You know, there are a lot of great things about being married, but you know what one of the best things about being married is? Money! After all, the day you get married, it just becomes easy. Life is so easy when you get to manage money with another person. It's just remarkable.

Everything flows smoothly. You always agree on everything. Wait, that's not your experience? Oh, bummer. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, radicals. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and today we're here to talk about money and marriage. The good thing is I'm not alone. I've got Talit and Ty from His and Hers Money.

They're here to share a little bit of their experience, a little bit of their wisdom, and hopes that we can all learn together. If your experience with money and marriage is not what I described there in my little intro, don't worry. I don't think it's anybody's experience in the world.

And so this topic is one of those that I think could have a bigger impact on our life than just about anything else. This is one of those topics that affects the day-to-day life. Figuring out how to rebalance your 401(k), that is easy. You sit down one time, you figure out an asset allocation plan, you punch in some order tickets on your mutual funds and boom, you're done.

Figuring out how much to spend on the budget category that you disagree on, that's a little tougher. And so today I've got Talit and Ty from His and Hers Money on to talk with me. I reached out to them and I was able to connect with them at FinCon 2015 up in Charlotte, North Carolina in September 2015.

So that's when this interview was recorded. I hadn't gotten around to playing it for you guys for a while, but I'm thrilled to bring it to you. It's a good interview and I think you're going to enjoy it. Talit and Ty have a cool story and they run a website called His and Hers Money.

So they talk about this stuff each and every day and we had an enjoyable conversation together and I think they're going to find a lot of value in it. Before I play the interview for you, we're going to do sponsors up front. There are two major things that might help you guys to get on the same page with money.

And that's why I've chosen these two sponsors to play on today's show for you. And here are the two things. Number one, get clear on big picture goals. And number two, have a system of accurate, proactive money management. Those two things can bring a tremendous amount of peace to a relationship.

If you're clear on where you're going, big picture long term, that gives you the direction, that gives you the general orientation. And then if you put a plan in place that accounts for the day to day activity, you can make major progress. There's my tip. If you need to turn off after that, that's all you need.

Well, suggestions on ways to do it. Number one, sponsor of the day number one is Paladin, a financial advisor registry service. Sit down with a good financial advisor and spend some time talking about your long term goals and figure out where you are with regard to your progress on those goals.

The best way that I know of for you to sit down and find and start your search for good financial advisors is to use the Paladin registry. Paladin is a service that goes out and they bring advisors together. They research those advisors. Make sure they're not crooks and scoundrels.

They try to weed out the bad ones and only represent the good ones. And what you can do is go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/paladin, P-A-L-A-D-I-N, Paladin. Go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/paladin. Put your info in there and they will refer you to a couple of financial advisors. Start your search there. You don't have to hire them.

I don't have any financial interest in whether you hire them or not, but at least start your search there and interview them first in hopes they can help you with that long term goals. Sponsor number two is YNAB. You Need a Budget, the budgeting software. Brand new version of the software out.

I've gotten some mixed feedback on it. A couple of people have loved it. A couple of people hated it. I haven't yet delved into it deeply enough to give you a review, but it is on my to-do list and that will be coming soon and I'll let you know what I think about it.

I am confident that Jesse and his team, they've been doing this a while and I'm confident that for the most part it's going to be great. They did change a few features, so I'll update you on those features and let you know. But you can try it for free, 30-day trial.

If you haven't done that, go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/YNAB, Y-N-A-B. It's an acronym for You Need a Budget, radicalpersonalfinance.com/YNAB. Do those two things and I believe that your relationship together will be improved, not necessarily because of what you do, but because you're building communication around what you're doing. That communication leads to a sharing of the heart, a sharing of vision and purpose, and that leads to making major progress in how you can relate to another person with regard to money.

