Have you recently caught financial independence fever? Or maybe like I did you hit the point where you realized you need to change your spending and increase your income. That’s great. But that doesn’t mean everyone in your household will have the same epiphany at the same time. Andy Hill is the host of the Marriage, Kids and Money podcast and he joins us to share how he got his wife interested in working towards financial independence and how he got his children learning some great money habits to.

Welcome to the Maple Money Show, the podcast that helps Canadians improve their personal finances to create lasting financial freedom. Borrowell’s mission is to help Canadians make great decisions about credit. To do that, they’ve taken a product that used to be $23 a month and made it totally free. To get your free credit score, free credit report and continual monitoring, head over to maplemoney.com/borrowell. Now let’s chat with Andy…

Tom: Andy, welcome to the Maple Money Show.

Andy: Thanks so much for having me Tom.

Tom: I know you’ve kind of gone through this and I have a bit too. You get this new idea to deal with your finances and you’re married so you have to get as a spouse onboard. Can we go right to the beginning of that? What led you to make this decision in the first place?

Andy: I guess the first thing that pops in my head when you’re thinking about making these financial changes is when I talked to my wife about eliminating our debt. This was just after when we got married. We found out we were having our first child. And something clicked in my brain where I thought, “Oh, I’m not just living for today. I’m not just living for myself anymore. We are literally creating a human and we are responsible for that human for the rest of her life.” Something happened in my brain and I decided I needed to start acting like an adult. I needed to start taking care of our finances. The first thing that came up with the finances was what I could do better with my finances to give my daughter a great life? I started to consume a lot of personal finance media. I was watching Susie Orman and watching her talk to, giving them grades on how they’re doing and everything like that. Then I picked up Dave Ramsey’s, Total Money Makeover. It was really after I finished that book that I got super excited about becoming debt-free. It was the only way. This was how we were going to have to do it. I remember my wife coming home from work one day. I met her at the door and said, “Honey, we’re going to become debt-free and today we’re going to sell your car.” What do you think about that? Let’s just say it didn’t go very well because what I thought in my brain was—it was as if she read the book with me. But really, she didn’t. I read the book and I came up to her assuming that she was just going to be right onboard and it sounded great and that was one of the first real money fights of our marriage. That kind of kicked things off right there. I didn’t really start off the conversations all that well I guess.

Tom: I know. I think our stories are very similar right down to getting married. We didn’t take long to have a kid right after and going from both of us being very natural spenders to where all of a sudden I had flipped and decided we couldn’t do this anymore. We need to do to stop spending. We didn’t have a lot debt but we still needed to pay off what we had. It was very similar where I had read all these books, magazines and blogs too. I just kind of sprung it on her. I don’t remember exactly when. I didn’t tell her that she had to sell her car in the first conversation. We did eventually do that though. We had two cars. Once we had our first kid she stopped working so it was more for that reason. We realized we didn’t need the second car. There are some times I would love to have a second car but it just seems to work a lot better to skip that expense.

Andy: That’s actually where I eventually got around to. It’s funny you said that was similar to your experience. I came at her with the actions and the numbers saying, “Hey, let’s become debt-free. Let’s sell your car. Let’s reach zero in our debt.” Those were all numbers and they were exciting to me because I’m kind of an internal money nerd. But for her, she’s more about the emotional side of things. What does that mean? Why would I do that? That sounds uncomfortable—getting rid of my car and then living on less than we make? Why? And it wasn’t until I had those conversations with her about what her internal motivations were… And to your point, she was working at a job she really didn’t like and she was pregnant. She was looking forward to some opportunity in the future to maybe be able to stay at home with our new daughter and our future children. Once I kind of realized that I tried to start speaking her language, “Hey, sweetheart. If we live on a budget and pay down all this debt and decrease our expenses, you’re going to be able to stay home with the kids.” That’s kind of where I got her a little bit more interested. It wasn’t the numbers. It wasn’t the goal which is where my brain was. It was the emotional side of things.

Tom: That’s a good point. I guess I eventually got there but it took me a while. I think we’re pretty similar that way. How was your debt then? Did you have a lot of debt? Was this a big turnaround?

Andy: I don’t know what yours was but ours was about $50,000 and about $30,000 of that were my student loans and about $20,000 was her car. It wasn’t a bunch of credit cards or things like that. We were pretty responsible in our youth. We were still having fun. I liked to use my home equity line of credit almost like my credit card which was very dangerous. But I built that up to about $10,000 as well. We were able to pay that off when we got married. But at this time when we were having this conversation it was the $30,000 of student loans and her $20,000 car loan.

