According to relationship charity Relate, money is the number one trigger of arguments for couples, while more than a quarter of couples questioned in the It takes two: the quality of the UK’s adult couple relationships report from March 2017 say financial worries put their relationship under pressure. Dealing with conflicting attitudes towards money is one of the biggest challenges a planner will face when working with a couple. 

“The reason those conflicts come up in the first place is because money stands for a number of things that are extremely personal, intimate and important to a client,” says George Kinder, founder of the Kinder Institute of Life Planning. 

Money can represent the hard work you put in to earn it, or it can represent the value of the personal contribution each individual feels they make to the economic security of the couple. Most importantly, says George, money represents the degree of freedom we each have to live the life that we most want to live – which he describes as our “dream of freedom”. These representations can often lead to feelings of strength and adequacy, or of inadequacy, within the relationship.

It may sound counterintuitive, but conflicting attitudes towards managing money can often surface between a couple undertaking financial planning because the discussion they have with their planner is about money. That, says George, who pioneered the concept of financial life planning, is not an appropriate focus – at least not in the early stages of the financial planning journey.
Money can represent the hard work you put in to earn it, or it can represent the value of the personal contribution each individual feels they make to the economic security of the couple Kathleen Burns Kingsbury, a wealth psychology expert who specialises in women and couples, agrees. “When the conversation is just about numbers, couples can get stuck,” she says. “If you can get them to talk about how they think and feel about money, and the values they are honouring with their actions, you might discover that they have shared values. If they don’t, a financial planner can at least help a couple to understand the underlying causes of their conflict and decide how to work towards a shared solution.”

Financial planners are practised in using their traditional toolkit, which includes exercises such as cashflow modelling and planning. But how can they get to a stage where the conflicts are resolved, and a couple is ready to crunch the numbers?

One of the first steps in effectively dealing with conflicting attitudes is for a financial planner to gain the trust of the couple. Levels of trust are likely to be low if, in the first conversation you have, you attempt to establish their psychology when it comes to managing money. The couple will feel that you’re patronising them, you don’t understand them or you’re trying to put them in a box, says George. 

Jumping straight to the money conversation also does little to build trust, particularly at a time when society as a whole has reservations about the financial services sector. The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer shows that a steady five-year rise in trust in financial services stalled in 2018.

The Trust Equation, developed by Charles H Green, founder of Trusted Advisor Associates and author of several books on trust, offers a guide for building trust. In it, credibility (your experience and designations), plus reliability (delivering on your promises), plus intimacy (your knowledge of your clients’ hopes and dreams), divided by self-orientation (your degree of self-centredness), equals your level of trustworthiness. The higher the self-orientation, the lower the level of trust you will command. This means you need to be a better listener than you are a speaker. 
Establishing prioritiesListening is a key part of the Kinder Institute’s EVOKE financial life planning process, in which trust is established during the first of the five steps: Exploration, Vision, Obstacles, Knowledge and Execution.

In that first exploration meeting, a couple should be speaking for 80% to 90% of the session and the key question a financial planner should be seeking the answer to is: if the financial planning process goes well, what is the dream life that it will enable them to lead?
If you had all the money you needed for the rest of your life, how would you live it?  George uses three questions to help each individual within a couple to identify this dream. First, if you had all the money you needed for the rest of your life, how would you live it?

The final two more serious questions are designed to sharpen each person’s thinking about what will give them the greatest personal fulfilment. If the doctor said you only had five to ten healthy years left to live, how would you live your life? Finally, if your doctor stuns you with news that you have an illness that has come to term and you have 24 hours left to live, reflecting on your life and dreams, what did you miss?
 
The three questions should be answered separately by each individual to ensure their answers are honest and not tempered by considerations for their partner. To achieve this honesty, it’s often useful to ask the couple not to share their answers with each other prior to the financial planning session.
How to manage tension between a couple during a meeting

George Kinder, founder of the Kinder Institute of Life Planning, says there are a number of simple things you can do to diffuse a tense situation between a couple during a financial planning meeting:

• Acknowledge the tension.

• Tell the couple that it's important to you, as their financial planner, to give each of them the freedom to describe their ideal lifestyle.

• Remind them that you want to help them find a way to live their dream life individually, and as a couple. 

• Ask each individual to give their partner free rein to express themselves.

• Reassure them that you will give each of them time to have their say.

• Stress that you are not there to take sides.

• Ask them to listen respectfully to their partner.

The answers are rarely to do with money, says George. They are more often to do with family and relationships, the values they wish they had lived by and achieving their creative potential.

George calls helping a couple to identify their dreams of freedom “lighting the torch”. They may have two completely independent torches, or they may overlap, but a planner’s role is to clearly identify each torch and plot the path towards delivering it.

“If the listening quality is good, at the end of the first meeting the couple is eager to work with you because you’ve listened to them both as a couple and as individuals,” says George. By the end of the second meeting – the Vision meeting – the couple is often on a high, having visualised what their dream life could be like. At this point, they should be encouraged to imagine living that life on a daily basis, while putting potential obstacles to one side. During this process, a couple will often work through their conflicting attitudes to money themselves because the dream is so appealing.

