Marriage is a beautiful thing. And, it can be fraught with many challenges — not the least of which is figuring out how to manage money together. Which is why I’m excited about this week’s release of Starting Strong: Discovering the Good That Money Can Do in Your Marriage, a book I had the privilege of writing for Focus on the Family.
Dealing with the baggage we bring
No one enters marriage as a blank slate. Each person brings their money-related habits, hopes, dreams, past experiences, temperaments, and examples set by their parents. All of that can make it challenging to manage money as husband and wife.
Starting Strong addresses those challenges and more.
Setting a God-honoring course. The book opens with an encouragement to pray five prayers together that are about putting God at the center of a couple’s marriage and committing to unity. Before getting wrapped up in the many money decisions they’ll face, it’s important for couples to agree on the big picture — that all financial decisions will be oriented around honoring God and keeping their marriage strong.
Setting priorities. There are only so many things that can be done with money. It can be spent, used for debt payments, saved, invested, and given away. And that’s the order our consumer culture encourages. If the culture could speak, it would say, “Great, you’re making “x” amount of money. That means you can live here, drive that, vacation there. Spending comes first. And when spending comes first, debt usually comes second. Then, after all that spending and all of the debt payments, some might be saved, invested, and given away. But there isn’t usually much left over for those three priorities.
Far better to give first, save and invest next, and then see how much can be spent on housing, transportation, travel, and all the rest. And along the way, it’s best to have no debt other than a reasonable mortgage. That framework is so simple, so effective, so biblical — and so rare. If a couple will set their priorities that way, it will make a huge difference.Plan to succeed. A cash flow plan (a.k.a., budget!) suffers from an unwarranted bad reputation. People often think of it as something you “go on,” like a diet. But it isn’t something you go on, it’s a tool you use to proactively manage money. It’s especially helpful in marriage because it fosters teamwork and transparency. It enables a couple to put their priorities in motion and it keeps each person knowledgable about what’s happening with their finances.
Shared accounts also foster teamwork and trust. Not all accounts can be turned into joint accounts; an IRA, after all, is an Individual Retirement Account. But checking and savings accounts can be joint accounts, and even secular research shows that joint accounts are good for a marriage.Play to each other’s strengths. Temperament is a huge and under-appreciated factor in marriage. So many of the disagreements couples have are not so much about the issue they seem to be arguing over, but a clash of temperaments.
Temperament is how a person is wired — how they have been uniquely designed by God. It impacts whether a person prefers to make decisions slowly or quickly, how comfortable they are with risk, whether they are savers or spenders, and so much more. Each temperament comes with inherent money management strengths and weaknesses. By understanding each other’s temperament, couples can learn to maximize each person’s strengths while navigating around their weaknesses.
All of this and much more is covered in Starting Strong.
If you are engaged or newly married, or if you know someone who is, pick up a copy at Amazon or Christianbook.com.
Help and hope
My prayer in writing Starting Strong is that it will be a great help and encouragement to countless couples — that God will use it to help couples manage money in ways that glorify Him, foster unity in their marriage, and free them to make the difference in this world that God brought them together to make.
