he felt he clicked with the most. Fortunately, she also felt the same way. They got married and have been married for decades. And he has replicated the effects of simultaneous choice versus sequential choice in other places and found that people who identify their best

• 24:55Speaker 00

  choice from a number of choices that they experience simultaneously have are more satisfied with the outcomes. And so there are ways, even if you're not in an arranged marriage situation, to do the same thing. So comparing the person who is the most likely candidate, who you enjoy spending time with the most, to maybe the person who you feel was the best candidate, like the suitor you enjoyed the most in your most recent dating history, that can be a way to kind of fake, if you will, the simultaneous choice and not just keep feeling like, okay,

• 25:37Speaker 00

  well, the next person is right around the corner. Because you're right, that paradox of choice we've seen does not lead to happiness and it can lead to a lot of frustration, actually.

• 25:47Chris Williamson?

  What if you're already in a relationship and you're considering getting married? What are the things to consider before you decide to take that step? Is there anything unique that we haven't covered already?

• 25:59Speaker 00

  Well, I think a big part of getting married is formally, legally tying yourself to someone and your finances. And so one of the things we talk about is prenups, because prenuptial agreements are on the rise. We have a lot of people who grew up, for example, with divorced parents that are seeing, you know, the consequences of that on their own family's finances. People are getting married later, and so they're more likely to have a lot of assets and/or a lot of debt. And so it's very important to, we don't think it's important to have a prenup necessarily, but to go through the same conversations and have the same discussions you would have if

• 26:41Speaker 00

  you were setting one up, which include disclosing all of your debt and being financially transparent with one another, talking about The the assets that you have, talking about what's important to you financially. And you can do that certainly formally with the support of attorneys, or you could do that informally with one another, maybe even with a facilitator like a therapist or a financial coach. And we we did a survey as part of our book and as part of the research, we heard from a number of people who said, we actually went through the steps of having those conversations, didn't go so far as to drop the legal document, but feel like we got the the best of both worlds because we now are going into this marriage with our eyes wide open.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  And I like to say that a wedding is actually a microcosm of all of the issues that you face as a couple. And so you you have to agree on the role of religion and spirituality in the day, you have to agree on family and how much influence financially and otherwise you want them to have on your day, to think about the people who are important to you and make decisions about whether the day is really about you or about them. And so if you can survive that planning process and come out, you know, on the other side with an experience that is meaningful, you are you are likely to be well set up.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  But the challenge is that most many couples really focus on that day at the expense of the rest of their lives. And we know a day is over very quickly. And so the more that you can have those conversations leading up to marriage about what you want in the long run, what's most important to you, how the other person can support you in those goals, the better off that you're able to be.

• 28:31Chris Williamson?

  Are you saying discuss the prenup as you're going down the aisle? Is that the best approach for it?

• 28:36Speaker 00

  Uh, no. Ideally, you would have those discussions far before you walked down the aisle.

• 28:41Chris Williamson?

  Okay, if you say so. I mean, this is a very unromantic, unsexy part of romance, right? Like, I have a number of friends that are married and all of them have had discussions like this. One of them had a

• 28:59Chris Williamson?

  Contentious discussion with his partner about prenup and lack thereof that they were going to go in with. And it's difficult. It's a concern with finding a partner who happens to match you in terms of your financial resources and financial future is rare. And then people have got concerns about divorces happening. But then it also, if there is a disparity in terms of either resources now or wealth potential in the future, it kind of feels a little bit like someone's already got one foot out of the door. It could be interpreted in that sort of way. So it's just a messy, very, very messy, messy decision. And one that I haven't, I haven't considered about the nuts and bolts of what that looks like. But yeah, it doesn't

• 29:43Chris Williamson?

  surprise me that it probably takes a number of hours, many, many hours to discuss. Okay, so how are we actually going to do this?