Let's hear what Talent and Ty had to say. Talent and Ty, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Hi. Hey, Josh. I'm so happy to be here. I'm a big fan of the show. Thank you. Absolutely. So we're going to talk about his and her money, which ought to be fun because, what, is there any more challenging and more consistent challenge that people face with their money other than learning how to work with a loved one and work together?

How did you guys get started in this money advice space? Well, we've been doing this for a while just in person, locally. People are always asking us questions about finances because we had such a unique story. I'm a natural spender. My wife's a natural saver. I had a bunch of debt when we got married.

She had never had any debt. I had a terrible credit score. How's that for a challenging relationship to integrate? Yeah, because we were just polar opposites. And so when we got together and got married, we had to learn a lot. We had to compromise a lot. And a lot of the lessons that we've learned and people see the outcome and see that we've figured a lot of things out.

And so people would always be asking us questions and advice locally. So we decided that maybe it'd be a good idea to take this message online because we could probably help more people than we are right now. How long have you been married? Almost 10 years. This is coming June.

Okay. So what was the process like in the beginning? What was it like and then how did it change over time? Yes. So it started just with a lot of tears and Kleenex and yelling and arguing. But no, seriously, it just was a lot of trial and error. So again, we're completely different.

And so we had to try things a certain way. If it worked, we kept it. If it didn't work, we figured it out and we remixed it and tried something different. The problem I think a lot of times when it comes to couples is that they try something and it didn't work and then they just drift apart.

They become isolated. They don't try to work through or try to find a different alternative. And that's why finances is one of the number one reasons that marriages fall apart because they didn't figure out a way to work it out. So you came together with a big disparity in both habits, but also in your financial situation.

Completely. Did you integrate your finances together? Yes. So I must mention prior to us getting married, everything pretty much hit the fan. My husband, as he said, he was the one with debt. I had no debt. Bad credit, great credit. And so I thought that I was entering into marriage where my husband didn't have at least $30,000 worth of debt.

When we finally discovered the debt, as he said, it was a lot of trial and error, a lot of communication. I was afraid. I'm not going to lie. I was absolutely afraid because I was not used to that. So when we got married, I knew that his debt was going to then become my debt because yes, we did integrate our finances and we came up with a plan to get out of debt as quickly as possible.

From day one, we decided that it wasn't going to be any separation. Even though we were different, we were both willing to put in the work. And so from day one, we integrated everything. I mean, Ty took a big risk because of the mistakes that I was making. But I think that she saw that my behavior was different.

Although I still had repercussions from the past mistakes that I made. So the debt was still there, but I was thinking differently and I was behaving differently. And so that made her realize that, you know, let's do this together. Let's work this out as a team because that's what marriage is.

So you talk about couples money and I'm getting the sense that would your advice be to all couples that they should integrate their finances together? That is our, that's our position. That's our standpoint. We know that not everybody agrees with us, but anytime anybody asks us, yes, we believe that when the two come together, they are one and that includes their finances.

And why, why would you marry somebody that you don't believe in that you can operate and get through the good and the bad together? Because that's marriage is one long process of both of you all becoming better. And so everything's not going to be set up perfectly from day one.

It won't be set up perfectly from day 1000. But the point is it's a gradual process and if you don't start off thinking operating as a team, it's going to be much harder to do it later. You know, and there are also exceptions to the rule. Of course, you know, we're not saying someone who may have a spouse that has a gambling addiction problem or they may be in an abusive relationship.

Of course you, you should have some type of money that's separate, you know, if, because you have to plan for the future. You know, I actually had a client that I dealt with. She had to physically set money aside that her spouse did not know about because he gambled all of their retirement away.

So in that case, yes, you know, but the average everyday couple, you know, who's not going through those type of issues or situations we do believe in combining. So when you were in those difficult early years, what were some of the things that you started to do that started to make a difference?

I think, I think the first, before we say what made a difference, we made a huge mistake right out the gate and learning from that mistake, the lessons that came out of that huge mistake is what propelled us forward. So on the surface, it sounded, what we did sounded like a good idea.

