Afford Anything - How to Stop Fighting About Money

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

#654: Fights about money are common, but they're rarely about math. They're about power, shame, vulnerability, and trust. And no amount of data or fancy spreadsheets is going to fix it. What you need is a better system for fairness, more open communication, and a shared ambition. In this candid conversation with Heather and Doug Bonaparte, we explore how two partners rebuilt confidence, handled their six-figure student loans, and designed a rhythm for money talks that actually works. Together they share how early money stories, law school debt, and the Great Recession shaped their dynamic, plus the tools they used to find fairness at home and in their finances Key Takeaways Why 50/50 isn't always fair and how to do it better The small ritual that turned dreaded money talks into something they actually look forward to How borrowing a strategy from the office made household decisions way less stressful The surprising fix for resentment that had nothing to do with chores or budgeting Why tackling six-figure student loans together became a turning point in their relationship The mindset shift that helped them see debt not as a burden but as a shared opportunity Resources and Links Money Together, the book DoMoneyTogether.com, learn more about the book and project The Joint Account, weekly newsletter on joint finances at ReadTheJointAccount.com Fair Play by Eve Rodsky, a framework for dividing household responsibilities Share this episode with a friend, colleagues, and anyone who is part of a couple: https://affordanything.com/episode654 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode is about the invisible financial dynamics that can make or break relationships. It's the stuff that nobody teaches you before you merge bank accounts together as a couple. If you've ever found yourself fighting about money at the worst possible moment, or if you feel like you're drowning in financial shame while the other partner is frustratingly confident, or if there's resentment because one person carries the entire mental load around finances, Well, today's conversation tackles these exact challenges. You'll learn how to have productive money conversations. You'll learn what to do when shame around past financial decisions starts destroying your confidence.

You'll learn why some partners withdraw from financial decisions entirely and how to rebuild that partnership. And you'll learn about why healing your relationship with money isn't linear. My guests today, Doug and Heather Bonaparte, have been through. it all. Six figures of student loan debt, parenting during COVID. They join me to talk about what they've learned about managing money as a couple. Doug is the founder of bona fide wealth, a wealth management firm. He's been recognized as one of the nation's most influential financial advisors. He's served on advisory councils for Investopedia and CNBC. He's been featured in the

Wall Street Journal, Barron's The New York Times. He's a CFP board ambassador for New York, and he holds an MBA from NYU's Stern School of Business. Heather is a lawyer with more than a decade of experience in the insurance industry. She is now the director of business and legal affairs at Bonafide Wealth, and she's written for CNBC, The Skim, Business Insider, which is now called Insider, and more. She holds a JD from the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in Manhattan. They have co-authored a book called Money Together, all about managing finances as a couple. Here they are, Doug and Heather Bonaparte.

Welcome. Hey there. Thanks so much for having us. Thanks for being on. The two of you met as freshmen in college. How did you meet? Is this like freshman orientation? I'll start by saying I took one look at that hair.

And I said, which wasn't quite like that. Do you remember the show Jersey Shore? Yeah, yeah. He was more like Paul E. He had a blowout. But he was from Boca Raton, so I called it the Boca Blowout. And I took one look. I was like, who's that tall, handsome man with a very tall hair?

I have to know him. But I'm not even kidding. Like, he did have very tall hair. He had a big smile. We had a couple mutual friends. My close friend, who was also from the Philadelphia area, there were very few of us down in college in Florida. They were pledged brothers.

He was my good friend. I was kind of being put in the friend zone by the friend. Oh, yeah. And eventually, Doug and I found each other, found our way back to each other. Yeah, I mean, I was becoming very close with this guy, Dan, who's still a wonderful friend to this day, was my college roommate. And I was kind of like, dude, you know, we're off the pot here because I was catching feelings for this girl who was unlike anything I had experienced in South Florida. It was a Philly girl and, you know,

we had Birkenstocks and curly hair and all. It wasn't your typical SEC. Yeah. It was very, it was very different. It was like a tie-dye t-shirt. and cut off shorts and Birkenstocks. I was like, wait, I was supposed to dress up for this. Yeah. Yeah, you could tell she was different. And I was just like, hey, you want to come to, you want to come get some sushi with some of my fraternity brothers? As horrible as that sounds.

What could be a better first date than Douglas, myself, and 10 of his fraternity brothers? Yeah, yeah, it was good. And the rest is history. And we just kept seeing each other. And that was all of college. Did you have observations about how one another spent money during your college? college days. Oh, yes. Definitely. Oh, yes. So I'm an only child and grandchild on both sides of my family. My parents got divorced right as I entered my teenage years. And I really embodied a lot of the

scarcity mindset that my mom kind of imparted on me during those years. There was a lot of we don't have, you know, a lot of money stress in our house. It doesn't really matter what was. What matters is how you felt about it in those earliest years and your earliest money memories. When I went to college, it was kind of this blank slate. It was the first time in my life that I was truly on my own. And I was really trying to navigate a lot of mixed messaging that I was given. Both I had the scarcity mindset on one side. I had my father on the other side, who was already remarried by then and living a different life. He came from wealth and there was family money on his side. The way that money kind of commingled with this idea of like when you give

money, you're giving love. When you withhold money, you're withholding love. The more that I wasn't having my needs met from an attention and an emotional support standpoint from my father, money was very much tied into that. And Doug really had a front row seat to that. I remember doing things that were silly in college. Like, anytime my debit account got low, I remember feeling like there was like a lack of attention. I can't explain it because, I mean, I saw that.

I saw that a bunch of times. I was really on top of it. So what would happen would be like I wouldn't speak to my dad for six, seven, eight weeks at a time, which is kind of strange. I would say, well, I'm going to go out and I'm going to overdraft my debit account and see if that gets his attention to see if he'll call me then. Obviously, that's like not a healthy relationship with money and it tied into a lot of the lessons that you learned around money early on.

It shaped a lot of what we. We've spent a lot of time working through together to ultimately find ourselves in a good spot. I got to see a lot of that. I can recall some stories of my own around that. And we were very opposite, I think, in this regard. I mean, I was taught that money helped you build. I mean, I came from a family of serial entrepreneurs.

My father worked with his father. They built a business together. I watched my own father build a financial advisory practice. My brother and I were encouraged to build businesses of our business. own and we fixed computers on the weekend back when, you know, the personal computer revolution. We were privileged to always have computers in the household. You always had the tools to not only make money, but Doug had the tools to really understand how money was a vehicle that helped him to get whatever it was he wanted.

That created a lot of confidence, though. I never worried about having money on the weekends because I can make $100 in two to three hours of helping a lovely senior citizen in South Florida get on AOL. And 90, 100 bucks on a weekend in, you know, the early 2000s, that's more money than you probably need. That's trouble right there. I always worked multiple jobs, too, like both from high school, into college and after college. But the fear and the emotional entanglement and enmeshment between money and love and support in my life was just so messed up that I couldn't even see. that I had all the tools at my disposal to be in control because I just was still looking for

something. It was never about the money. I was looking for something else and money was just totally enmeshed in that conflicts, all those conflicts in my family. So what I'm hearing from you then are these themes of insecurity and scarcity as it relates to your early money story. And then dug from you confidence in a relationship in particular, that could create an imbalanced power dynamic. Of course. You know, when you've got one partner who's highly confident with money and another who's feeling very insecure with money, it could create this dynamic in which you seed your power

to the more confident partner. Of course. Yeah, we see that a lot. And this is exactly one of the points that we try and make about being wary about the way you speak to yourself about your financial challenges from the past, your financial missteps, or even just things that didn't go the way you wanted them to. It's incredibly important to understand the way that you perceive those mistakes and that you don't embody them to have it take a hit on your confidence so that you don't believe you deserve to have a say in your

household finances moving forward. And to that point as well, you have to be very cautious and mindful of the way your partner speaks about your financial mistakes, your financial missteps. the things that they wish could have gone differently. Because, yes, all of these things 100% play into the power dynamics in your relationship. We saw it firsthand. It's why we highlight just how important the beginnings of your life and experience with money are. Heather got to that point based on her journey and her life by her parents going through what they went through. I got to where I got to because of what my parents taught me.