• 29:50Speaker 00

  Well, it's messy, but I would argue that going into a relationship and a marriage without those conversations is really has the potential to be a lot messier because you really, it is much better to get all of that out in the open and be transparent before you've made promises to one another than it is on the other side of it. And, you know, I am now at the age where I have friends who are getting divorced, sometimes after several decades of marriage. And it is, it is, that is a lot messier. Let's just put it that way.

• 30:26Chris Williamson?

  I get you. What about before having kids? What costs should people think about before they have children?

• 30:33Speaker 00

  Well, the cost that so many people are shocked to see, it's less of a shock, I think, these days, because it actually has been in the news more with with COVID and the the lack of our infrastructure being revealed is childcare. And often people don't realize how much it costs to raise a child, which the estimates are about half a million dollars up through age 18, and certainly more than that when you tack on college. But the early years are where a lot of the, it can feel as if your entire paycheck is going to pay to someone to help.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Care for your child when you're at work. And the math that I think is so tricky is that often people deduct those childcare costs from, again, in a heterosexual couple, the woman's paycheck. And they say, okay, if you're, you know, not making, if you're making either the same as it costs to have a nanny, or less than that, then it's just not worth it. And the truth is that that's really flawed math. One of the things that my co-author taught in her class is, no, no, no. You add the paychecks together, you deduct the childcare from the joint paycheck, because it is actually a long-term investment in the careers of both of you, so that you,

• 31:58Speaker 00

  nobody has to pause their career if they don't want to, to care for a child, because it is a lot harder to go back into the workforce if you, if you take a pause. And, you know, that, you will not need a nanny forever. What, what you don't realize, though, is that schools close for the summer, they get out at 3:00 PM, and so you will likely need some form of childcare, summer camps, after school programs, for a very long time, certainly until your children can take care of themselves. And so just going in with your eyes wide open to all of the costs, how you're going to approach it, how you both want your child to be cared for. Some people feel very strongly that they only want family members to care for their

• 32:42Speaker 00

  children, whereas other people would rather have a very large village, and if they don't happen to live near their family, they're willing to pay for it. And so getting on the same page about your approach, your feelings about childcare, your feelings about how you want your careers to go, actually how you'll divide the work, and this is, it sounds so mundane and boring compared to the idea of bringing in a new life to the world, but frankly, like, who's gonna wash the bottles? And who's gonna prepare the food and pack the lunches is where it breaks down for a lot of couples. And so making sure that you have a plan, and you've discussed how it's all gonna shake out in terms of responsibility, can be very important.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  And that's, we have an exercise in the book where you go through and look at all of the different tasks required to

• 33:32Speaker 00

  Take care of a household and take care of a child and talk about are you, you know, who in a, in a, again, in a couple, you have three choices. You have, well, I guess you have four choices. You have, you know, person A can do it. You have person B could do it. You have, you could outsource it, or I guess you could just not do it and just, you know, have a messy house. And I mean, you can't not care for a child, but there are some tasks you can cross off. And so going through and, you know, my husband and I used to be guest speakers in my co-authorist class for over, for about a decade. And we would joke that we were making the drive, it's about 45 minutes from San Francisco to Palo Alto, we would check in with each other about how our division of labor was going at home, because we were about to get in front of a class and air our dirty laundry to the

• 34:16Speaker 00

  whole class. And, you know, better if something's not, you know, working for you, tell me now so that we don't complain about it in front of the class. And that was actually, we joked about it, but it was helpful because there were some things where we realized, oh, like, I'm really sick of doing this. And I really wish you could, you know, would you be willing to take this on? And, you know, one of those things with thank you notes, like, I wish I didn't care about thank you notes, but I do. And so I supervised my children writing thank you notes for a really long time. But at some point, I would rather like poke my eye out with the pen that they were using than, you know, help them write the thank you notes. And so thankfully, my husband agreed, okay, I will take over the thank you note job. And he's still doing that.

• 34:57Chris Williamson?

  How many thank you notes are they producing?

• 34:59Speaker 00

  I mean, you would be surprised if you have a class of 25 kids and, you know, you're getting a lot of birthday presents. It's more thank you notes than you want.