So like we said, I was terrible with money. Ty was great with money. She had a finance degree. She was working in the finance industry. And so our idea was, okay, Ty, you handle the money. You just let me know how things go, right, and what I should do.

And so on the surface, it sounded like a good idea, but the problem was we weren't operating as a team. People make the mistake when they hear the word team, especially in marriage, they think that things should be 50/50, which they hardly ever are. But another mistake people make is that when you're attempting to operate as a team, they'll do something a hundred to zero.

So that's what we were. She was doing a hundred percent of the budgeting and organizing the finance and I was doing zero. I was doing the red line saying, okay, so what do I have to operate with? And so what happened was over time, we begin to build up, both of us, resentment within each other because of this situation that we agreed to at first, but we were finding that we were resenting the process because she was feeling unappreciated because she was doing all this hard work.

She was calculating, organizing, budgeting, making sure that we weren't going into the red and me, I was building up resentment because I felt I knew how much I made. I knew what my salary was and then I knew what she was saying. Well, this is what you have to spend for the month.

And I'm like, wait a minute, this does not add up. And so I was feeling like I was a child being handed an allowance and we weren't communicating our resentment. And so it continued to grow and fester and we just had to sit down and discuss the resentment that was in it.

It took a while to get there. We were just silent, quiet, and we were growing frustrated internally. And so once we laid all the cards out on the table, like, I don't like this set up because of this and I don't like this set up because of this, we were able to realize we weren't operating as a team.

We were operating as Ty was doing all the work and I was just sitting back. And so that's just not the way to operate. What was your perspective, Ty? Same, totally agree. I thought he was a big baby, you know, and I thought that he did not appreciate what I was doing.

I was making a lot of sacrifices and I did not quite feel that he was doing the same. I felt like he wasn't making sacrifices. I'm like, okay, if we want to reach our certain goals that we both say, then we're going to have to spend XYZ. And he wanted to spend ABC.

You know, and yeah, it was very frustrating. And so what we learned was that teamwork means that both parties have a part to play. It may not be 50/50, but it's not 100 to zero either. So we always give the illustration of, we're from Chicago. So in the nineties, we were all about the Chicago Bulls and everybody knows Michael Jordan, but they don't know the starting point guard.

So it was BJ Armstrong for those first few. And I say the name BJ Armstrong and nobody knows who in the world I'm talking about, but he was the opposite guard to Michael Jordan on some of those championship teams. And what happened was they were on the same team, right?

They didn't have the same amount of responsibility, but they both had responsibilities on the team. So when teams were game planning to play the Chicago Bulls, it's not like they were game planning 50% Jordan and 50% BJ Armstrong. No, it was overwhelmingly game planning for Michael Jordan, but BJ Armstrong played his part, right?

He was the point guard on the team. And so he had a role as a point guard. Mike had a role as the two guard. And because they both played their roles and they both played their roles well, they became champions. And so you both parties, husband and wife have to be involved in the game.

Even if it's 80-20, 70-30, you have to play to your strengths and you both have to play. Did you get advice or did you figure it out the hard way? We started to do a lot of research on our own. We would email each other financial articles. We would go to sites and read their posts.

We would read books. We started to gain the knowledge on our own in order to win it. Yeah, we started to self-educate and do it together. So I would come across an article or we would watch the Dave Ramsey show, the Orman show and discuss what was being talked about on there.

And they, what do you think about that? What do you think about that? So at the same time, we're both growing together. Practically, how do you actually go about on a practical basis starting to work together? Do both people, do you have budget meetings? Do you, you know, both people have a checkbook register?

How does it work? Well, now almost 10 years later in our marriage, I am still the one physically putting the budget together. However, we sit down together and we come up with the numbers, you know, so I'm the one with the checkbook, you know, writing the check, paying the bills because he still works outside of the home right now.