And this could be shaped by your experiences that have trauma or don't. It could be shaped by your culture, your religion. It could be shaped by so many things. And you live a lot of life before you meet your partner. I've had the privilege of knowing Heather for more than 20 years. We've been married a long time. We've known each other longer. I've heard the stories, and I, as Heather said, bore witness to them.

We're probably more of an exception than the rule here, which is most people live a ton of life before you meet that person that you're going to spend the rest of your life with. How much do you know about that? How much do you really understand what it felt like? You might know a story or two. You might know your partner had food insecurity or grew up with an immense amount of privilege. We found out through our interviews what that actually meant to people. And that's why in partnerships, it's important not to have a race to the bottom of who had it worse or who had it best. Everyone's entitled to feel the way that they felt about their particular experience with money.

And until you start to gain the perspective of how your partner felt, you're going to have a very difficult time coming together to rectify those imbalances that might exist. There are definitely going to be imbalances. But how are you going to go about finding fairness between the two of you and what you've experienced? When it comes to something as fundamental as your confidence with money in the pursuit of achieving that fairness, there's, of course, the, As you just spoke about, the importance of making sure that you understand one another, you have that empathy, that you're not shaming one another for each other's mistakes. In addition to the emotional understanding, there's also confidence in just the tactical doing. And particularly when you're young and you're learning all of this stuff for the first time, you're still figuring out the tactical doing. How do you balance all of that?

Like, as you guys were embarking on your financial journeys together as young adults, how did you approach those conversations about how much money you're going to put into a retirement account versus a down payment savings versus fixing the headlights on that car that you had that. Thomas. Yeah. Thomas. Yeah. That old car. Yeah, exactly. You know, we were really thrown into the thick of things.

I think that our experience together was such an extremely. extreme examples. So what happened was, you know, we're elder millennials. When I chose to move to New York City for law school, I took out six figures of student loan debt. Multiple. I looked at the employment statistics for, I thought I was making an incredibly sound decision. I said, this is an investment in my future. 200,000 of student loan debt. I sat with the financial aid officer at the school, said, can I afford this? How does this make sense? Like, sit with me, show me, because I didn't really have the family infrastructure at the time to really have. help guide those financial decisions for me. I sat with the financial aid officer and they said,

well, here is a chart of the employment statistics for graduates from our school. And this is the salary ban and the average salary and you should be able to pay back these loans in X, Y, Z year. It made sense at the time. That was 2007. So I was in law school during the years when Lehman collapsed. I was there. I watched my on-campus interviews go from, you know, 30 down to two. Right. Literally, they disintegrated in my fingers. We definitely were in a bit of survival mode. And by the way, survival mode in our own relationship, too. Doug, we did not know whether we were going to survive that time. There's a lot of doubt as to whether or not this would all work out. There was a lot of doubt. There was a lot of lack of trust between the two of us

during that time because I was so, I had found myself in such an extreme situation. You became lost pretty quickly. I did. And I was truly drinking from the hose of my own life, figuring out, did I just make the biggest mistake that's going to follow me for the rest of my life? And how much am I going to punish myself for this? And that thinking and destructive behavior went on for several years, financially, emotionally, everything. So that was the biggest challenge in navigating our financial lives together and don't mean to cut you off. But it wasn't like, how do we share a bank account?

That's right, right. It wasn't, well, who's going to pay for what? it's how are we going to build a life together when we have student loan debt to contend with? More important than that was, how are we going to get Heather's mindset of one where she's feeling helpless, feeling lost, and feeling like she made a mistake and the shame that came with it? Because at no point in time, despite that loan balance, did I think there wasn't a solution or a path we could go down that would get us to where we needed to be. That was the entrepreneur and me. I mean, I went up to New York on a whim, walked away from the family business.

He went up there with a duffel bag in a dream. No joke. I went up with like, I had to sell my car, borrow some money from my mom because it was a lease I had a buyout. I shipped up four boxes and went to Sleepies on Fifth to get a very cheap mattress and room with some guy we met on Craigslist. Shout out me, Tesh. And my experience was like that, you know, and honestly, it was beyond exciting, but it still had to contend with watching the entire financial world melt down before. for my eyes. So we didn't reach that moment of that what we want for us as a couple, what do we want out of this partnership in our lives. We just didn't want the boat to sink into the water. Yeah. For most of our early adult years here, we just said, what can we do to stay here?

Let alone what do we actually want? We weren't in a position to even talk about what we wanted for a while. So I just don't want that. Yeah, we weren't very, we couldn't really afford to be choosy here. We simply had to find a way through it. With something like that, coming out of law school into a job market that sucks because it's the great recession while you've got all of that student loan debt, what strikes me about your story is that mentally it would have been very different if your story was, oh, ever since I was a little girl, I felt a calling from above to be an attorney. That's right. Then this was my dream. And even though it doesn't make sense, this is clearly what I was put on this earth to do. That's right. And sure, if that's the feeling that you have when you're going through law school, then this is a blip in what is a much bigger, more purposeful calling. That's right. But that's not your story. That is not my story. My dream in life was to be a journalist and to be a writer. And I went to undergrad to be a journalist. And I ended up in.

in law school for a lot of the reasons we were just talking about, which was I was desperate for a financial independence from that feeling, not just from my parents, but from that feeling, the scarcity feeling. I never wanted to need anyone ever again because I carried so much shame from being caught between my parents in those teenage years and being caught between feeling like I was compelled to ask my father for things, not knowing what the answer was going to be, not knowing whether I receive an answer because the question I was asking wasn't, can you take me for a pair of jeans because I need a pair of jeans? The question was like, do you love me how much?

When I think about why I became a lawyer, like, it was one of those things that kind of made sense in the narrative of elder millennial lore of like, how can we self-optimized and continue this climb, right? How can we just continue to invest in ourselves? That was very much the narrative. It wasn't just for me. That was what the school's higher education was selling at that time and nobody was questioning it at that time. It was a responsible thing to do.

Well, you can always use a law degree. You can always use a law degree. Right. It's practical. It's useful. It's practical. It's useful. It's responsible.

Well, that's what I thought. And, I mean, I wasn't mature enough then to be able to pull you aside and have the conversations we would probably have today. I thought she was making a good decision too. I remember telling you after college, you know, go to whatever school you think is going to be best for you. And it wasn't just that. It wasn't just go become a lawyer and go to law school. It was go to the best school that you get into. And I wish that that narrative broke even more. But it still feels like when I speak with teens and families today, that there's still some of that out there. And that's not really

how you calculate the ROI. Yeah. Well, they're buying insurance policy is not investments. the insurance policy that it will work out and that your child or you yourself making that decision will be able to hedge against the risks of it not working out and not being successful. And that's a whole other conversation around the dynamics between parents and their kids and higher education. Yeah. Yeah. You see that especially, I think, with immigrant families.

You want the certainty that you're, especially when you lack a social support network in this country, you want the certainty, you want as much certainty for your children as possible. Oh, it gets even, and it gets, and Ivey League category brings you that. Ooh, and it gets so much even more twisted when you realize that a lot of these decisions are made so that it's the parents that want to be the ones that look good like they've achieved. Look what, look at the child that I produced in this world. Forget that they have no interest in the thing that I've pushed them into or don't even

mesh well at this wonderful, you know, institution that they're now attending. Forget all that for a moment. Look what I was able to do. And that's a big part of it as well. We could spend all day on higher education, why kids turn out the way that they do. Tell me then about what happened your story in 2008, 2009, 2010. How did you come out of this dilemma, both professionally but also in your relationship and in the way that the two of you related to one another as you were beginning your post-collegiate phase of life?

I think we, after figuring out what we would be doing, I always knew. I would be working in personal finance. And I knew what my goal was to become a financial advisor with his own practice. But getting to that end result would be something we had to figure out. But Heather was very supportive and knew that that is something that I wanted to do and had the training to do that and the experience from the time I did work in my family business and working with my father. And Heather already pot committed to the legal profession. We had figured out pretty quickly that I didn't like it. I didn't like my time in private practice.

