How Do You and Your Partner Talk About Money?
The connection between finances and sexual satisfaction.
This fall, Julia and I are publishing two Substack articles per week that provide ideas for how you, your partner, and those closest to you can most effectively communicate and make decisions that work best for your family system. Please subscribe and donate, so that we can continue to write these articles:
Current Polls on Key Issues
Last week, YouGov and The Economist released a poll in which they interviewed 1,567 voters about a variety of topics, including:
Jobs and the economy
Immigration
Climate change
Civil liberties
Crime and criminal reform
24% of participants identified inflation and prices as the most important issue, with this view shared by 29% of women, 30% of individuals earning less than $50K per year, and 34% of those who lean independent. 13% of participants cited jobs and the economy as the most important issue.
That’s three out of every eight voters who say that something related to finances—either the regulation of prices or the capacity to sustain or increase income—is the most important voting issue.
Apparently, inflation is under 3% for the first time since 2021, and the Federal Reserve has stated that its overall goal for price increase is 2%, leading Politico’s Sam Sutton to write on Wednesday, August 14:
“The latest data signals that the greatest threat has shifted from price spikes to the overall health of the economy. Bringing down prices remains a priority, but Fed policymakers are increasingly attuned to how two years of high interest rates have affected consumers — particularly those with low or moderate incomes — as well as businesses and the labor market.
Those shifting dynamics will require an adjustment in how Harris and other Democrats pitch voters on economic policy.”
Our Focus: Communication in Decision-Making
It’s here that I want to send an emphatic reminder: Neither Julia nor I are financial experts. I have no idea how the Federal Reserve sets inflation rates, and even if I tried to learn, most of it would go over my head.
Our expertise lies in communication, relational and sexual health, and family dynamics. And as such, we’re much more concerned with how couples make decisions about money, including:
Income flow. How do individuals in a family system make money?
Consumption. How do couples decide what to buy, communicate spending decisions to each other, and manage financial structures like joint checking accounts to support these choices?
Credit decisions. How do couples decide on purchases, like homes, cars, or furniture, when they don’t have cash available at the time of sale?
Savings and investment. How do couples make financial decisions that reflect how they’re thinking about their future? (And, to what extent are they even able to save?)
Financial Management and Relationship Health
Finances are one of three topics (along with sex and substance use) that couples commonly don’t discuss.
Marianne Hilgert and Jeanne Hogarth remind us that 66% of people are able to name specific cash management strategies, 45% of people have credit strategies, 33% have savings strategies, and 19% have investment strategies. While they recognize that the amount of folks living paycheck to paycheck may not have the capacity to develop longer-term financial strategies, there are still a plethora of people who lack explicit financial strategies, let alone knowledge about how these financial structures operate.
Everyday Financial Decisions
Over the last few months, we’ve posed the question: “What if the Democratic Party spoke overtly about family and relational health?” And part of that is discussing more about decisions that everyday Americans are actually making, as opposed to broader, abstract topics, such as inflation.
So what everyday decisions are families making?
Jeffrey Dew, professor of family studies at BYU, and Jing Jian Xiao, professor of family finance at the University of Rhode Island, give us a starting place in their 2011 construction of the Financial Management Behavior Scale, which they initially published in the Journal of Financial Counseling and Planning.
With the assistance of a nationwide sample of financial advisors and the feedback of 1,000 participants, they determined that couples and families are making the following fourteen financial decisions that impact relational functionality, quality, and sustainability:
Paying bills on time.
Keeping a financial record of some sort, be that a budget, expense report, or at least routinely checking their income/expenses through their bank’s online portal .
Staying within the budget or other strategies for determining financial means.
Paying off their credit card. (Assuming that a person has credit.)
Maxing out their credit card. (With the assumption that maxing out credit cards increase financial burden.)
Making at least a minimum payment on loans.
Creating and maintaining an emergency fund, which may or may not be different from a savings account.
Saving from every paycheck.
Saving for retirement.
Saving for other long term goals, such as a down payment for a home, vacation, or family planning.
Investing money, either directly through the stock market or in an account that grows, such as a brokerage account.
Obtaining and maintaining adequate health insurance.