So it makes sense for me to do it. But he's involved in every purchase decision. He's involved in every line category in our budget. Yeah, so she'll set it up and then we'll both sit down. We'll both look at it. We'll both talk about it. We'll both discuss it and we'll both come up with the final game plan for the month.

So we sit down before the month begins and do our budget. And periodically sometimes things have come up where we didn't necessarily budget for it, we missed or we forgot. So we sit down together again and say, okay, what do we need to move around and how should we attack this?

And we talk about goals as far as saving up for bigger purchases. We're always in discussion. But again, it's not 50/50. We both play to our strengths though. Right. So what's your go-to budget? What's your go-to budget? And then what's your go-to budget? And then what's your go-to budget?

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And then what's your go-to budget? And then what's your go-to budget? And then what's your go-to budget? And then what's your go-to budget? And then what's your go-to budget? And then what's your go-to budget? What advice do you have for couples who have very different incomes? One is much higher than the other.

Have you worked with that? With your site? Do you have any insight that could be helpful for those people? Absolutely. We lived it. Yeah. Well, in the beginning of our marriage, I was the one making a higher salary than my husband, but I never put him down. It was our money.

You know, I never said, "Well, I'm making this. You're making that." So, I never felt like I had more power, you know, because from day one, we were one in our salary, right? Yeah. And I would say that things can change because guess what? Ty decided she wanted to come home, and now I'm the one with the salary.

Right. So, now imagine if in the beginning of our marriage, my wife was making me feel bad because she earned more than I did. How would I be treating her right now? I'd be treating her the same way. And because my wife didn't do that, because it was about us from the beginning, it's still about us now.

So, our advice to couples is that come together. Realize again that you all are a team. Who cares who makes what? Not I make this and you make that. We make this amount. How are we going to game plan for this amount? What are our dreams? What are our goals?

What are our ambitions? What do we want to do with our life? It's always got to be about us, we, and our. Never about you and I. I personally think that this idea of thinking together versus thinking separately is a major influence to the breakdown of families in our culture.

The family-oriented culture of the past seems to be continually under attack, seems to be continually falling apart. And in my mind, one of the most important reasons to connect money is because it's a symbol of connecting life. The traditional marriage vows say, you know, we're together for life, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health.

And in my mind, money is the easy one to put together because that's what can happen right at the beginning. And it's hard for me to see how, now I know there are exceptions, it's hard for me to see how, if your relationship isn't together on money, which is a reflection of your goals, then how is it going to be together on how you spend your time?

And how is it going to be together, you know, when I'm 93 years old and I need a bedpan and a diaper and I'm sick and my wife is caring for me or vice versa. If the relationship starts and it's about me and we're together out of convenience, I don't see how it continues through the difficult times of sickness and in health.

Do you have any insight or perspective on that from your experience? Yeah, you got to ask yourself, is your marriage a covenant or is it a contract? Too many marriages are operating right now as business partnerships instead of covenantal partners. A covenant is a union. There is no separation in any aspect of it.

If you're in a covenant, everything you do is about the whole. Whereas business partners, business contracts, leave, have out clauses, have exit strategies, have isolation built within them. And too many people, like you said, are operating under marriage contracts instead of marriage covenants. And we need to be striving to that covenantal relationship that, like you just talked about, for better than for worse, because guess what?

You're going to experience both. And if you don't have covenant, those worst moments can tear you apart. But if you do have covenant, those worst moments can drive you closer together. It's my experience. My wife and I have been married for a little over three and a half years now, something like that.

And just in my experience, marriage is tough. And that's why it's very much driven by a philosophical and ethical and moral framework, which is something that we debate about on an ongoing basis in our society. But at least our experience has been that marriage is so challenging that without the framework of commitment and no exit point, it's not possible for it to continue.

My wife and I, we didn't come from a perspective of being deeply in debt. We didn't come from the perspective of a dramatic difference. But even for us, actually, even though I talk about money and whatnot, we did have a major challenge in that prior to our marriage, I had made some stupid business decisions and basically hadn't watched my expenses of my business carefully enough.

