Maddy Roche: [00:00:00] Welcome to Childfree Life by Design. Today, we’re talking about money and relationships and what it means for partners who are building a Childfree life on their own terms. I’m Maddy Roche, and in this episode, I interview a longtime friend, Bill Nelson, CFP® and certified financial therapist professional, who’s the founder of Pacesetter Planning, and he’s been working with couples since 2016. He helps partners navigate the intersection of money and emotions, combining financial planning with the psychological side of personal finance to build a strong foundation together. Whether you’re merging finances, working on your money mindset as a couple, or navigating tough conversations about money with your spouse or partner, Bill brings some really good human-focused framework to the financial side of partnership. And we dive into all sorts of things related to how to have the tough conversations to actually neutralizing the idea that differences are quite common among partners.
Intro: From Childfree Insights, [00:01:00] this is Childfree Life by Design, the go-to resource for building the Childfree life you want. Every episode gives you practical guidance, clear direction, and meaningful conversations to help you live intentionally and design a future on your terms. This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please consult your advisor before implementing any ideas heard on this podcast.
Maddy Roche: So Bill I’d love for you just to introduce yourself and your firm to our audience.
Bill Nelson, CFP®: Thanks so much for having me, Maddy. My name is Bill Nelson. I’m a certified financial planner, certified financial therapist. I started my firm, Pacesetter Planning, to help couples almost 10 years ago now which is kind of hard to believe. I myself got married just before launching my firm, I’ve had a large focus on working with engaged and newlywed couples, really since the very beginning. And over time, I’ve gotten more into the financial therapy side of things, helping couples get on the same financial page and figure out how to use their money to create their good life.
Maddy Roche: [00:02:00] Incredible. I think we all know that the actual execution of merging finances in relationships is intimidating. It’s clinical sometimes. It feels vulnerable. And I think, Bill can probably speak to this better than I can, but it remains one of the leading causes of relational stress among partners and divorce across the country. I have a stat here that says 40% of couples cannot accurately state what their partner actually earns. Bill, I’m wondering from your perspective what do you see as one of the more common problems couples face early on in the relationship they have with money together?
Bill Nelson, CFP®: Yeah. Good question. I think that, certainly the question about combining tends to come up pretty early. I think you bring up a good example, right? Before we get to the point of combining is just making sure we understand where everybody’s at. And particularly with a subject like money that is a hard emotional subject for a lot of people to talk about. Particularly if there are things like debt in the [00:03:00] picture or, the aspects of your financial situation that you’re not so happy about or proud of, it can be a really hard subject for couples to bring up. You typically think about talking about money in the same way that we would talk about having kids or religion, relationships with in-laws and what we want that to look like. That’s not something you’re gonna bring up on a first date. But by the time you get married, you all should kinda understand what the game plan is gonna be. But unfortunately, it’s an easier subject to punt in terms of the conversation than some of the other things that I just mentioned. Being able to have the conversations and then from there figure out tactically what we’re gonna do.
Maddy Roche: But I think both of those are real challenges. Yeah. And I think it’s so fascinating ’cause talking about the numbers is one thing. How do we make the numbers work? Who owns what? Who pays for what? But it’s the relationship we have with money behind the scenes that I think individually we bring into the relationship that we may not even ever address unless we have the help of someone like you. And so just for the audience perspective, the certified financial planning designation is the gold [00:04:00] standard in the financial planning world. There’s a deep amount of curriculum that folks have to go through, a big test, and years of experience to be able to get those credentials. But you come from the angle of also having a certified financial therapist designation. Can you tell the audience a bit about what that is and how that’s different?
Bill Nelson, CFP®: Yeah, absolutely, right. So, over a decade ago, a group of financial planners and mental health practitioners came together and saw that money was an overlapping area in both practices. People who are going through mental health challenges or traumas who are meeting with therapists who had real financial things to talk about and unpack, the therapists weren’t particularly well-equipped to handle. And financial planners like myself, who were dealing with couples fighting about money or past financial trauma and, I mean, I was flat-out trained, in my financial planning training program, like if a couple starts fighting about money, your job is to change the conversation.
Maddy Roche: There’s a group of people who got together basically to explore the link between the two,
Bill Nelson, CFP®: Explore working in between those two areas. I [00:05:00] use the term financial therapy in the same way like, physical therapy, occupational therapy, financial therapy. I am not a capital T therapist by any stretch. But I have a financial planning practice where I take some techniques from the field of financial therapy to work through, to help couples work through roadblocks that they’re having.