• 35:08Chris Williamson?

  Okay, I, I'm not going to argue with you. What is your advice for people who might be in relationships that are less communicatively transparent than yours is? It seems like you and your partner have a, a lot of openness with regards to this, perhaps unsurprising, given how we met.

• 35:30Chris Williamson?

  Broaching these sorts of subjects, especially consistently, can cause friction. You're always nagging me or bugging me about this thing. There's always a new problem here. There's always a new. What are some of your pieces of advice for people that are in relationships to bring up issues and challenges in a way which is engenders the sort of response that they're looking for, which is one that's collaborative?

• 35:57Speaker 00

  Well, a lot of that goes back to the setting. And so are you just springing this on your partner when they're watching their favorite TV show? Are you, you know, having a, we actually recommend, and this is a practice that we've been doing, I've been doing for a while, having a weekly check in. We call it TCOB, Taking Care of Business, where we just have it on the calendar. And I mean, it's not the most romantic thing, but you just, you know, have half an hour and we go through the calendar for that week. We say, you know, who's doing pickup and drop off? It's our opportunity to kind of bring up other things, like right now we're planning a trip

• 36:40Speaker 00

  and we were looking at Airbnb listings on, in that time. And so if there's something on the calendar, you don't have to constantly feel like you have to nag and bring up. It's just like, it's on the calendar. We do it on, you know, Friday afternoons and that's the time. So the very small step I would suggest for a couple who is like, how do I break out of this rut of one person constantly bugging the other person? Just say, hey, can we set a time every week to just check in on, you know, the mundane tasks that we have to take care of by nature of being in a household together, being in a relationship together. And you can set it whatever time you want. You can make it really fun.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  I know a couple that goes out for drinks on Friday and talks about it. Personally, when I go out for drinks, I do not want to talk about who's doing pickup and drop off. So our preference is to, you know, have a different approach, but you can tailor it to you and you can just try it. You could say, hey, I was listening to this podcast and this author was on talking about having a weekly meeting where you talk about all the boring stuff involved in running a household together. And once that meeting's on the calendar, it's more likely to happen. Nobody has to bring it up and have an agenda and just go through it and. You could even have a walking meeting. I mean, again, it's up to the person's, you know, everyone's preference, but certainly to have a neutral setting and a neutral way so

• 38:07Speaker 00

  that it's not just the same person bringing it up over and over again can go a long way.

• 38:12Chris Williamson?

  I like the idea of creating a bucket in which all of the things that need to be discussed can be discussed. I think that you're going through your day, you're in the car with your partner, you've just been talking about that recent movie that you watched, you both loved, or The Last of Us, or whatever, the song that just came on on the radio, or reflection about when you went to go and see your parents last year and it was a catastrophe or whatever. And then somebody brings up admin, right? One of these taking care of business decisions. And it seems to cross the boundary between the personal and the organizational in a little bit of a way. And I wonder whether bundling it all together, it's like, it's like, you not

• 38:57Chris Williamson?

  taking care of the thank you notes isn't a comment on your worth as an individual or my value in you as a partner. But it is something that we need to discuss. So maybe I don't bring it up just after we've been talking about stuff that's a little bit more touchy feely and makes me feel nice about the song on the radio or The Last of Us or whatever. So I think that's a very, very good solution, actually. One thing, you mentioned regrets earlier on and challenges. What is the most common life decision regret that you've witnessed in your research?

• 39:30Speaker 00

  Not doing things, not taking risks, not trying something that you have always wanted to. So people don't regret working too hard, or they don't regret, you know, I didn't spend enough time at the office. I mean, people regret not spending time with people they love and not taking risks, not going for the big move or not.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  Trying something even if they didn't know if this is going to succeed. And that's something that we've, we've all experienced over the last three years where our choices got really narrowed, right? There were places we couldn't visit. There were people we couldn't see. There were a lot of things that we couldn't do. And I think what we're seeing in this current time where many of those restrictions have been removed is people making those choices to visit the place that they always wanted to see or to move closer to the person who they couldn't see when they lived half a world away and no planes were taking off, right? So that is certainly a big part of what the research says is the regret of not doing the thing.