Hold on. but you were able to find, despite the economic circumstances, while your expectations were dead. Yeah, she really did. I got a job. I got several job offers at school. Hundreds and hundreds of applications I saw her put out in the world. There's no one who works harder than Heather. And she was able to secure a job in the legal profession.

Was it the one that was offered or suggested that you would get in the financial aid office? Nowhere close to it, you know. Right. But we found ourselves working in our respective fields and crafts. and ultimately taking those initial steps to figure out how we would dig ourselves out of student loan debt. I, by the way, threw another $100,000 of student loan debt on top of that by going to business school as kind of this contra example of how the investment in yourself and school could go right, you know, and finding a pathway to get that return on the investment. And again, we supported each other in these endeavors. I think there were two major turning points for us in our relationship with money and said that really set us up for our adult lives and for things to start going the way we wanted them to.

One, when I decided after a couple years of being underpaid and overwork in private practice, I found myself working in a more of a corporate setting. And I went to a large fortune at the time. They were a fortune 50 company to go do in-house work there. The hours were a lot more manageable. Yes, I took a slight pay cut from where I ended up at that time. But pound for pound, given the amount of, you know, the amount of hours I got back in my life and the way that I felt and having an HR department and working in a place that felt like a supportive environment with colleagues and just a really positive environment. When you're straight up told, don't make weekend plans because remember your BlackBerry? Your BlackBerry is going to blow up and you need to jump into action.

That is not, that's not very sustainable. But, you know, that was a joint decision to say you're going to take a slight pay cut, right? now so that you can gain some stability in your life because that stability is more important to us than that extra 10, 15, 20,000 dollars, which feels like a lot of money. It is a lot of money, especially when you're in your twice. And you have those kind of liabilities. But when I tell you, every day was truly like another horror show. And for Doug to watch me start my career like that, like I was on a one way path to complete burnout and to leaving the profession as a whole, as a lot of people are, a lot of young attorneys feel this way. So to take a step back and kind of look for a legal adjacent role in that moment was very important for us in our relationship and for me professionally. And at the same time, it allowed Doug to take some risks in his career. I mean, he's an entrepreneur. He was trying to build a book of business. He was trying to grow and get clients and put himself out there in the world and build platforms online. Me having stability, even at a lower salary band, was more valuable.

to us as a couple. 100%. Yeah, she gave us the foundation to build. You know, for the builder, hey, you know, like, what do I need here? I need concrete on the ground. And Heather did that. I want to mention, too, that there was a moment and a lot of trust played into us healing our relationship with each other and kind of growing up together.

And for me, I needed to trust that I could rely on somebody. That was something that I had a really hard time with. Even all these years that I knew Doug, I didn't believe. that I was worthy of having someone to support me and love me like that. So in this moment... Oh, no problem, babe. No, but I want to talk about the student loan debt. Absolutely. I know. That's number two here.

We had an opportunity to refinance our student loan debt with the private bank. They took Dougs because he went to Stern. He went to NYU and they're like, this man, this man is a high potential man. And then they looked at me and they said... I sat down with a banker and a top hat and a mustache. Monocle. Welcome to the bank, saying... I'll give it a big eye.

but like that's what they did. They're like, well, look at him, high potential, right? And then they were like, well, all right, we'll take yours too, but he's got a cosign. They had offered, and they still wanted a co-sign. And we punted a year on this simply because we wanted the flexibility of the income-based repayment plan. Like, we were still establishing ourselves. We thought that we're still going to be, like, real opportunities to actually have loans forgiven.

I don't even know if it was forgiveness as much as it was, those repayment plans were extremely flexible and I knew how to game them in such a way that we could give ourselves the flexibility we needed because I wasn't 100% confident with what the future looked like for the business. It was still the early aughts of building. But then, you know, we got to a point where it's like, what are we doing? Like, we have to address this now. I think they came back and they're like, hey, you want to handle this? And they said, you know, we need your signature here too, Doug. And I was like, absolutely. This is such an opportunity that we cannot afford to pass up. I wasn't thinking about what Heather is about to tell you in terms of what it did. I was just like, this makes absolute

financial sense. Yeah, we were married. I am in it to win it with this one right here. Why on earth would I not? What was mine was already yours? That was my thinking, but Heather will tell you what it really did. Spoken like someone whose parents were still married. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? And I think for me, this was truly the largest demonstration of loyalty and love and care. support and belief in me as a person, as a partner, that anyone, more than us getting engaged, this was the biggest gesture he's ever made towards me because of what those loans represented to me. It's, yes, because of what they represented to me, because the loans to me, they were not just

a deficit in my life. I was the deficit. And so him, his willingness to do that was just the ultimate gesture. Yeah, it was a game changer, I think, for, you know, what we're getting to here in the conversation, which is, you know, how did we go from having? So she went from giving me this foundation. I guess in turn, I was able to remove shame and let her feel or allow her to feel like everything she was doing mattered in terms of her contribution to what we were building together. And that was a huge breakthrough. It also gave me the space to rebuild a mindset that's,

said you are in control of your life. You are in control of your career. And you certainly deserve to have a say in our financial decisions in this family. And it's wild how easy it is to lose that when you're buried in your own shame. Remember how I said we didn't really have a lot of optionality when we first embarked on our old journey together? I ended up getting more optionality as the business grew. And up until that moment, I don't know if you necessarily felt like you had many options as well until, you know, that moment there. And that's when things got a lot more fun and exciting as our family grew. And we did some things that fill us with joy and happiness. But, you know, that doesn't go on forever. And we'll talk about how, you know,

these cycles of growth ultimately lead you to making other decisions you need to consider before you can get into the next phase of growth. I really have a lot of sympathy for couples. and young adults in their 20s and feeling like every decision is a linear one that leads you further down a path and that there's no way off the path. And that's not really how life feels. Like when you look back, like, I just turned 40 two months ago. Happy birthday. Thanks. Welcome to the club. No, but, man, if I could look back and just tell her that this path you're on is not forever, that you do have choices. There are detours from the path. There are forks in the road. And there's

seasons in your life. It's not just, I got myself into this legal career. Like, you made your bed, lie down in it for the rest of your life, which is truly, I think, how a lot of people feel. And I just, if I could tell anyone anything, it's that. It's that we live our life in seasons. And there will be another one. Right. And what you do in your 20s is not indicative of anything. that my I hated my mid-20s. I did not like 24, 5, or 6. I felt like it was puberty all over again, except your body's not changing.

Like, you're not really respected by people older than you. Like, the adults really don't think you're an adult, and you're definitely not a kid or a child anymore. So you're really just kind of lost in this awkward moment in time. That's the way that I felt about it. So for all the mid-20-somethings out there, who feel that way. Right.

It seems to be normal. You're like old enough to be an adult. Yeah. But you're not yet old enough to be taken seriously by adults. Yeah. Yeah. Not a girl. Not yet a woman.

Sorry, I had to say that. I don't know if you'll edit that, but. 100%. I think you lack context for the grand scheme of your life and for the things that are actually important. And it's no fault of your own because these institutions like higher education are optimizing you to build and grind and grow and to continue to better yourself. And like, no one's telling you that you are bettering yourself by being a part of a community, by being a

good friend, by being a good partner and being a good daughter and a good sister. No one's telling you that. They're telling you that your value is connected to what you produce. That's what you are taught up to that point. So you lack context. You're also at a point where the very institution we plug ourselves into, whether it be corporate institutions or educational institutions, the time in which those frameworks were built are further and further, if not more than ever, disconnected from the realities of today. Right. From the motivations of the demographics that are stepping into power, that are stepping into money, right?

That's Gen X and millennials. We still see this lingering effect of stuff that was made at the turn of a century. And by the way, not the 99 into 2000. and 1899 into 1900, you know. These are very out of touch and often unrelatable things that are trying to connect to generations that simply don't operate that way. And we see those effects, I think, playing out in real time. And we see it particularly in the conversation around money, the gendered tropes that exist around money, who does what in the household, who's meant to believe that they're, earning power is their self-worth and their contribution to families and the family unit.