Maddy Roche: Over your 10 years, have you developed a philosophy around money conversations and the emotional conversation that goes along with it? I mean, what’s your perspective when you take on a new client in terms of where they may be and where they may be able to go with real work with a supporter like you?
Bill Nelson, CFP®: I think the first step is always to diagnose the starting point. Not a medical diagnosis, of course, but, to really understand what the friction points are and where they’re coming from. Are you both completely open to being open about finances with each other if you haven’t already been? Or are there roadblocks in that regard? If everybody has everything on the table, so to speak, then the question is to what degree are we combining if we are combining at all. What are the pros and cons of that? What are the [00:06:00] hesitations, the specific hesitations that you have around combining, and are there ways to work around that? Opposites attract is a common saying people say. There is a growing body of research that suggests that we do tend to attract our financial opposites. Whether that’s saving and spending issues, whether that’s related to risk management. One person being willing to be a little bit more risky with the finances and investments than the other couple, or even just differences in money histories and backdrops. The number of couples I talk to where money was a source of stress in their household growing up versus the other one where it was just never a thought. Those differences are common. And so I think, if you’re in that situation, know you’re the normal ones. The fact that you’re having these differences, is not inherently a problem. It’s actually, I would argue, quite normal.
Maddy Roche: That’s a beautiful reminder, I think, for everyone. ‘Cause I do think that people get hung up a bit where, to me, my relationship with money feels like it’s a values conversation. And so people who have a different value around money than I do, sometimes I [00:07:00] worry, could we work together on that? But what you’re saying is that that’s actually a really common thing to have. So it is okay to be different from your partner in terms of what we think about money, and how do you then begin to work with them?
Bill Nelson, CFP®: If we fast-forward and we think about what we want our lives to look like with our partners 30 years from now, 40 years from now, 50 years from now often, the vision is the same, right? The reason that couples get together and stay together is because, they have that shared vision, that picture of the life that we wanna build together. It’s only when we layer money on top of that and bring in the history and the money scripts and different biases and internal thought patterns that we have. That it gets complicated. And so I think the degree to which we can keep our eyes on that road ahead and really be able to connect the dots on where you are today financially, where we want your money to take you down the road and put together that step-by-step plan makes these conversations a lot easier. The analogy [00:08:00] I often give is, like, think about yourself driving a car. Rear view mirror in a car is there for a reason. It’s important. There’s a reason that every car has one. And the dashboard is important. There’s a reason that the dashboard is there in a car. You should be periodically reviewing what’s happened in the, like, where you’ve come from, what’s happened in the past, and what the metrics look like in the present. But if we’re driving the car and you’re only looking in the rear view mirror, or you’re only looking at the dashboard, not ideal. That’s a great way to create issues for yourself. Most of your time should be spent looking at the road ahead, and that just isn’t how we’re naturally wired, I think, to talk about a subject that’s very tempting for people to ignore.
Maddy Roche: I’ve loved getting to know you over this past decade because you talk with such eloquence around this, and then it’s just like light bulb moments of like, “Wow, yeah, you’re so right. We wouldn’t live life driving just looking at the rear view mirror.” And it also reminds me that this isn’t always the perspective financial [00:09:00] advisors take to client relationships. And I’m wondering, if you were an audience member, how do you know we should be working with a certified financial therapist and CFP® versus just a CFP®?
Bill Nelson, CFP®: That’s a great question. My lens through everything is couples, right? So I’m thinking specifically through that lens. I think, if there’s any sort of financial trauma, in the past, and I use that word pretty broadly would be a case, I think that would really strongly argue for it. If it’s a capital T trauma, that would be a case where I’d specifically be looking for a certified financial therapist who comes from the mental health side of things who is a true therapist. The more acute or specific or overwhelming the problem is, the more I think that someone like that is the right fit, at least in the short term. I often hear things from the people, like, who reach out to me, something to the effect of, “Money’s the only thing we ever fight about.” And so I think that to me is a really good compelling case where someone with that background would be a big help. Because those [00:10:00] situations are often easier to resolve than you might expect. Doesn’t mean it’s gonna be quick, doesn’t mean it’s gonna be effortless, but, those are fixable problems.
Maddy Roche: Yeah. I think this is just such a good reminder to recognize being in a long-term partnership, it’s like, it’s easy to say, “Oh, we’re just fighting about money.” And it’s like, no, I think to your point, we could be tripping over experiences we had as kids, traumas that we had as children or young adults, and we wouldn’t even know that unless we really gave time to explore it. So could you give a couple examples of just like what common things you see showing up in relationships nowadays that came from early adulthood or childhood?
