Generosity in relationships can help make financial decisions

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about generosity.

Not in the sense of charity, although Lord knows, we need to help alleviate suffering. I mean generosity in the relational sense. And what this means for our money.

In dealing with couples and their money, generosity doesn’t mean succumbing to things in which you don’t believe or want in order to create peace in the relationship. That is actually a level of control. And generosity isn’t accepting what someone doesn’t want to really give.

True generosity in relationships comes from exploring your own experiences with money, contextualizing how they enlarge or diminish you and working with your partner to overcome those habitual tendencies that redirect us from getting things we don’t want or not getting what we do want.

When couples have different money styles, they end up arguing about spending. The conversation is better spent on how those styles impact the relationship. The spouse who is anxious around spending might draft tight budgets as a way to take charge. The spouse who is arguably too free with their spending might choose to be unaware of their decisions as a way to avoid having to make any.

Does the spending spouse feel the budget or the budgeter is controlling them? Does the anxious spouse feel angry or lonely in feeling like they have to be the responsible one? These arguments invariably end up with promises of future concessions that neither party will ultimately keep.

Things go very differently when the anxious person shares what money fears they have. This allows a conversation around how realistic these fears are, what protections can provide safety and what mechanisms can help when anxiety is causing them to behave sub-optimally.

When the spending spouse consciously looks at what they are spending (rather than avoiding the subject), they can then prioritize what’s most important to them and come to an agreement on what is a reasonable amount of money to dedicate to those priorities. If the couple doesn’t agree on the priorities, then they can have a discussion around why.

The key in this scenario is to determine how to manage your own behavior rather than your partner’s. It is an act of generosity to understand how our behavior impacts others and to have a willingness to make small changes.

And be generous with yourself. As you look at the money choices you have made, don’t sit in judgment about them. Instead, evaluate them in the context of how you made your decisions and what drove you to those choices.

Be aware of the obstacles you faced for good decision-making. We make money choices that we think will increase our comfort, add to our status or bring us satisfaction, security or peace. We make some of those choices for reasons we might realize were not important to us. Some are good choices that turned out poorly. Be generous with yourself as you explore the motives behind your choices and your evaluation around whether you would make the same decisions again. The more generous you are with yourself and your partner, the better able you will be to reverse decisions sooner.

One of our clients bought a car he thought he would like without doing much research or even test driving it. After he bought it, he spent a lot of time justifying why he should like it. He spent time punishing himself for buying it. Once he got over this self-haranguing and became generous with himself for this mistake, we developed a strategy for nixing the car with little financial carnage by trading in his newish car for a used one he really loved.

Other clients were disappointed their children did not properly handle a financial gift, at least in a manner acceptable to their parents. But if the parents had conditions associated with the gift, then they should have drawn up in a contract because it was certainly not a gift. The parents wanted love and control and felt they ended up with neither. But if they were completely generous and gave without expectations, they might have ended up with one and not needed the other.

Generosity in our relationships is an expanding resource, not a diminishing one.

Ross Levin is the founder of Accredited Investors Wealth Management in Edina. He can be reached at ross@accredited.com.