Money is emotional long before it is mathematical.
I say that not as a theory, but from experience, both professionally and personally. Over nearly a decade in the financial industry, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with clients, business owners, and families who are intelligent, capable, and still making emotionally driven financial decisions. Not because they’re irresponsible, but because money has a way of touching everything beneath the surface. Our fears. Our insecurities. Our sense of identity. Our desire for control. It amplifies what already exists inside us.
For some people, money creates confidence. For others, anxiety. It can make us generous or controlling, content or restless. I’ve experienced all of those at different points in my life, and some of the clearest evidence showed up not in my career, but in my marriage.
My wife and I will celebrate our five-year wedding anniversary this Fall. I’m genuinely proud of where we are, but I won’t pretend the first few years were easy, especially when it came to money conversations (perhaps you can relate).
We had competing desires. Competing priorities. And underneath both of us were motivations we hadn’t fully examined yet. For me, a lot of it was the love of security (which I shouldn’t have been seeking from a temporary thing), maybe even a love of money itself dressed up as responsibility. I was striving to build financial stability, but some of it was rooted in control more than purpose. For my wife, some of it came from her upbringing, comparison, looking at what others had and feeling like we should be further along or enjoying more of life now. Neither of us was inherently wrong to want what we wanted. But we were both letting unexamined motivations do the talking, and it created real tension.
Arguments. Avoidance. Two people who loved each other working against each other because we hadn’t done the harder work of understanding ourselves first.
Morgan Housel writes that spending money well is an art, not a science. I’ve come to believe that’s true. There’s no perfect formula because money touches every part of being human (we’re all imperfect, right!).
Why do people with plenty still feel dissatisfied? Why do smart people make poor emotional decisions? Why do we spend money to impress people we don’t even know that well? Because the issue is rarely the money itself. The issue is whatever money is being asked to do. Provide worth. Signal status. Create safety. Fill a void. Prove something to someone. Mostly all heart issues.
Thankfully, my wife and I have both done that harder work. Our choices have grown more unified. Our fears have slowly turned into generosity. And our view has shifted from what can we accumulate toward how we can use what we have to love people well, create something meaningful, and build something that outlives us. That shift didn’t come from a better budget. It came from asking harder questions about ourselves.
That’s the real challenge, and it’s one that no financial plan alone can solve.
I know we’re not alone in our struggles. I’ve seen them over the past decade when I’ve been belly button to belly button with clients I care for deeply. And what I’ve learned sitting across from people in those honest moments is the same thing my wife and I had to learn in our household. Money doesn’t create the problem beneath the surface. It just makes it impossible to ignore.