These are systemic things that we luckily are breaking away from, but the difficulty factor is super high, especially when those in power are unwilling to relent it or pass the baton onto those who are ready, willing, and able to do it. And that's a very much commentary of moment in time. And we try and tie that into money, right, and our relationship with it. all of these powers and structures play a role in how we think about money and arguably make it more challenging. And even to put a modern twist on this, the information that we consume, sure, like we're watching 1950s films where like, you know, again, it's very much gendered, but we also

see it in social media and what we consume and the pressures that come with how to compete against not only your friends, your neighbors, and sometimes even your loved ones, like, that's not correct, right? That's not going to help us create fairness in our relationship. That's not going to help us be the team and do the teamwork that's required to get to the goals that we share together to honor the values that don't necessarily come from our parents, but the values that we created ourselves. That's the opportunity is for us to say, hey, here's what served me very well in my pathway into our relationship. And here's what's not.

Let's drop the things that don't. Let's bring the ones from your life and my life that do and create, when you say create a life together, that's what you're doing is finding the blend of values that drive your relationship and life forward so that you can find happiness and fulfillment and fairness. And somehow money is at the core of all of this. And we really enjoyed exploring that. Fifth Third Bank's commercial payments are fast and efficient, but they're not just fast and efficient. They're also powered by the latest in payments technology, built to evolve with your business.

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When I hear you talk about that area of your life, your mid to late 20s, that not a girl, not yet a woman, phase, what I hear from you is a lot of mutual teamwork. I hear a lot of mutual support. Heather, you built the space while he was building out that book of business, right? So you provided that support, the stability so that Doug could be an entrepreneur and take some risks. Doug, you had the confidence to say, hey, I feel confident about money and I feel confident that we're going to be okay. And I want you to know that we're in it together and I'm going to co-sign for this loan. I hear a lot of back and forth mutual support. And yet I also know that there are many other couples out there where, that feeling of mutuality is not necessarily always there. And there are probably couples who are listening to this who feel as though they are in a situation that is asymmetric. They feel as though they have a partner who's maybe withholding certain information from them. I mean, it could be as nefarious as lying or it could be as oblivious as they just don't think to include them in certain information.

Or they just don't know how to talk about it because money was never talked about in their household growing up. And they just don't know how to have the conversation. Or share their feelings around something. You know, tuck it under the rug. Well, it's very common, especially when we're talking about ambition, right? Let's say we're talking about ambition. We believe that couples should have somewhat of a collective ambition. My win is your win.

Your win is my win. This is the opposite of a big. counting, keeping a scorecard type of thing where we say, well, you got to do X, Y, Z. Now I'm going to, like, from a retaliatory standpoint, do X, Y, Z because that keeps us even. Fair is not always even. And again, this goes back to this idea of seasons in your life. There may be a season where more of our family needs, attention, funds, and support needed to go to Doug to build that.

Because that's what it required. Like, that was the season that he was in. But you also have to recognize that there's two sides to this coin, right? Because an investment, whether we're talking about a financial investment or a time investment, an investment in one thing is inherently a sacrifice in something else. And in the context of a relationship, that means that to invest in Doug's career, to invest in this firm, there were opportunities that maybe I did not go for. There were things that I had to do to support him that required a sacrifice of my time and energy in service of what our goal was for him. Now, this is a wonderful,

wonderful thing so long as you're one, recognizing it, acknowledging it, and talking about it, there does come a point where that's all well and good for a season, but you deserve a season as well. Season's change. It did for us. Ultimately, after building this foundation and getting our financial house in order and prospering by watching the business that was being built flourish, we got to a point, particularly through the pandemic where the scale tilted so far the other way. We put ourselves in a position where I was out earning Heather three or four to one while she was arguably working three jobs. She was being a lawyer full time. She has always been my co-pilot and co-founder for the most part for this business that we built. Moonlighting us Doug's business consult at night as well. No major decisions were being made by simply me. It'd always be a conversation between the two of us. And that takes emotion and that takes energy to help guide me.

And I was holding the majority of the cards for our family. Yeah, without a doubt during that time as we were marooned in our cruise ship to nowhere during those very strange years of COVID, that Heather was an overdrive on all the things that were needed to do to occupy and capture the attention of our kids. I definitely could have done better here, but I was just thrilled. I was on the come-up on all the areas in which I had been building, and it takes a lot to, one, recognize that there are feelings like resentment coming into play here. Heather found out she was plateauing and really not liking that. And again, just what was fair seemed really unfair at the time. And ultimately, you know, as someone who loves you dearly, she sat me down and said,

this isn't working. And the last thing in the world I want to hear is that the person I love most in this world is unhappy. And the word resentment, by the way, should be taken very seriously. Because if you want to find a... That's when people ask what was the turning point and you say something like it was the sock on the steps for the hundredth day. Yeah, I walked over clean laundry instead of bringing it up. Anything could be the sock. Yeah. The sock was just one small piece of the resentment that had been building for several years.

And it broke and we sat down and she explained to me and what I wanted to just finish the thought on resentment. It's the most corrosive substance to our relationship. And for me, that was extraordinarily scary. to say, oh, we cannot and will not go down that road. And it prompted the conversation of what changes needed to take place in order to find ourselves back into fairness. Also, it's important to note that during this time, the one thing Heather didn't have to deal with was the household finances. We were very much in tune with the ins and outs of our financial lives. And I found, and she found

herself floating further and further away from that because she was busy doing a million other things and that was the thing that she didn't need to do. Which many mothers find themselves. When you look and you do like a Monday morning quarterback situation, when women who step away from being involved in their household finances, when that happens, it should not surprise anyone that it happens in the years when there are small children now entering your life. because for women who are carrying the lion's share of the household responsibilities, the actual labor, the physical labor, the emotional labor, and all the invisible labor that oftentimes falls mostly on women, the household finances may feel like the one thing you are not responsible for. And it's not something that you can just say like, oh, they just decided they didn't want to be involved anymore. That's not it. It's when you're drowning in everything else. And this feels like the only thing that's safe. because you know that they're going to do it.

Yeah, 100%. That's how that happened. And it's crazy because that was not... It's a compound fracture because you find yourself giving up power when you do that by just attaching yourself from the financial welfare of the household. It is, again, corrosive and in multi-layers here. So what we did is figured out what that next pathway forward was going to look like. And ultimately, it resulted in us working to.

together, something we had always wanted to do and working on this project money together, which, you know, after some trial and error of what ultimately our first, you know, months and years of working together would look like, we went to the thing that we knew as a team we did really well, which was create some thought leadership and get behind a mission that we really believe in. And here we are, two and a half, three years later since joining, or two and a half years since starting this, and we're still married. We're still married. And your kids were three and one when the pandemic began?

11 months, yeah, and four. Yeah, something like that. Actually, I remember to this day that Ruby, our younger daughter, on the day of lockdown, March 13th, 2020, I'll never forget, pulled herself up on the coffee table for the first time. And I said, oh, great, she's mobile. Great. She only has four rooms that she can navigate for the foreseeable future. That was obviously a great demarcation. Candemic parents of young children share a collective trauma.

That is really hard to understand if you did not go through it. Tell me more about that. There's so much. I don't even know where to begin unpacking it. I'll start with the emotional side of it. It was terrifying. It was a terrifying thought, one, Yeah, you're spooked.