• 40:42Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that is? What do you think that says about us psychologically, adaptively as humans?

• 40:50Speaker 00

  I think as humans, we are daunted by the unknown.

• 40:58Speaker 00

  But we love possibility. We love the idea that we could publish a book, that we could spend time with a person who we really care about, but only if we take that leap, right? And so, yes, you might not know how things are going to go, but that's not a reason not to do something. And so, part of what our framework offers is the ability to, again, make sure you have done your homework, have stepped through all the steps to get out of the emotional way of making a decision that, again, might lead to regret. I'm not doing this because I'm scared.

• 41:42Speaker 00

  I'm not doing this because I don't know how it's going to work out. But pushing past that and tapping into the things that could give you more confidence, not about how it's going to work out, but that you approached it in a way that is valid, that is proven to be effective and likely to leave you feeling more confident and empowered.

• 42:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's, it's so interesting to consider that the things we regret are not the things that we did, but the things that we didn't do. And I don't know, it makes me think that we just over egg our...

• 42:23Chris Williamson?

  Risk aversion, conservative nature a little bit, but everyone's concern is, okay, so maybe I can kind of just like a sniper does, I'll just adjust my sights, I'll just tune down my risk aversion by 10 or 20%, and that'll get me about there. But then you go, yeah, but what if it's on a category of decision to which I shouldn't have done that? And then, so, yeah, I think if there is ever something reassuring that everybody could learn about the nature of decision making in life's big decisions, and about the concern that they have about regrets for the future, in the future of things that they haven't done in right now, it is precisely that. It's the fact that people end up regretting

• 43:07Chris Williamson?

  the stuff that they didn't do. And there's also some evidence that I'd seen that suggests people that make big life decisions generally, on average, end up to be happier, that it just by making a big change that they end up being in a happier place. I wonder whether that satisfies just a bit of novelty seeking perhaps that people have, you know, objectively, it could be a slightly worse town, but subjectively, the fact that it's somewhere new and there's all of these different people and stuff for you, and also your framing around the present moment largely determines your experience of it in any case. So if it is an adventure, you can pick yourself up by your bootstraps there. One other side of this, I suppose, the dark side of marriage is if it needs to finish, or the dark side of a relationship

• 43:51Chris Williamson?

  is if it needs to split up. What's the process for working out whether or not you should get divorced or break up with a partner?

• 44:01Speaker 00

  I recently heard the term "complete a relationship", which I thought was a nice term.

• 44:06Chris Williamson?

  No, that's no, that's, that makes it sound like that's what everybody is working towards.

• 44:11Speaker 00

  It's true. It's maybe not the aspiration, but it is a kinder way of speaking about it. Well, my co-author has been divorced, and she talks a lot about The importance of an amicable divorce. And certainly, if there are children involved, you can get to the point where you, you know, maybe are not seeing eye to eye with the person who you have decided to spend your life with anymore. And by the way, we are big believers in therapy. So, working with a trained professional, sometimes when you're just two people and it's, you know, one person against the other person, it's hard to break out of that dynamic. And so, bringing in someone else who can say,

• 44:54Speaker 00

  you know, yes, you can work through these issues, or no, I see these as really intractable problems that are going to be very challenging. That can be very helpful. That was something that my co-author did in her marriage, her first marriage. And, you know, the therapist thought, no, this isn't actually a marriage that I think is going to be able to be resuscitated. And so, they did part ways. But, they also did that very deliberately, wanting to not have their children, because they had to at the time, be put in a position of having to choose, you know, which parent they're going to take sides of. And so, they, they had an amicable divorce. And actually, when my co-author got remarried,

• 45:40Speaker 00

  her new husband said, you know, what do you think about inviting her ex-husband, who he also knew, to Thanksgiving? And she said, are you kidding? No, why would I want to do that? He said, well, you know, otherwise, your kids are going to have to have two Thanksgivings or not see one of their parents on Thanksgivings. And she said, ask me again in five years. And so, he was a patient person. He asked again. And in five years, she said, okay, let's give it a try. They all had Thanksgiving together. And it actually went so well that at the end of the meal, her ex-husband and who was now remarried, they toasted the, his ex-wife. And he said, thank you so much for inviting us to do this.