Obtaining and maintaining adequate property insurance. (This includes car, renter’s, homeowner’s, and professional insurance.)
Obtaining and maintaining adequate life insurance.
Financial Management Behavioral Scores (FMBS) were based on the self-reported clarity of a person’s strategy for addressing each of these 14 issues. Self-reported assessments have limitations, like unaddressed bias and privilege, as Dew and Xiao acknowledge. Many people may struggle to make decisions about saving or life insurance due to factors like low minimum wage, disability, barriers to sustainable employment, and generational poverty.
However, they observe that, in general, the higher that a person’s score was on the FMBS, the less debt and more savings that a person had, and the less financial stress that a person reported.
The Connection Between Finances and Sexual and Relational Health
Ten years later, Dew and colleagues at BYU interviewed 1,447 young heterosexual couples to examine the link between financial management strategies, perceptions of economic pressure, and sexual satisfaction. They chose heterosexual couples to assess gender expectations around financial roles like earning, providing, and spending. Interviewing couples in newer relationships was also strategic, as they often face initial disillusionments and conflicts related to financial discrepancies around 2-3 years in. We'll explore these issues further on Thursday.
They wrote an article called “The Budget and the Bedroom: Associations between Financial Management Behaviors, Perceptions of Economic Pressures, and Sexual Satisfaction,” published in 2021’s summer edition of Journal of Financial Therapy.
A quick note: Sexual satisfaction is difficult to measure due to its subjective nature and the diverse ways individuals or couples define it. Self-reported surveys struggle with this, as people often have unrealistic, socially constructed expectations about sex and gender performance, which can lead to unfairly blaming partners for unmet expectations.
With that said, for both men and women, when partners have individual and relational positive financial management strategies, they also were likely to have higher levels of sexual satisfaction.
In sex therapy, we talk about the concept of parallel process. The way a couple communicates and makes agreements about their sexual relationship mirrors how they communicate and make agreements about other aspects of their relationship, be that finances, parenting, or navigating families of origin. Dew’s research reinforces this idea in real time.
Back to the Democratic Party
On Thursday, August 15, the Biden-Harris administration announced that it made deals with pharmaceutical companies to drastically reduce the prices of ten different drugs.
reports:“The new prices offer discounts of from 38% to 79% off list prices. The new prices would have saved the government an estimated $6 billion last year if they had been in effect. About 9 million people take those drugs and will save about $1.5 billion out of pocket after the new prices go into effect on January 1, 2026.”
On Friday, Vice President Harris is slated to propose elements of her economic agenda. Nicholas Nehamas and Jim Tankersley give us a preview in a 8/15 NYT article:
“The vice president will also propose a more lucrative credit for parents in the first year of a new child’s life. Taken together, those plans would slice heavily into the projected $3 trillion of deficit reduction in Mr. Biden’s budget, unless Ms. Harris plans more tax increases or spending cuts than Mr. Biden proposed.
Other proposals could also cut significantly into Mr. Biden’s proposed deficit savings — or erase them entirely — by increasing federal spending. To address the national housing shortage, Ms. Harris plans to call for the construction of three million new housing units in the next four years, an increase from the two million new homes that Mr. Biden promised during his re-election campaign.”
These are fantastic macroeconomic ideas that ultimately seek to make products such as housing, medicines, and family planning more affordable.
My hope is that Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and others in the Democratic Party have strategies to translate how these macroeconomic ideas help individual families navigate the real-life microeconomic issues that they face, such as the fourteen items listed above.
In the Meantime:
Take some time this week to assess for the following:
Check out the 14 items from the Financial Behavior Management Scale with your partner.
Start conversations that cover:
What systems do I have in place to address each of the 14 items?
What barriers can I control that are preventing me from meeting the 14 items
What existing resources can help me create processes to manage the 14 items effectively?
While Julia and I are not financial advisors and cannot provide specific financial advice, we specialize in helping couples solve problems and collaborate effectively. If you want to learn more about working with us, please email us at sexvangelicals@gmail.com.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia
Maybe it's because my husband and I are both anxious about money, but I'm always shocked at the numbers of people who don't have financial strategies or even budgets. 😬
Great point about democratic party needing to address family health