Bill Nelson, CFP®: I think that the attitude on investing can really vary depending on what you saw of that growing up. For people who graduated in the middle of the 2008 market crash, their attitudes on what it means to take financial risks are a little bit differently for some others. To give you a [00:11:00] specific example that I’ve actually seen, like, every example I give, I always make sure it could apply to at least two couples that I’ve—
Maddy Roche: Oh, nice. Okay.
Bill Nelson, CFP®: I don’t like to put anybody on the spot. So I have seen this case twice. Somebody who really was gung ho to invest like every single dollar that came in, right outside of a bare bones emergency fund. The paychecks would come in, and immediately the money would get invested. Like they’re to the point where like there’s risks of overdraft in the checking account and, just like no, cash buffer at all, right? They were in good financial shape, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the bank account and the number of times that was an issue. And, we kind of explored why, and, one case it was in, I think it was somewhere in South America, and the other case it was somewhere in Eastern Europe. But both of the spouses who were instigating this came from childhoods abroad where hyperinflation was an issue [00:12:00] in their childhood. The value of the dollar a week from now is dramatically less than the value of the dollar today. So A, like neither one of them were particularly hesitant to spend money on things. Money comes in, we better spend it today. If not, it needs to grow. It can’t just sit in the bank account because who knows what tomorrow’s gonna bring. And obviously, right there, there’s reasons to why we might not expect that to be applicable today. So like, by talking through those things and understanding these things and understanding what this people in this case would need to feel safe and protected financially, like you can create a path forward.
Maddy Roche: And is that something that they knew going into the relationship, or was this something that you helped uncover?
Bill Nelson, CFP®: I don’t think it was, like, totally unknown, but, I think it can be hard in the middle of conversations like that. I’m not sure the person in question knew why it is they wanted to do that. But we were able to uncover it.
Maddy Roche: How would you encourage couples to explore their money stories outside of the room with you, like just over dinner?
Bill Nelson, CFP®: I have a handful of questions that I suggest couples ask each other. I think, “What’s the first [00:13:00] thing you remember about money from your childhood?” is an interesting one. The things that you anchor onto at like a young age. And I’d invite anybody listening to just think about, like, what is the first thing you remember about money growing up?
Maddy Roche: Almost always it’s a really specific story that people come up with. That can tell you a bit about your childhood and—
Bill Nelson, CFP®: Lead to bigger discussions.
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Maddy Roche: When it comes to, I mean, being in long-term [00:14:00] partnership with folks, what is your advice around merging and separating? Is it a one-size-fit-all or do you have quadrants people fall into?
Bill Nelson, CFP®: No. So no, this is me at my most useful and/or annoying, depending on your perspective. I believe that there is a right solution for every couple. There is a objectively a right way you should be aligning your finances, but it is not one size fits all. A couple years ago, I think it was 2022 or 2023 there was a study that came out of, I think it was Indiana University or one of their campuses that studied two groups of people. There was a group of couples who were told, “You are combining all of your finances.” And there was another group of couples that were told, “You are not combining any of your finances.” They looked at these couples over a few years. And every metric from relationship satisfaction to whether or not the couple stayed together to financial outcomes, like, I mean, every metric they looked at, combining things was better, [00:15:00] across the board. However, the problem with taking that and applying it to your family is that every couple who participated in that study was willing to be told what to do. The only people who were sitting down to go through this experience were people who were willing to be told, “You are combining everything. Is that okay with you?” And they said yes. In reality, I find that often one spouse has some concerns about that. If you look at those results and say, “Great. Good news. You know, we’re gonna combine everything,” and we don’t address the fears around why that’s the case. I think you’re running the risk of creating problems down the road for yourself.
Maddy Roche: Fascinating.