What happens if I fall ill in a way that, you know, in the early year of COVID, early months of COVID, it wasn't just, am I going to have a fever? This was, do I have my affairs in order if one of us falls ill? I remember standing in the grocery store that last trip and saying, I better run out and get something. And it was like a run on the market kind of thing. And everyone was. Run on the banks. It was. It was like everyone was grabbing.

grabbing diapers and I had this thought of, am I going to be able to get diapers? Am I going to be able to get formula? She was still taking formula. And everyone was like, don't come anywhere near me. And everyone was standing far. Yeah, it was wild. I mean, I carry these memories with me because it was this just extreme version of parenting that was just so consequential. Every decision felt so consequential. And it already does when you're a young parent. You already feel like everything you do could break them and you're trying to form. cranked up to 11. And you're trying to form your own identity as a parent and your own values and your own risk management protocols of what makes sense for you. And then everything was just dialed up to 100. And every decision felt just so incredibly consequential to the safety and health and survival almost of your family. That's just the emotional side of it.

Then there's the side of it, like, I'm a young parent who's trying to perform at a high voltage job where I'm managing, you know, six, seven figure. lawsuits, eight-figure lawsuits remotely with a team remotely that I used to see in person three days a week. And frankly, I was one of the only young parents on my team that had multiple children at home. And while everyone was trying to be understanding and trying to say, you know, okay, well, so you can't make it on this call because your child is melting down and needs to be fed lunch and they're normally at school during those hours or with a caregiver. People tried to be as supportive as they can, but there's a difference between tolerance and support.

and there is a bit of a gray area in between there. And I mean, you know, this went on for so long and had such an impact on my energy, an impact on my morale, an impact on my ability to just keep showing up every day. Like the exhaustion was so deep that, of course I wasn't doing a great job at my job. I was doing literally everything. This wasn't a four-month thing. Like I remember at the beginning, we're all like, well, we'll see you in June. Maybe we'll be able to all get together in June.

Yeah, they said two weeks to stop the spread. Right, right, right. I took him seriously. I thought it was going to be two weeks. It really did just extend those years that I refer to as the Bermuda Triangle of my career from the time that I had my first daughter through most of COVID, really. Because it just felt like I don't even know where this is going because I don't know, one, whether I can withstand any more of this. Two, people are perceiving me differently. I feel like I'm being perceived as unreliable, even though like I'm doing literally everything I can.

but I'm the only one who's in this situation. So of course, they're not going to turn to me at a time of need. And also what you're dealing with at home to try and balance out the load between the two of us and find some. But there was no way to even do it because we were both just so reactionary to what was happening. Because every day was like a new day. You always thought like maybe the next month will be the month that things returned to normal. But everything was tentative. Nothing felt permanent enough to build systems around.

It was just such a difficult time. I try and find silver linings in these very once-in-a-lifetime, enough with the once-and-a-lifetime events in our lifetime. Yeah, the silver lining, I guess, for us is that an extreme experience that we went through also uncovered and revealed what it is that we needed to do in order to move forward in our lives and get to the next act and stage of what we ultimately- It galvanized our priorities. Yeah, yeah, it really did. So in any extreme situation, if you can survive it and walk away from it, you have to look for the lessons that improve your life and make you cherish or value the things that maybe you didn't previously to that and maybe put yourself in a new direction. We clearly did put ourselves in a whole new direction. When you choose to do things like that and you put in the work and it's been a lot of work, you inevitably get to find yourself into reaping season, right?

So those are the seeds you sow during that time. And now hopefully you get to enjoy and the spoils and the rewards that come from working that hard. And you take that win. You deserve that win when you were smart enough and caring enough to listen to each other to figure out how you would continue to walk down, you know, life's path together. And you will find yourself continuously doing this. Life and money, these are things that you don't. win at life and you don't necessarily win at money, you have the luxury of continuing to do it and play that and hopefully find the next adventure you're going to go on, hopefully with someone

you love and your partner, if that's who you're with. It sounds as though throughout all of this, even in the hard parts, there was excellent communication between the two of you. When the pandemic unfolded and you are at your wits and feeling resentment, you had a good enough relationship that you could say, I am feeling resentment. And what that requires is, a, self-awareness to understand what you yourself are experiencing. And then beyond the self-awareness, the trust in the communication to say, all right, I am feeling some resentment. I am feeling unhappiness. And then, Doug, you had to be receptive to that and say, okay, I hear what you're saying.

and I'm going to take that seriously, and I'm going to actually not just pay lip service to it, but really take action on it. And so for all of those things to be true, the self-awareness followed by the saying, received by the hearing, and then, you know, followed up with doing. That's like four things. And I think for a lot of couples, one of those four steps breaks down. Sure. It did for us. Absolutely. It did for us.

I mean, look, we can paint the picture of how it all worked out now. But again, it's one of those things where, no, we were not communicating well during COVID. In fact, I think a misconception people have is that you're not communicating. But the truth is, and many couples therapists told us this, you're always communicating. You just may not be saying things the way that you want to be saying. You may not be getting your point across. So I was communicating by huffing and puffing around the house and by yelling at everybody and by stomping around and throwing laundry bins everywhere.

But still doing all the work, right? Right, but I was not communicating that I felt overloaded, that I felt like I was invisible. That's what I'm saying. That's why I was unable to pick up on it because despite the huffing and puffing and all of that, you know, oh, laundry was still getting done. Kids are still getting fed. I guess everything is okay over here. I used to hate this saying that he would have, which is like it just gets done. And to me, that's the most passive.

You still hate that. I hate that saying. I still hate it because I don't believe that it just gets done. You do it. It doesn't. It's also like grammatically. Like he says it just gets done. I'm like, yes, because we do it.

We do it. One chooses to do it. Right. There's also this very interesting idea about like power and you think that the person who's the loudest in the room has all the power. And that is not true. Oftentimes it's the person who feels powerless that is the loudest. And it's the person carrying the power that can just go on with.

third time, right? Well, when I or the proverbial you says it just gets done and one person is doing more of the doing, that is the reaction you will get. But if both people have found fairness, and again, that's not equal. There are things I'm never going to do 50, 50 with Heather and there are things she's never going to do 50, 50 with me. But when there's fairness and you say, well, it gets done, it's like, yeah, it does because we get it done. And as much as my heart says, it just gets done, In that moment, it took, you know, it was not received as that. And objectively, that's true because of the unfairness that existed. One of the biggest hurdles that gets in people's way is not just the way they're communicating,

but when they're communicating. And we were very, very guilty of this. So Doug would come up, like, we always found a way to get into these very consequential decisions at the worst possible time. Like, especially this, like, started during COVID, but, like, really, I guess we've always It's when we would come up for error, which would be at very different times. I would come up for air before dinner after that four o'clock meeting, and she would come up for air at like 11 p.m. after the day was done, done, done.

So we both thought that those respective times were the best time for us to talk about these consequential decisions or the important thing that needed to be communicated. I'm going to be much more specific than that. Do it. It is not a good time to talk about money while you're feeding your kids dinner and getting them bathed for bedtime. Yep. And while we're exhausted at the end of the day. And everyone's exhausted and there's probably somebody crying and you both just finished your work day. That is not going to set the stage for a constructive conversation around money, your goals, around your needs. You're both not

at ease. You're both kind of in still either. You're coming down from a stressful day. It's a bad environment. It's just a bad environment. So so much about time and place really, really matter. that's only one of the reasons why we like the idea of a money date and why that's so important. And for us, that's not something that has to happen every week. Because I think when you set the bar too high, you're setting yourself up to fail and not everybody has time every week to sit down and like check in on these points, especially when you're just getting started. But if you set aside time once a quarter, let's say, and you set aside time in a forum that you both are really comfortable in or that you both can even, dare I say, look forward. too. Like for Doug and I, we love to go for walks. We've always, I think this is like a COVID thing that we start. Actually, no, I would say it goes back to the city. We always used to walk at night

in the city too. We were like, we're big walkers. We would just go out at night after dinner and we'd walk. Yeah, no shortage of studies on how amazing a walk is for your brain. But we've always been walkers. We walk through important conversations. That's just always been something that we do. But now also, we'd go out for a cocktail. We'd like to sit at the bar, at a restaurant, downtown. And these four, we'd get a babysitter. Like, these were things that we looked at forward to doing together, and we knew that the purpose of us going out doing this thing that we like to do together was exclusively to talk about these topics that night. And eventually, we started saving those conversations for those moments instead of like, hey, I know you're

really eager to talk to me about how we did this month because you just put together like the spreadsheet and you're like really excited. You just finished. It's just my ADHD, baby. Right. But I'm like, first of all, there's either like a show I want to watch on TV. I'm like, no, this is not the time. And I'm going to brush him off and he's going to feel slighted and we're not going to get anything done. But now I would say to him, hey, that's awesome that you did that. Do we have that date on the calendar for a week from now? I'm really excited to talk about this. We're going to go through all of it then. Here's some tips, viewers, for when you're going on your money date, how to begin without feeling like someone doesn't want to be there. And it's important to know that there are some really good ways to go about this and some terrible ways to go about this. Guys try not to sit down with spreadsheets and tables and numbers when you could easily start the conversation with goals, things that you both are looking forward to. I will have a much easier time talking to Heather about anything in our financial lives if it's tied to something we both care about or are excited for. That was very important for us.