As a result of the EVOKE process, trust levels between a couple and their planner can increase multiple times, says George. In these instances, conflicting attitudes between the partners tend to shrink dramatically and they are much more likely to take the planner’s advice because they are confident that their planner’s greatest concern is that they live their dream of freedom. 
Identifying biasesWhile George warns against putting a couple in a psychological box too soon, understanding what personal biases each partner has can help a financial planner tailor how they create and present a financial plan. 

Kathleen, who is the founder of KBK Wealth Connection, based in the US, says those biases can often be found in an individual’s ‘money mindset’ – the sum of all their thoughts and feelings about wealth. She trains planners to establish their clients’ money mindsets through a list of 20 revealing questions, which include: What did you learn from your parents about money? How would you describe your comfort level talking about money? What is your biggest fear or concern about money?

“This is a great exercise to do with couples as they learn more about each other’s mindset and that can help them plan and communicate about finances more effectively,” says Kathleen.
People can broadly be split into two financial camps: preservers and creators of wealthShe believes no two money mindsets are the same, although a number of people have identified money personalities, which can help in understanding why people interact with money in the way they do. According to Courtney Pullen, a psychologist and adviser, and Kathleen Parks, an independent practitioner, people can broadly be split into two financial camps: preservers and creators of wealth. Their work featured in a 2005 article, ‘Planning for couples’, in the Journal of Financial Planning.

Others have come up with alternative categories. Dr Kathleen Gurney, founder and CEO of Financial Psychology Corporation, says people tend to fall into one of nine money personalities: entrepreneur; hunter, high roller; safety player; achiever; perfectionist; money master; producer; and optimist. Olivia Mellan, author of Money harmony: a road map for individuals and couples, identifies five major money personality types: hoarder; spender; money monk; avoider; and amasser.Managing tensionWhen differences in attitudes to money do lead to conflict between a couple, it can manifest itself in different ways during a meeting. One partner might be less forthcoming than the other, they might interrupt, scowl or even look in the opposite direction when their partner is talking. 

“At times of tension, pause, listen, share empathy and show that you’re really there for them and you really want both of them to live their dream of freedom,” says George. “This allows the couple to feel safe to explore the answers themselves. They know the answers, and what compromises might be there, much better than I do.” This is also a good moment to ‘relight the torch’ and remind the couple of the dream of freedom that they are working towards together.

Listening and empathising is not always easy, particularly if your instinct as a financial planner is to solve problems. Putting your own agenda – whether that be thoughts about landing the client, fees or payment structures – to one side can help.

It’s also important to be aware of the personal biases you might bring to the conversation. Kathleen encourages financial planners to go through the money mindset exercise themselves: “If you’re self-aware, you can get out of your own way and really be there for the client,” she says.

George advocates mindfulness as a tool to help with unbiased listening. It enables a person to let go of their thoughts and be in the present, heightening their levels of emotional intelligence and patience. 
It’s also important to be aware of the personal biases you might bring to the conversationCouples may unconsciously want you to take sides, so it’s important to be aware of when you’re identifying with one partner too much or know one partner better than the other. If that happens, financial planners need to acknowledge that they have lost neutrality, get curious about both partners’ perspectives and actively listen to each person in order to regain a neutral stance, says Kathleen.

Talking to other financial planners through study groups or working with a coach can help a planner to work through problems they might be having with remaining neutral. 
Embracing conflictIdeally, processes such as EVOKE will help a couple to work through their differences about money themselves. However, differences often can, and do, persist and one challenge a financial planner faces is helping a couple to draw them out before they can move towards a plan of financial security. This is difficult because we live in a society that is conflict avoidant and where talking about money is often taboo, says Kathleen.

She believes busting the top three myths about conflict can help. The first myth is that conflict is bad and should be avoided at all times. “Avoiding conflict means not resolving issues,” says Kathleen. “Conflict is healthy and an important part of a couple’s financial planning process. As a financial planner, you need to remind the couple that financial disagreements from time to time are healthy and can help to clarify goals and objectives.”

The second myth is that conflict has a winner and loser. Financial planners can remind a couple that the goal of conflict is to understand each other and not to win the fight. A financial planner can play a mediation role, teaching each partner to listen to the other.

The third myth is that conflict is an innate skill. In fact, engaging in healthy conflict is a learned skill, which financial planners have an opportunity to teach to couples. 

“My belief is that conflict is not a bad thing and when we work through it, we actually become closer to the person that we’ve worked through the conflict with, so it increases intimacy,” says Kathleen. “It also fosters trust, increases mutual understanding and is really something that provides value to a couple’s life and to their relationship with their financial planner.” 
 

The original version of this article appears in the Q3 2018 print edition of The Review. All members, excluding student members, are eligible to receive the quarterly print edition of the magazine. Members can opt in to receive the print edition by logging in to MyCISI, clicking on My account, then clicking the Communications tab and selecting ‘Yes’.

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