• 46:25Speaker 00

  This was so meaningful. And they continued doing it for decades. And so, it is possible to get to a point, even if you no longer want to spend your life with someone, to have shared experiences that are bigger and bigger than the two of you that allow their children, in that particular instance, to have both of their parents together on a meaningful day.

• 46:50Chris Williamson?

  What do you think would predict a less amicable divorce? If you were to design a way for the partners to communicate with each other, the sort of things they would say, the way that the divorce would be enacted, what would you do if you wanted to cause the worst divorce possible?

• 47:10Speaker 00

  Try to win.

• 47:14Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean?

• 47:15Speaker 00

  So try to exact the most money from the person, try to get everything on your terms, try to not agree to anything that they want, try to not compromise. So if you are trying to not have an amicable divorce, really seeing it as a one-time negotiation, right, where you are more likely to just try to get your way at all costs.

• 47:43Speaker 00

  If you've clarified what's important to you, and if that clarity has told you, what's important to me is having an amicable relationship with this person, so I'm not constantly pitting myself against them or making my children, if we have them, choose, then you might agree to some things that are not ideal. So an example, a story that I heard is

• 48:12Speaker 00

  a woman and her husband got divorced. They had a teenage son. And she knew that if she stayed in the house with her son, it would be unlikely that he would see his father that often. His father was just not a big planner. That was part of the challenge. And she said, you know, it's more important to me that my son has a strong relationship with his father than it is for me to stay and live in the house with them. So she was the one that moved out. She, you know, continued to visit. She spent time with him. But it ended up that her son had a much closer relationship with his father as a result of their living arrangements

• 48:55Speaker 00

  than he would have if she hadn't made that concession. And she feels, you know, she gave up five years of being able to live with her son, but it was for the greater good of his relationship with his dad.

• 49:07Chris Williamson?

  That's a very selfless act to do that. And I imagine that... As somebody approaches the end of a divorce, which is, you know, by by its nature, not exactly a paradise to get through, there will be resentments and unanswered questions and that thing that you did that I couldn't stand you doing anymore. So for somebody to be such a the bigger person or a more noble person at least and do that, I think is a pretty good sign. Maybe it's let a good one go with regards to that. When it comes to choosing where to live, whether this is you moving with a partner or not, I recently made the

• 49:52Chris Williamson?

  move from the UK to Austin, Texas. And that was something that had been on my mind for a long time. Do I want to be here in the northeast of the UK? It's this place that I was born in and I've always wanted to travel somewhere else. But it was a very difficult decision to make. I had to let go of a lot of things. I would have to sell this business that I'd spent a decade and a half building with my best friend who I was the groomsmen at his wedding and sat next to in my first ever seminar at university. And I'm going to lose my sense of identity. I was this big name on campus club promoter guy in Newcastle and it was a relatively small city. And I'm going to go to this brand new country where I don't know anybody, basically, and see if I can do this talking

• 50:32Chris Williamson?

  to people on the internet thing and make a career out of that. What should I have done that would have made the decision about whether or not I should move more simple and easy for me?

• 50:46Speaker 00

  Well, congratulations, because you will not have the regret of never making that move and seeing how it would be if you had moved to Austin. One of the things I hope you did before you moved was visit and get a chance.

• 50:59Chris Williamson?

  I did, I did, I did that, I did that.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. And sometimes even, you know, renting a place for a month, right? And

• 51:05Chris Williamson?

  I did exactly that. Airbnb did.