At the beginning, when we started doing these conversations in much more of a structured sense, it was very important for me to not just dive right in. to those numbers and to the technical. We wanted to start with the positive because I'm a bit of like a negative Nancy and I kind of need that positive reinforcement. Like, here's all the great things. That's the second one is don't go with the things that need improvement off the bat.

No one wants to start a conversation with what's negative. They want to start with what you're doing right. And you'll notice that all of this is just simple little tweaks. Right. Just turn the thing you were going to do. Turn it upside down.

What would that look like? Yeah, start with positives. Hey, look how great we did this month with this. High five. take a shot, take a sip, whatever. And that's going to be a much better on-ramp into, well, we do have to talk about the things that need improvement. Yeah, cool. Well, we book some wins. Where's the L? Here's the L. Okay. We're now more motivated to talk about that. So I think these are just two really great examples, not only time and place, but how you start the conversation. They make a

perfect mix to setting the stage for productive sessions. And then the other part I'd tell you is be patient here, you know, if you're setting up quarterly dates, that's only four times a year. This is a practice. You know, anything you want to get good at requires practice. And this type of work compounds, so four money dates, great. Over two years, eight, I'm just counting by four now. You know, three year or twelve. You start to... How many in four years? Oh, 16, I think. He's not sure. I'm unsure. Let me check with my ninth grader. They're doing multiplication now. But these are the things that compound over time. And just appreciate the fact that, you know, if you're doing this quarterly, you only get so many cracks at this. So please, please, make them count. And that's why it's so

critical to have kind of best strategies or best practices in going into these things. And don't expect the world out of your first date. I know how hard. We had more questions at the end of it than we had answers. And then there were slightly less questions. And now we know what the same questions are going to be every time or which areas we need to focus on as we approach money date number, you know, 24 or whatever it is. I counted by four again. Well, you know, the advice about starting with wins, it reminds me of how a lot of team meetings are structured in the workplace. You might have a weekly team meeting, like a Monday morning all-hands meeting that begins with, all right, what were our big wins from last week? Sure.

And everyone in the all-hands meeting celebrates the big team wins before you go into, all right, what are we working on this week? What are the goals overarching big picture? What are the goals for the next five days? Yep. It is a meeting. It is a meeting. You know, it's so interesting. there are so many positive, constructive communication tools that you can take from your workplace

and bring into your household at home. But, like, people don't do it. You know why? Because it's the same reason that my daughter would cry when she gets home from preschool every day because she saved all of her negative energy for me. Like, you know, that's what they always say. Well, she saved it all for you. She was, oh, she's such a delight at school. And then she comes home and she would yell at everyone and cry and, like, throw herself in the ground.

It's, like, funny, but it's not because it's the same exact thing. It's like, why do we? Why do we accuse and yell and deflect and whatever against one another when we do have the communication tools, many of us? Like we spoke about in a chapter in the book about couples who are both really committed to their careers working through a hard career decision that might require one person to make a sacrifice. You have to give those decisions the time they need. But also you could map it out and do the pros and cons the same way you would with the decision in the workplace. You can use a decision tree. You can work through it.

Like you have the tools. Many people have the tools, but it's a lot easier to just be your hardest on the person that you love the most because you're the most comfortable and your guard is down. Which reminds me what you maybe in that instance should do instead of, you know, yes, you are hardest and you hurt the ones you love, right? We all know that expression. But so much of this is also knowing how your partner learns and meeting them where they're at. Oh, yeah. We had a couple that was struggling to conduct a money meeting and get on the same page. And yes, it started with here the, like they had to talk about the numbers at one point.

And even in getting to them in the most constructive way possible, it just wasn't clicking what was on the paper or on the screen. And it was getting a whiteboard and drawing it. And I use this as an example to show that people like to learn and do things in a certain way. And if you are going to approach your partner with the way that you get it done, and we believe it or not, talk about how we approach. things all the time. We are oil and water with how we approach stuff. We work incredibly differently. Yeah, it's very frustrating at times. It just gets done. The point here is if you can meet your partner where they're at and find out and have the perspective, put yourself in their shoes for a minute. Like, yeah, I know Heather doesn't want to start the conversation with X. I know

my partner works best if we're, again, having a cocktail. Like, this is the activity we like to do. Just pay particular focus, take a minute to think about not yourself, but how your partner learns. And they should be doing the same and watch what happens at that point. You will have constructive, meaningful conversations at the right time, in the right place, getting to the right conclusions. In addition to a money date, do you also do, do you have a date or a structure around planning for domestic activities? Well, I don't think there is a better system out there than Eve Rodsky's fair play and the cards. there. She breaks down, I think it's more than 100 household tasks and responsibilities into

microcards, and then you can divide them up. And I think for us, it's a very helpful exercise, but we don't stick to things like that, like the gospel at this point, because we don't really need to anymore. One of the most important concepts, and actually this was also from Fairplay, and this was one of Yves Roski's amazing. You're going to say owning the activity, aren't you? Do you want to say it? No, go for it. No, you're on a roll here. Right. No, one of the most important things about how you do divide up household responsibilities is to make sure that you own that activity. Beginning to the end. So it's an idea of conceptualize, plan, and execute. And I think many women feel frustrated with this idea when their spouse comes to them and says, how can I help?

Just tell me what to do and I'll do it. Yeah. And that to me is like, oh, my God, there's nothing more infuriating than that because then you've just added yourself into the roster of my children standing in front of me. with me being like, get your shoes on, take out the trash, and you put your code away. Yeah, but I'm actually going to do it. Right. But the mental load is maybe heavier than half of the physical responsibilities that we all have. So for someone to really own an activity from start to finish is the most valuable thing that they can do.

So I'll give you a great example from our own lives. Our older daughter, Hazel, is on a competitive swim team. And there's like a million emails. and it starts off season. You get the emails, time trials, bathing suits. You know, it's a million different signups, meets. I said to Doug, I want nothing to do with swim. I don't want to go to practice.

I don't want to read the emails because there's so many of them and they're confusing. I don't want to buy anything for swim. All I want to do is do what the dads do at a lot of the activities. I want to show up and put a chair down and put a chair down and cheer hazel on. Stay less, fam. Swim Dad. Swim Dad is here. So that's how Swim Dad was born. And I think the important thing, too, is like, he doesn't get it right 100% of the time. But I don't get it right 100% of the time either. I can't get on him, and I can't step in and fix it and try and do it for him. If he forget something, I tell him that he forgot and that he's got to do it. Yeah. You know what I mean? I feel bad I forgot because I've taken true ownership over this entire thing. It's not something I want to hear is that I miss something, you know, especially when you're dialed into it. What's crazy is that him becoming swim dad started off this effect into other things where

like he realized I can take ownership over something from start to finish. I'm not just, I'm not a man kept man child who needs to be told what to do and where to be all the time that actually I don't need to wait for Heather to say like if she's still upstairs working and it's six o'clock at night and the kids need dinner, I'm going to make dinner. Well, I think the point is it builds upon itself, right? It creates better behaviors and habits in all areas of your participation in your family and in your life. And that's a really good thing. And I think it's also very important to point out here.