I'd hired a bunch of staff and spent all my money. And so by the time I got through with that expensive phase of my business, where I'd let my business expenses grow too high without the corresponding revenue, and then by the time I'd gotten through my personal experiences, and then by the time I had worked through just even the expenses of marriage, engagement ring, weddings, things like that, honeymoons, etc., I came to a perspective where coming into marriage, I didn't have a big, cushy savings account, which is really hard because I always imagined myself that I was going to be the rich guy coming into marriage.

I'm going to come in with hundreds of thousands of dollars of savings. And it was really humbling, really, really humbling to be Josh Rasheed's Mr. Financial Advisor. And I married my wife, who never made a lot of money, but she was always so careful and so frugal that she had a lot of money saved, and I had spent all of mine investing in my business.

And it's tough because it created in our relationship, it created challenges that for years we continued to work at. And I can't see how if our relationship were built upon love, if our relationship were built upon good feelings for each other, if our relationship were built upon any of those things, I can't see how it would survive.

For us, it wasn't built on that. It was built upon a commitment. You can use the word covenant. It was built upon, you know, I was told, I said, "Honey, if you ever leave me, I'm going with you, so don't even bother trying." And so then on that basis, then everything else flows and the love comes out of that, the good feelings come out of that, and the ability to work through things comes out of that because you've got no other choice.

And so I always struggle with giving financial advice to couples because people come at their relationships from such a dramatically different perspective. It's always a real challenge for me to figure out, well, do I just share my perspective and tell you how I view the world? Do I try to look at the world through your lens?

Money exposes the strengths or flaws of every relationship. But that's the point of marriage. It's to make you better. And so it would have been pointless for you to marry somebody just like you because you would have never got better. You would have got worse. And so what happens is we're married to people who are our opposites because they're going to make you better and you're going to make them better.

And what has to happen, no matter what the two backgrounds are, is you got to go through the process of making each other better. You got to have those discussions. We started with that. You guys didn't start with any debt, but there were still conversations that needed to be had.

The lines of communication needed to be open. You needed to dream together. You need to make a plan together how you're going to move forward. Now the wedding day is gone. Honeymoon's over. Okay, here's day one. What is our life going to look like? So it doesn't matter where you start.

What matters is that you both put in the work and that you're willing to come together with your differences, with your flaws and make each other better. I would disagree with you on one thing. It doesn't start on day one because day one, you're still fine. You're still right.

Right. Right. I remember when I was like 37, right before the first year where all of a sudden you start to say, Oh, okay. So the reality of life is that I'm living with somebody. Yeah, you're right. They have idiosyncrasies. I got to learn to deal with. Yeah, you're right about that.

So practically, let me ask you, one spouse is listening to this and I don't know whether it's husband or wife, but one spouse is listening to this and they're thinking, my relationship is just struggling and they want to start. What's the first step? What do they go home and do?

Have a conversation with your spouse, I would say. For us, it was prayer first. I had to go to God. We are Christians. And so I had to go to God to pray about my husband first before I actually started to communicate with him and have the talk and discussion.

And just be honest, be transparent. Don't be judgmental. When you go to your spouse, don't point the finger at them and find out or point out their failures or their flaws. I would first start the conversation just by saying, I know that I have not been 100% with whatever it is.

And then just ask for them just to listen and then wait for a response. Along those lines, while you're trying to get to that point, even maybe leading up to that conversation, maybe you can't do it right here today wouldn't be a good time for you to talk to them.

Also ask and look and self-evaluate. What are some ways that I can get better? What are some areas that I need to grow in? Because what happens is if you can get two spouses that are both working on themselves, the marriage as a whole gets better. And so as you're working on yourself, you'll probably come to realize how you can approach your spouse better or what are some things that you can do to be the example.