• 51:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so you get a sense of, okay, if I'm not just swooping in on a weekend and having all this fun, but actually approximating the life I would have if I lived here, like, I'm gonna have to do laundry, I'm gonna have to go to the grocery store, I'm going to have to, you know, experience the like, not fun parts of living someplace.

• 51:25Chris Williamson?

  So you're offsetting the holiday effect?

• 51:27Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. So try to, I mean, this is in design thinking, it's called prototyping, right? So you're trying to prototype what your life would be if you lived in Austin. So you are Spending more time there than just a weekend. You can talk to people who made similar moves to either that specific city. I mean, it's obviously most helpful, but there's a lot of people who've been moving to Austin recently. And so getting a chance to talk to them about what they like, what they don't like, what they wish they had known before they joined. That community can be very helpful. And, you know, so these are parts of our framework, right?

• 52:06Speaker 00

  So the, this is the check in part, talking to people, trying to approximate it. And then, you know, playing out the consequences. So you know that the first part of living somewhere, there will be a lot of novelty. You'll be disoriented, but it'll be fun and new. But, you know, what are the places that, what are the things that in the medium term might be hard? What might be easy? What might go wrong? What might go really right? So play now as many of those scenarios as possible so that you start to get a sense of, of, of do the kind of positives, the potential things that could go right outweigh the things that might be hard or uncomfortable in the, in those different time horizons.

• 52:51Chris Williamson?

  I did some of those. I did, I stumbled upon a number of those. So I feel vindicated that I didn't make the decision like a total idiot. But yeah, I think the, um, that is definitely a very, very smart idea. If you are looking to move somewhere to try and just test what's life going to be like? Why can't I go and get my haircut? How about the traffic? What's the weather like in the middle of, I mean, I couldn't test what the weather was like in the middle of summer. And there was 60 days where it didn't drop below a hundred last year, but that's a, I'll take that. That's a price that I'm prepared to pay. One other thing that you spoke about that I've never really heard anybody talk about is elder care. As you get toward the end of life, what's, what are the insights around that?

• 53:38Speaker 00

  Well, it's one of the, so Myra's class, my co-author's class, had a class on it. And there was a speaker who came in and talked about different types of elder care, what are different options? And I took notes, but I tuned it out, right? It just seemed like something I wouldn't have to think about for decades. And then, as it turns out, as life would have it, my mother had a very bad accident. She fell and hit her head and had brain swelling and trauma. And I had to think about these things much earlier than I had anticipated. And so, I actually got out the notes from the course, and a lot of it is the research that we talk about in our chapter on elder care, thinking about how to have these conversations with our parents or other elder relatives that we might be having them with.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  The key, a key is to tread lightly. It is, these are very tricky conversations. They are uncomfortable for you and likely for that other person. And so, doing it with respect, with grace, trying to understand what's important to the other person, as well as what's important to you. And certainly checking in with other people. One of the things that I did when, when my parents, they actually ended up moving out across the country to where I lived in California, when my mom needed more care. And then, they lived in a condo and they had home health aides. But then they needed, then my mom needed more care than those aides were able to provide.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  And so, I asked my father if he had thought about life plan communities, which are communities that have an element of independent living, an element of skilled, an element of assisted living, and then an element of skilled nursing. And so, at that point, my mom needed the skilled nursing. My dad would have been in independent living. And he said, you know, I haven't looked at any of those. I don't think we could afford it. And I said, well, I think, you know, let's just tour a couple of them. We'll ask some questions, we'll do some math. And it turned out that they, they found one that accepted my mother's insurance. And, and so, having

• 55:42Speaker 00

  Me as someone else who was part of the conversation, but not in the decision myself, was very helpful to my father at that time. And he, it turns out, there have been a number of my friends' parents who have moved into the same community where he lives today because he's had such a positive experience there. And so I have ended up being a bit of a guide for a lot of friends who faced this crossroads later than I did. And, and understanding people's experiences can be so helpful when you're facing those same, same choices.