I'm probably not going to stop the question of, you know, what can I do to help? But when you are taking big pieces off the plate and you're lightening the mental load and these things that are clearly, you know, being thrust it upon you more so than they're me, it allows for there to be more forgiveness. and Slack for the inevitable times, I will say, how can I help? What can I do here? Just tell me what to do. I just don't want people to feel like this all magically goes away. It comes back to the idea of practice and building the habits and behaviors. These are things you are playing long. Your whole relationship is a long game, right? And I took that lesson from building businesses, from looking at our related. This is something that we are going, and particularly with money. It's one of the longest games. You have to deal with it. forever. You don't get to opt out. Yeah. Right? You're not going off the grid in Montana, you know, and opting out of money. You still need money to buy supplies to do that. And even if you were, yeah. Yeah, you still need. Even that has cost to. Yeah, you literally can't do it. And, you know, unless you're trying to nuke your relationship and that's the worst outcome, I think,

of any situation here, you don't get to opt out of these things. You have to figure out ways to make them work and that gets back to fairness. There is no perfect here, right? There's never going to be, sorry, honey, there's not going to be a day where I'm not bothering you about that. But as long as she knows, I am continuing to show the types of actions that make our lives more fair. It's okay. I'll be given that grace as opposed to, because you just once take care of this from beginning to end. That's what that sounds like. It's not good. One thing that strikes me, both of you have developed quite a lot of wisdom around what makes a relationship work.

You know, when you talk about how resentment is like poison for a relationship or when you talk about the importance of fairness as a guiding value. One thing that strikes me, though, is you met as freshmen in college, so you have not had a string of failed adult relationships. Most of my friends have told me that their biggest relationship lessons have come from the failures. They've come from the painful breakups that they had at the age of 23 and then at 27 and then at 31 and then at 36. Without a string of failures, how have you been able to form that level of wisdom? I do think we've had a string of failures. Right. Yeah, I was going to say, I don't think it's a thing.

string of failures. Yeah, I don't think it takes it. We failed each other on numerous occasions early in our relationship. And I think that by growing into adults together, we were unfair to each other on numerous occasions. We made tons of mistakes. I tell people all the time that I feel like we live the life cycle of some marriages before we even got married because of how close we got to this, not working out, early in our relationship. So I don't ever intend. And look, our book is not a memoir. So I wish it was. Tell it to my editor. You know what I mean? This is now our memoir. No, no, no. But it's important because I think with the focus on money and on these topics, we have to keep it focused on these topics. However, to be very clear,

we were messy A-F. And the fact that our relationship survived into adulthood took an insane amount of work, rebuilding, trust. We had to get to know each other. Heartbreak. We had to get to know each other all over again on more than one occasion. And when I moved up to New York, it was very much a see-you-later situation. So this was not all sunshine and roses. And I think nothing is, nothing is though, like, right? I mean, that's the point is that we kind of move through these seasons of our lives. And so we've definitely shared different seasons of our lives together. I think the thing here is that, you know, we got into financial infidelity as part of a chapter. It's called the chapter on lying. And the psychologist that we

talked to. We asked a question of, how do you know when it's game over and it's time to move on? They told us that when one person is not willing to do the work in the relationship to get it back on track or to fix whatever damage took place, that's about as accurate as it gets. And in all the instances where we had our struggles and moments that we would consider losses and not wins, we have yet to find ourselves in a position where one of us was unwilling to put in the work to move it on. So I don't think you necessarily need to see our relationship crumble to extract the lessons that life will inevitably give you. There is no successful entrepreneur. There is no successful marriage.

There is nothing that has resulted in success that hasn't come from a bunch of failures. I should also add, and this is Doug and I both are now products of divorce at this point in our life. I think we both at various times in our life felt like we were each other's family. This isn't just, he's not just a guy that I'm dating. We had to fill some pretty big holes in each other's lives. Maybe holes that were too big for somebody our age to be filling. Yeah, not sure it was necessarily fair for us to be in that position, but life gets a change. use those things. But I think it's an important point to further Doug's point, which is that

there are lots of ways to rupture and repair relationships. And I don't necessarily think that people who have had five horror stories of past boyfriends have more context than the people who have been through some pretty hard stuff together and have still found a way through. Your story is your story. That's why we share so many other people's stories as well, not just our own. I would never hold us out as the, you know, shining example of people who have always gotten it right. No, I would. I would. I think of anything, I mean, it's how I choose to hold myself out in the world, too, is that I'm not. I'm messy. I get it wrong all the time. I don't say the right thing. You have to. And I'm a little unkempt, and it is what it is. And I think that that is why we're

able to have real conversations and also connect with real people because they see pieces of themselves in these stories and in these not just ours but others because yeah like there's a million different ways to get to the desired result and there's a million different experiences that get people to where they want to be so Doug your parents were married for 36 years before they got divorced something like that yeah and you were in your 20s at the time uh no 30s you were in your 30s at the time yes how did that land with you? I mean, it sucks.

Yeah. The good side of that is I was a mature adult with a kid and had a family of my own. So my perspective, unlike Heather at the tender age of 13 or 14, when her parents got divorced, I understood more of how the world worked and how relationships work. But putting that aside, it still really rocks you to your core. I took a lot of pride in that while watching my friend's parents get divorced. I mean, you know, boomers really went for the whole 50-50 split here on who stayed together and who left. That's very different from their parents who, if you hated your spouse, you still stayed together, just what it was.

Yeah, it took an emotional toll for sure. I thought one of the core pillars of my life, which was my parents being together, despite knowing for many, many years, they were unhappy. And I thought they would, yeah, there were probably times which I thought this thing's cooked, right? This is over, but they kept going. but to see it finally fall apart in the way that it did made me question a lot of things about my childhood, about, you know, what I thought family was supposed to be. But again, you take these struggles, you take these moments and thank God I had Heather there, who, by the way, because of her experience through this, was maybe one of the most supportive things I had in my life,

not just because she was my wife and she was there for me, because she had the experience and arguably had it worse. That's what's so crazy is that... She could tell me that, hey, here's what you're going. I get it. That meant the world. He helped me through so much, like a decade and a half earlier. Yeah.

And I was able to do the same for him, but in a totally different context. Yeah. It gave us one more thing that we now have in common. I'm not necessarily the thing you want to have in common, but we're able to look at what had happened in our respective lives and draw lessons from it, be able to share feelings around it and tap into areas that maybe we weren't talking about enough. You know, there'll be a moment where I'm like, man, I really wish my dad was able to see whatever it may be that I've done or be able to communicate or I wish I had my parents together for this. moment, whatever it may be.

And it sounds cliche, but it's true, right? And she'd be like, yeah, yeah, let me tell you why you feel that way. Let me tell you what I do to get through that. You know what? Forget all that. Let's grab the girls and go out to dinner. Within 30 minutes, I ain't thinking about that anymore. Look at what I have in front of me, and that's awesome.

Earlier you talked about how through your relationship, you've been through some tumultuous ups and downs. And what that means is that you've both had to be. practice forgiveness over the years. Forgiveness of each other, forgiveness of yourselves. Yes. How do you do that? It's not easy. It's not easy. And I think that we can only do so much for one and other. I think one of the most important things you can do, though, is to understand how deep something is cutting your partner. I think you need to understand how big of a deal this is, whatever the thing is. Like, know how big that cloud is.

that's over them. Then you can tailor your support to meet them in that moment. And yeah, you may not be able to do it alone. This is why we call upon the help of so many professionals. I go to therapy. Doug goes to therapy. There are reasons why professionals exist to help you through these difficult moments in your life. We could only forgive each other so much if you don't forgive yourself. And I've needed help with that over time, not just in terms of whatever was gone on with us, but in terms of even just the student loan debt, the shame I carried for the decisions that I made was really, really deep. Yeah.