Maybe you're going to have to be the change that you want to see first. And that change could lead to a conversation like, well, why are you doing that? What's the point? Where are you trying to get to? And boom, there's an opportunity for an initial conversation just to get the ball rolling.

Don't expect an overnight fix because that's not, again, that's not what marriage is. Marriage is a process. And so what trials and tribulations do is it builds character, it builds perseverance. And so it comes again to make you better and embrace the process because again, it's a process. Don't just have one conversation like, oh, he didn't change.

She didn't change. I give up. That's not marriage. It's a process. And so it's going to take a lifetime of conversations. Ty and I still have conversations. We still don't see eye to eye on some things just because we're naturally wired financially different. It still takes conversations and it still takes compromise 10 years later.

You know what I mean? It's all, that's what marriage is, one big compromise. And so you're going to have to be willing to be patient and talk things through consistently and on a regular basis. I would add to that also, in addition to those things in the short term, having a united vision and spending the time to understand how to build a vision that includes all of the things that are important to each party.

It does my relationship with my wife no good if I just say, well, this is what I want to do and I'm going to go for it. It also does no good if I just say, well, honey, what do you want to do? Okay, let's just go for that.

This concept of the wishy-washy husband, honey, yes. I'll tell you one joke I can't stand is when people make the joke about, well, yes, dear, being the appropriate response in all situations and all circumstances for a husband. It's nonsense. It's not yes, dear. It's let's understand together what's important.

And my job is to make sure that our vision as a family is the appropriate vision that satisfies the needs and desires of everyone in it. And then building that long-term united vision and then orienting the money in line with that and making sure that the needs of each spouse are cared for and are united in that.

And so, you know, it's, I've had in my relationship with my wife, we've worked hard at this in the sense that I think a lot about vision. I think a lot about long-term. I'm obsessed with here are the goals. Here's the next step. Here's the plan. Here's where we're going to go.

Here are these types of things. My wife is very different. She's not, she's not that obsessive, you know, vision thing. She's much more in the present. She's not foolish. She's just much more in the present. And she thinks less about, well, these are all the directions I need to go.

But I know it makes a world of difference when I spend a lot of time asking and trying to encourage her, hey, write these, write down, share with me, write a journal entry. Here's a journaling exercise. Now give that to me so that I can understand and so then we can talk together and I can make sure that we're not just charging off after Joshua's great crazy ideas without making sure that as a family we're accounting for the needs of our family.

She goes back to the concept of teamwork. We both have a part to play. And again, it shows the benefits of you all being totally different because she needs you for vision and for goal setting and you need her for the details of today. She's the one that says, Joshua, that doesn't make sense.

We can't do that right now. My wife is the same way. My wife is the exact same way. When I have these big lofty ideas and I say let's do this or that, she's quick to tell me if this is a reality. Maybe not today, maybe next week, maybe a month from now.

But we both have a part to play. And as long as we're both playing to our strengths and we're both willing to hear and work with each other, we're both going to win. So tell it, you are earning an income now and Ty, you're at home not earning an income.

Do you make special provision for that in your budget somehow or plan for that? Because in many relationships, especially Ty, with your being at home, many parents, especially for their daughters, would say don't ever let yourself be in a position of where you don't have resources. Don't ever let yourself be in a position where you've got to depend on your husband for income because you're basically setting yourself up to get cheated on and abandoned and then you're destroyed.

Do you have any perspective on how you guys account for that fear in your marriage? Well, prior to us getting married, that's all I used to hear. People would tell me, "Oh girl, make sure you have your stuff on the side because you just never know." But as Tyler said, we went into marriage as a covenant, not as a business contract.

So I didn't go into marriage with an exit plan. So I don't want to go throughout our marriage with an exit plan. Now I'm not going to be foolish if I saw that my husband was doing some things that I did not agree with and it was red sirens going off, then yes, then I would definitely be put some type of money aside.

