Financial planning for couples: Get them to talk

By Susan Rupe

Life can get busy – especially for dual-income couples. So often, the busy-ness of daily life means that people live their financial lives by default, said Elizabeth Husserl. Husserl is a financial advisor and wealth manager who founded Peak360 Wealth Management in San Ramon, Calif.

“Life gets really busy, and we can end up living our financial life by default, like putting one step in front of the other, but not taking the time to design our financial life and our goals, and how we make bigger decisions,” she said.

The couples Husserl works with lead demanding lives.

“They're couples who are in the accumulating phase. They're building wealth. They're growing families. They’re buying homes. They're sending their kids to school. Some of them are dealing with aging parents.”

They want to take control

What prompts many of Husserl’s couple clients to come to her is the desire to become empowered and take control of their financial lives.

“They need help designing their financial life and understanding what's really important to them in the short-term, mid-term and long term,” she said.

Husserl said she always was interested in finance and mathematics. But she also loved to study human behavior and earned a degree in psychology. Her work in advising couples blends all those interests.

“Everyone has their own unique relationship and background with money, the different ways that we were raised with money in our family of origin,” she said. “When we put two distinct ways of being with money into one container to make decisions, it can get a little spicy, it can get a little explosive and we see a lot of the emotions that money brings. With both of my backgrounds, I can find the psychology of those I am working with and then use that to work on problem solving.”

Husserl said her job in working with couples “is to make sure everyone’s voice is heard.”

“We all see that each person has strengths they bring to the table, but they also potentially have some shadows and some obstacles that they bring. The more we talk about this, the more we understand the dynamics,” she said. “Personality traits really impact how we make decisions. The more we understand those personality traits, the better decisions we can make.”

Much of the advisor’s role, Husserl said, “is to help people not make bad decisions.”

“We can get really anxious when it comes to money,” she said. “By having someone to talk it through and see all the angles, we can help settle the emotion around it and make better decisions. I think advisors who have that psychological training or a knowledge of behavioral finance can help people make better decisions.”

They need a neutral party

Couples seeking financial advice “first and foremost, need to be heard,” Husserl said.

“They need they need a neutral container to share what's most important to them without it triggering an emotional response from their partner.”

Husserl said she asks each couple the same questions and makes sure both partners answer. She asks questions such as:

Are you feeling a particular way about money?
Is it triggering a memory from a parent or from something that happened to you?

“Because I’m a neutral party, I can ask the questions and the partner can witness it and realize, ‘OK, I now can make connections about my partner that I hadn't made before because when we're having these conversations, we're both equally and emotionally evolved. It's too heated.”

Husserl said our relationship with money “is just another doorway of knowing who we are.”

“When we turn toward it with that kind of perspective and curiosity, instead of being something stressful or something we fight about, we can open up a fascinating world of insight and meaning.”

Susan Rupe is managing editor for InsuranceNewsNet. She formerly served as communications director for an insurance agents' association and was an award-winning newspaper reporter and editor. Contact her at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @INNsusan.