• 56:17Chris Williamson?

  What are the main kinds of aldeca?

• 56:21Speaker 00

  Well, so if you have, say, your loved one wants to remain in their home as long as possible, you can hire people to come into that home. They're called home health aides, or there are other, other folks who can, are trained in how to care for elders. But sometimes, I mean, that's very expensive. And so, and there's a shortage of care workers, as there is across the board in so many of these industries. And so there are also these communities where you can go and have rooms. They're almost like dorms for older adults and lots of activities

• 57:03Speaker 00

  and other, other elements of a vibrant community. But they're also expensive. I mean, and, and so having, one of the things we talk about in the book is long-term care insurance, because very few states offer that. Washington State is one of the few states that has passed laws that actually you're paying into long-term care insurance by virtue of living in that state. But in other places, it is largely up to the individual. There is

• 57:35Speaker 00

  Health insurance available for older people through Medicare and Medicaid, but it is very, does not cover a lot of that long term care.

• 57:44Chris Williamson?

  And yeah, it's a very interesting. I have a friend whose dad was very ill, but very rich. And they had this really difficult situation with inheritance, because in the UK, the way that it works, if you gift your children, I think it's three hundred and fifty thousand pounds is the upper bound limit. Anything over that, you get taxed at some ungodly percentage if you pass away within the space of seven years. And this father had spent his entire career building up a very large portfolio of businesses. And he was a super driven guy and still had a lot of self pride and stuff like that. And it was because, I mean, the way that he got ill was kind of out of nowhere.

• 58:29Chris Williamson?

  So how are you supposed to predict that sort of stuff? But I was about to say, there's no such thing as too early of a time to have this discussion. But if your parents are still pretty independent, you go, hey, mum and dad, how do you feel about me chatting about you becoming older and maybe needing help from professional help from people? Me thinking about me, would I, is that the sort of, oh, is that what my children think of me? My children think that I can't take care of myself or that I'm going to, I'm going to kick the bucket soon. That also doesn't feel like an easy conversation to have. There's difficult conversations everywhere.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  There are, it is a very difficult conversation, but I would argue that it is easier when you don't need to make those decisions imminently. And so if you're saying, I mean, I always say blame it on the book, right? Just say, I read this new book. It's called Money and Love. There's a chapter on elder care and it talks about having these conversations earlier than you want to, which is, by the way, never. We never want to think about our loved ones becoming, you know, unable to take care of themselves. And the truth is that at some point, everyone's loved ones will either die or become unable to take care of themselves. And so this is one of those places where just eyes wide open, having those conversations and just saying, hey, what do you want?

• 59:50Speaker 00

  Do you want us to, you know, to have something called an advanced directive, right? Which tells doctors, how much do you want to be resuscitated? You know, do you want to be?

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  Help breathing. Do you want help having your heartbeat, right? And so those are documents that that actually are medically necessary when you get to the point of being in the hospital. And again, we are all going to get to that point if we're lucky to live long enough. And so this is, you know, in the book, we talk about an advanced directive for driving, right? Having a document that says, when do you want to turn turn in your license, right? Probably before you're forced to do that by the government. I mean, Myra talks about my co author talks about her mother actually getting her license taken away because she was driving so erratically and was stopped by the police. And we don't,

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  you know, want that to happen. So what are the signs, right, that that might get you to that point? And it's much easier to have that conversation in the abstract than when it actually is necessary.

• 1:00:58Chris Williamson?

  Okay, I mean, let's bring this one home. Where should people go if they want to check out more of the stuff that you do in the book?

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  So we have a website, moneylovebook.com, that has all sorts of places you could buy the book. We also have a quiz to tell you what your money and love decision making style is. So we talked about, you know, the analyzers. There are also two other styles. And knowing your type, your tendency can help you put in place some guardrails to overcome that tendency. So that is a fun thing that we offer on the website as well.

• 1:01:32Chris Williamson?

  All right, Abby. Thank you.

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  Thank you so much.