But no, that's not how I approach it. So I wouldn't advise someone else to do the same. That's the way we do it. We do it different. We just don't think about what if our marriage doesn't work. I think that that just are bad seeds to plant. And so it's just really all about us trying to get better.

We don't make provisions for disaster. We just don't. We make provisions for our future with the intent of having a lifetime together. And those are the type of seeds that we plant even in our finances. Again, we don't operate as if I have an income and she doesn't. We operate as if this is our income.

So from day one, one of the reasons that we've been able to make this transition for her to come home is we never lived on both incomes when we had two incomes. We built a life that was based on one income from the beginning. And so we used one income for our investments or entrepreneurial endeavors.

And so we were used to living on one income. And so when her mindset changed and she felt like she wanted to come home, we began to have children and she wanted to be at home with the kids. It wasn't a huge paradigm shift because we were kind of used to it anyway.

We still had to tighten things up a bit to make room so that that one income can also include saving and investing money. But it was because of the mindset that we have, our team, us, it wasn't a hard transition. You don't think it's a little bit of a naive approach?

Not for us because again, as Ty mentioned, our roots are biblical. And so when we decided that we were going to get married, we decided that we were going to be married forever. And so again, it's hard work. There have been low points. There have been tough times. We've been through it.

We know what it feels like to want to separate, to want to let things fall apart. But our foundation tells us we need to work through it. So maybe it is naive, but it's also biblical. That's really all that matters to us. One thing that we do in my family, and I want to mention it as just a practical tip for anybody who's listening to this show, I think it's important.

In my family, I earn the income for our household and I'm also the person who coordinates the bills and the check register and things like that. And I'm also the spender in the family compared to my wife, who is the saver. I'm much more easily influenced by, "Man, I want to buy this new gadget." I'm much more easily influenced by, "Man, this new thing over here." So when you start adding those things together, I earn the income.

I manage the monthly budget, manage the accounts. I'm the spender. And then you add to that the fact that I have a business and I run the business and there are expenditures that I may make in business that have a specific business function that I wouldn't make if I weren't able to earn money off of them.

So one of the things that I'm very aware of, and I think husbands, if they're in a situation like I am, need to be very aware of, that can lead to a real, I'm not sure the right word, imbalance of power, I would say maybe imbalance of influence. I don't like to think about marriage relationships as a power struggle.

One of the things I've learned is very important that I try to do is, because of those things, I try to make sure that I'm not a bully. And I'm also not even tight with the money that my wife needs to run the household and the money that my wife needs even for her own personal consumption.

Now it's got to be in arrangement to, it's got to be in comparison to the income of the household, but I try to make sure that she never has to come and ask me for money. And what I find, that's really, really beneficial because I know, number one, she is so thrifty and she is so frugal.

So in my mind, I want her to always have plenty of money lying around that she can do what she wants with so she doesn't feel like she has to come and say, "Ask Joshua, okay, Joshua, can I have money?" I think when spouses do that and if you're not communicating about a vision, if you're not coordinating your household together, and then if one spouse is pulling all the strings and has control of the purse strings, it can lead to what you described in that beginning time of coming and, whether it's husbands or wives, groveling to your spouse and asking for money.

Then you have a child-parent relationship. Which is not about a child-parent relationship, it's about my husband-my wife relationship. Absolutely. Yeah, I think it's key. The underlying way to avoid that imbalance, you just said it, is communication. Not only you saying, "Okay, so these are the numbers, these are the expenses, here we go." But it's also her saying, "Well, that's not quite enough." And it's not quite enough because I have to do this, I have to do that, I have to do the other.

It's a two-way process. Communication is a two-way process. It's not just the talking, but it's also the listening. And so if you have talking and listening going on, whether you're doing all the numbers, still as long as you're, when you get done talking about the numbers, as long as she's talking back to you with her input, then it's still teamwork happening.

What is wrong or what people, when they get out into left field, is just that when you just, the mistake we made at the beginning was tied to the numbers and just handed me the plan and say, "Okay, here we go." What has to happen is there has to be two-way communication.