And I double down on this, by the way. Forgiving yourself, I think, is sometimes harder than forgiving. By the way, baby, I forgive you. No, I think forgiving yourself are the things that you believe you've done to yourself or the way that you've put certain types of feelings on you. They could be things that you've inherited and you don't, sometimes you don't even know where it's coming from. And Heather's point about you rely on.

and other professionals you rely on the support systems in your life to get there. And to the point about knowing where your partner's at, when you know somebody so well, you can recognize them falling back into patterns. Like there are things, I am always going to be hard on myself. That's who I am. I set incredibly high expectations of myself. Professionally, personally, physically, as a woman, I said high expectations of myself. And they're not fair.

Some of them are not always fair. about it all the time. And when Doug, when Doug catches me in a moment of kind of like spiraling into one of these things on myself, he's like, hey, hey, you're doing that thing that you do. And I see where this is going. And you are losing the joy in this moment that we're in. You know how hard it is like when you're launching a book like out into the world, not to get all meta. But like the pressure because this is something that I care about so incredibly deeply. Like this project, this book. Doug has a firm. Yes, it's our firm. Yes, we did a lot of this together. And I do embrace the we and everything like this, but this project is very personal to me. It's very important. And it's

really, really easy for me to slide into some very negative patterns of like expectations being outsized from reality on what I want for myself. And I rely on him to check me in those moments too. So, like, yes, therapists, yes, family and supportive and supportive people who love you and most of all your partner to kind of give you that check and to say, have you called your therapist about this? Because I think you probably should. I can tell you one thing, even when Heather checks me on stuff that are habits or my own spiraling, if you want to call it that is nobody really likes to hear it. So it takes a lot of bravery and it takes a lot of confidence and it takes a lot of knowing your partner. And trust. And trust that, hey, I'm going to say something that's really not going to make you feel good.

But the reason for that is it's right. And then you need to have the trust in your partner to say, I really didn't like to hear that. But I know that they wouldn't be saying it if it wasn't true. Or if their perception of this wasn't like, I would say, I observe you're doing this thing that you used to do. And I know that it's not going to be productive for us. I'm just telling you what I see. And there has to be enough trust on both ends of him saying, well, for her to say this, she hasn't said something like that to me. Yeah, she's not trying to like hurt my feelings.

And after I say it, I hide behind the couch and throw a little chocolate at her from a distance until it all goes away. Just kidding. But it's true. Yeah. It's true. There has to be enough trust to really, really not only check each other, but to fall back on each other when you do fall into those old patterns. because there's a reason that you were that way, like healing again. Just like your career isn't linear, healing isn't linear too.

Like you, these things are embodied. Like, some of these feelings I have are like one step away from genetic. Yeah. You know, that's why we say the self-work is the hardest work because, again, hearing things that, you know, aren't your best qualities. I even think today I pointed out something that wasn't my best quality and I got all bent out of shape around it. And after a second to breathe, I said, I am fully aware, being called. out on something that was an old habit or behavior or something I don't like about myself, made me extra sensitive to that. So as much as I want to fix things and get them solved in a second,

sometimes you've got to take a minute to reflect upon it, but it does take an incredible amount of trust and bravery to do some of these things. But I think that's a wonderful example of how far your relationship can go if you can get to a point of communicating that way. Well, and one other point I'll make on that, which is, what's really about all of it, is that couples work, when it comes to money or anything else, involves a lot of self-work. It really requires a level of self-awareness. You are not an enigma for your partner to figure out. It's not just their job. Yeah, take them there. It's your job, too. You have an obligation to yourself. And that goes with money, right, with stepping into your power around money, being sure that you not only know,

be understanding that you have an obligation to know, not just the ins and outs of your personal finances, but to know what you want out of life to try and start asking yourself those hard questions. How can your partner begin to figure out those two partners can't figure out what those things are for you? You've got to figure out what they are for yourself. And then you two can work on it together. So like, I never want to lose that in this work. And I think because so many people, so many partners lose themselves in their marriage. They lose themselves in a relationship or they lose themselves to their kids, especially women. And so when I look at this work, it is not just about talking your part. We talk about fairness. How can we even begin to talk about

fairness when you're not being fair to yourself, when you're not setting a bar for yourself to say, I deserve to have my needs met. Here's the baseline of how I'm going to do that. And then we can start to work together. It sounds like the real backbone of all of this is emotional maturity, agency, awareness. That's the life's work. of holding a family together. Yes. Thank you for spending this time with us. Where can people find you if they'd like to learn more?

Are you, oh, now you're going to look at me? Listen, listen. You Google it. No, no, no, no. If you're interested in learning more about the book, you can go to domoneytogether.com. We also write a weekly newsletter on joint finances called the joint account, and that's at readthejointh account.com.

Over on substack, but also our book money together is available anywhere you like to purchase books. Absolutely. Grab a copy. Beautiful. Thank you. And we will link to all of that in the show notes as well. Thanks so much.

Wonderful. Thank you to Doug and Heather. What are three key takeaways from this conversation? Key takeaway number one. Your relationship with money started in your childhood. It started long before you met your partner because your early childhood experiences with money create deeply ingrained patterns that show up in your adult relationships. And so Heather describes how her parents' divorce shaped her relationship with money in a way that followed her for decades.

And that's something that you need self-awareness of and that your partner also needs to understand about you. My parents got divorced right as I entered my teenage years. And I really embodied a lot of the scarcity mindset that my mom kind of imparted on me during those years. There was a lot of we don't have, you know, a lot of money stress in our house. It doesn't really matter what was. What matters is how you felt about it in those earliest years and your earliest money memories. That is the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two. Stop having money talks when you're stressed. The Bonaparte's discovered that timing makes or breaks financial conversations and they learned to table these discussions for when they're both relaxed and they can actually enjoy the process, like taking a walk together or over cocktails. Doug and I, we love to go for walks.

We've always, I think this is like a COVID thing that we started. Actually, no, I would say it goes back to the city. We always used to walk at night in the city, too. We were like, we're big walkers. We would just go out at night after dinner and we'd walk. Yeah, no shortage of studies on how amazing a walk is for your brain. But we've always been walkers. We walk through important conversations.

That's just always been something that we do. But now also, we'd go out for a cocktail. We'd like to sit at the bar at a restaurant downtown. And finally, key takeaway number three. Taking ownership beats keeping score. Real partnership means owning entire responsibilities from start to finish rather than trading tasks back and forth. Doug shares about how becoming swim dad, meaning completely taking over their daughter's competitive swimming activities, transformed the way in which they divide responsibilities. That's how swim dad was born. And I think the important thing too is like he doesn't get it right 100% of the time, but I don't get it right 100% of the time either.

I can't get on him, though, and I can't step in and fix it and try and do it for him. If he forget something, I tell him that he forgot and that he's got to do it. Yeah. You know what I mean? I feel bad I forgot because I've taken true ownership over this entire thing. There's our three key takeaways from this conversation with Doug and Heather Bonaparte. Thank you so much for being part of the Afford Anything community. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with the people in your life, friends, family, neighbors, colleagues,

anyone you know who is part of a couple, anyone who is single but is considering becoming part of a couple, potentially at some point in the future, anyone who was part of a couple and is trying to figure out a retrospective, share this with all of the people in your life because that is the single most important way that you can spread these lessons, spread educational teaching about money that we don't get in school. Unpacking your relationship with money individually and together as a couple

is such a big part of having a healthy relationship, and it's a lifelong relationship, not just with each other, but with yourself and with your money. Right? We all have a relationship with our money. So share this with anyone in your life who you think would benefit from learning this. Also, remember that we have a course on rental property investing. It's called Your First Rental Property, and it is open now through October 30th. This is a limited time window for you to enroll.

Now through October 30, you can enroll. roll in our course aimed at anyone who wants to learn about how to buy and manage a rental property. It's aimed at beginners. So if you have zero rental properties and you want to go from zero to one, this is for you. Or if maybe you have one, but you kind of like didn't know what you were doing and you sort of bought it on the fly and now you actually really want systems and processes. Or maybe you're an accidental landlord. You had a primary residence and when you had to move out, you didn't want to sell it because maybe you've got a really low interest mortgage on it. Now you're an accidental landlord and you want to learn how to manage it.

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