Bill Nelson, CFP®: I’ll give you a quick example of something I’ve seen in practice. And again, I’ve seen this multiple times. I’m thinking of a couple wives in particular who like really resistant to combining everything. Just really, really touchy. Like it was a touchy subject. Every time we talked about it, it was [00:16:00] immediately shut down. And the reason why it turns out is like each of them had a friend who had went through a divorce where the husband left and took money out of the accounts and left. There are legal ways to go about handling that. But in the short term, they were stuck. And so eventually like we realized, if it was okay in this case for each these spouses to keep separate emergency funds, like there’s always this pool of money that they and they alone have access to if they were to ever need it. In both those cases, they were willing to combine everything else. It was just that matter of if I ever needed that short term security blanket, not that I’m expecting to need it, but just in case, like it’s there. In working through that, that was fine. I’ve seen other cases where it’s the exact opposite. We have no concerns whatsoever combining all of our investment accounts, bank account, at least anything that you can combine. Like the day-to-day spending stuff, right? The credit cards, the checking accounts, that’s where a lot of money [00:17:00] fights tend to come up. And so like maybe you start by combining everything else other than that and seeing how it works. As long as you’re not using separate finances to avoid conversations that should be happening you can make it work.
Maddy Roche: I mean, financial infidelity is like a real thing. As you brought up those examples, my heart went out to the many different experiences and examples I’ve had in my own life of this happening to people. That you think you’re in this loving partnership, and all of a sudden one person has a lot more power and ability to put the other person in a horrific position. How do you as a coach and a financial therapist support those conversations? Like, what’s your advice?
Bill Nelson, CFP®: It’s interesting because it can just go in so many different ways depending on the couple in question. In a lot of cases like that, I think the default safe feeling assumption is to keep everything separate. I guess this is not maybe so relevant to your audience, but it’s the example that comes up closest to my mind. But like, in cases where one [00:18:00] spouse decides to stay at home with the kids, on the flip side, I’d argue that having completely separate finances in that situation is the worst thing you could do. ‘Cause then you’re essentially, always going to your spouse to ask for spending money. That can create a really weird tough conversation. So, I think it’s a tough line to walk, for sure. And I think to the question about financial infidelity, the way that I always coach couples through this is, it is okay to have some separate financial stuff, but there should always be financial transparency, there should not be financial secrets. It’s okay if we don’t combine our investment accounts. But there should be a way, like there’s enough technology these days where like you can log in and see your family’s picture in one spot, even if like you can’t literally access the accounts.
Maddy Roche: Excellent point. How do you coach around prenups?
Bill Nelson, CFP®: Great question. I think that in a lot of cases, there isn’t a strong necessity for them. If you all are in relatively equal financial footing coming into a marriage, I don’t view [00:19:00] it as a requirement. In cases where there are big discrepancies, you have the tough conversation, so then you never need to think about it. It’s not hanging over your head two years from now.
Maddy Roche: I’m a big fan of prenups. I’m no financial planner though. You just have to remember that people become very dark when things go dark.
Bill Nelson, CFP®: 100%. Absolutely. I think that people sometimes kind of view like, separate accounts as just the solution for that, and that, isn’t necessarily true. I think that regardless of what you decide, I think having the conversations about what would happen if is always a good idea.
Maddy Roche: And going back to your example of maybe one parent staying home, although we work with Childfree people exclusively here, I think a similar example is one person earns a lot more than the other. How do you manage those relationship dynamics in terms of power and respect?
Bill Nelson, CFP®: There’s a couple things that come to mind. I’m leaving the question of what we’re combining versus what we’re not kind of off the table here. I think it’s important that the lower income earner has a [00:20:00] financial job do. I think that there’s a risk, it’s a very common scenario I see where the lower income earner feels insignificant, like they’re not bringing anything to the table. Like, I think the degree to which that person can clearly point and say like, “Here’s what my income for the family is doing for our family. We’re using my income to pay the mortgage or we’re putting my income directly into savings and living off of the other spouse.” Like, you know, I think the degree to which you can give your dollars a job can really help with that. And the other thing I’d say is that regardless of the financial discrepancies whether it’s income or net worth coming into a marriage, I think it’s really important that when it comes to financial decisions, you both get votes. Regardless of what one person is making. Like, you are deciding we’re gonna spend our lives together and create this vision, like, you both need to get an equal say. I also see that a lot with couples who delegate a lot of the financial workload to one another. Like, I don’t view that as inherently problematic as a way to just split the [00:21:00] workload, so to speak. But both spouses need to know what’s going on. It’s okay if one person pays all the bills, does the investment stuff, but, like, the other spouse needs to know what’s happening and how to get into all that stuff if they ever needed to. And when it comes to decisions, that’s not something you can outsource.
Maddy Roche: Yeah. I’m thinking of that term like delegate, do something where like you don’t know anything about what’s going on. Again, that’s another scenario of just maybe it’s the age we are, but like I see that among different couples where one person is like, “Oh yeah,