So again, it's not ever going to be 50/50, but you guys are playing to your strengths. You are the number cruncher, you are the aligner. I mean, she doesn't know what the business expenses are because she's not operating in the business. That can't be her strength because she's not involved.

So her strength is looking at the money and you said she's thrifty, so she's able to stretch a dollar and make things work better. And what does that do? That frees up more cash for you to be able to market or do whatever you need to do with the company.

So again, it's you all operating as a team. Just don't, people have to not let themselves get caught up in operating or attempting to operate 50/50 because it's just not a reality and you're going to be frustrated, but you can't operate it as 100 and zero either. You got to have some type of balance and balance 70/30, believe it or not, is balance.

80/20 is balance as long as you're both playing to your strengths and you can win as long as you're both doing your part and you're doing your part well. So your website and your podcast is His and Her Money. Do you guys stay exclusively focused on these couples discussions or do you talk about other areas of finance as well?

Yeah, we talk about marriage, money, home organization. We're trying to help as many married couples as possible get on good financial footing because again, marriage and money are two tough things to put together. It's one of the leading causes of divorce. So if we can get a husband and wife together on the same page financially, we know that a lot of that stress, anxiety and downfall can be avoided.

And so that's our focus. We have the site, the podcast, the YouTube channel, all His and Her Money, Twitter, Facebook, wherever you want to find us. And we also share a lot of debt-free stories. We believe that every marriage, well every person in general should be debt-free. So we share a lot of debt-free stories on how people got out of debt in even a short period of time and what were some of the steps that they've taken.

Your voice alone, Talit and Ty, your voices alone, especially you Talit, makes me want to listen. You have such a cool radio voice. You got that deep voice, you got kind of the real soft accent. Thank you, thank you. Hopefully we can also get you on the show and you can share your story.

I'd love to. Absolutely. Yeah, I'd love to. Thanks so much for coming on guys. Hisandhermoney.com, His and Her Money podcast. Any other websites you need people to know about? You can also find us on YouTube at youtube.com/hisandhermoney. We have over 100 videos there. Again, getting this content, we learn, that people learn differently.

So we put a lot of our content in video format as well. So if you're more apt to learn through video, head to youtube.com/hisandhermoney. Cool. Thanks for coming on. Thank you for having us. Thanks for having us. Now that you heard the interview, you got to do something and do something in order to at least start the ball rolling with your spouse.

I hope that some of the ideas and discussions that we had maybe gave you some ideas of ways that you can more proactively interact with your spouse. I'll tell you, managing money together is not easy, but it is worth it because it allows us to be focused on the same goal together.

It makes all the difference in the world. It allows for synergy and us to work together. So Talent and Ty, thank you for coming on the show. If you are interested in checking out their stuff, hisandhermoney.com. Also they have a brand new project. Since it's been a while, I popped over to their website.

They have a brand new project, which is a community of people talking about this stuff called Smart Money Couples. So if you would like to join that community and talk with some other people about this particular topic, go to smartmoneycouples.com. Just notice they launched that. I want to help them with some publicity for that.

Smartmoneycouples.com. That will forward you through to a private Facebook group. Click join and I'm sure they'll approve you and you can interact with some other people who are working together on these topics. It might be a great resource for you, especially if you're having stress. I talk a little bit here and there on the show about this topic, but it's not a daily theme.

If you're having stress in your marital relationship as regards money, it's a daily source of stress for most of us. So go to smartmoneycouples.com and see if you can join their community. Thank you all so much for listening to today's show. If you would like to support the show and you would like to put a little bit of money in my pocket, that helps me immensely to cover the cost of the show, to cover the cost of going to FinCon and all of that stuff to get these interviews for you guys.

I'm able to do that because of your patronage. If you'd like to support the show directly, please go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. You will find all the information there that you need and I would love to have you supporting the show there. Thank you so much for listening and I'll be back with you soon.

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