Tom: Mine was a bit less. I don’t remember the exact amount but not much less. Thankfully, I didn’t have any big student loans. I went the college route and I don’t think my student loans even hit $10,000. That made it a lot easier. So you guys got this paid off. What did you do after you paid off the debt?

Andy: I kind of got excited about these financial goals. It didn’t really come out of my brain where I was saying we’d paid off the debt and hit this milestone. Once we did that we were able to pay off that debt and she was able to go from fulltime to part-time and then eventually to fulltime stay-at-home mom. We accomplished that family goal which was great. When we had our second child that’s when she was able to go fulltime. But at that point, we were already kind of used to living on about half of our income. And I made the proposal to her that if we could just keep living on half of our income, not only can we pay the debts off, we could also pay our mortgage off in something like five years. So why don’t we just keep up the same intensity and be completely mortgage-free in less than five years? Again, she came back to, “Okay, but why? What’s in it for me?” That’s okay because, of course, it’s going to cause a little bit of deprivation. My conversation to her was, “If we do this then we’ll be able to go on more vacations, have more fun, finally decorate this new house that we were able to buy together and maybe I can push towards some work that I love and some things like that.” Again, when I was able to talk to her on the emotional side of things—the things that were important to me and my dreams… And, actually, the important things to her with her dreams on developing a home and going on vacations. That’s again, where we were able to kind of work arm-in-arm again to do another crazy thing like pay off our mortgage. That was the goal we went after together and we partnered together for the next four years, meeting every month for our budget party to look over the numbers and see where our expenses are and where we are and our goals. We were able to pay off the mortgage in less than four years with that partnership.

Tom: You mentioned budget parties. That sounds a lot more fun than anything we do around budgeting. Can you go into that a little bit?

Andy: Yes sure. Again, I have a sales and marketing background so this is me trying to essentially spin to my wife that budgeting is a lot of fun. So if I just put the word party at the end of it then I thought she might show up. No, that’s—

Tom: Like a Tupperware party.

Andy: Yeah, exactly. A Tupperware party. That sounds like a lot more fun, right? I gave it this kind of sly name. But what we do is get together at the first of the month and do a few things. We review our spending from the previous month and see how we did. We plan out our spending for the next month. We review our goals together. And then lastly, we talk about things that aren’t associated with money at all like what’s coming up in the month? What birthday parties are we going to do? What weddings are coming up? What night are we going to do date night? Because we always want to make that happen. So we kind of combined the finances as well as the family and marriage planning all into this one get-together. In order to make it fun we use automated programs like Mint to help track everything and make it easy so we’re not messing around with paper and spreadsheets. We bring a cocktail into it or a glass of wine, beer or something like that so we can relax. On a beautiful day we’ll sit outside while the kids ride their bikes and we get it done on a beautiful day. We’ve even taken our laptops to a restaurant and break out the receipts and do it there. We try to do it in a way where it fits in with our lifestyle and also try to make it a little bit of fun. It’s a little bit unjust for her which is fun because she doesn’t love it. But she’s come to love it over time because what those things do is help us to plan the things that excite her. We have a set amount of money each month now for her to decorate her new house. She gets really excited about what she’s going to plan and what she’s going to do. And that sort of meeting has allowed her to get excited about budgeting and doing these big things together. It’s been a big plan and our and our marriage and we’ve done it since we got married about eight or nine years ago. We’ve been doing it since then.

Tom: It sounds like a great way to communicate in general let alone the money side of it. You said you’re doing this once a month?

Andy: Yes, once a month on the first of the month. We try to plan it for two to three hours when we’ve got some separated time away from the kids because the kids won’t let us. We’ve got a 7-year-old and a 5-year-old and if they’re around all attention is on them so we try to do it when the kids are sleeping or doing something else. We’ve even gone to a kid’s play place where they’ll run around in a playground and we’ll sit there with the laptop and get it done. We do it once a month and it’s been really helpful for our marriage.

Tom: Speaking about this idea communication, how do you suggest people should communicate? One of the things that come to mind is making sure you’re being respectful. What are your ideas on how a husband and wife can communicate better around this kind of topic?

Andy: I think a lot of it has to do with our emotions and being able to share those effectively. We’ve definitely had our fair share of money fights in our marriage and usually the time we do is when we get a little bit accusatory or thinking, “This is why they did that thing with the with the purchase,” or, “This is why he wants to save more,” when, in fact, if we really look into it and share our emotions around why we do things it becomes a lot easier. For example, let’s just say (and this is hypothetical) my wife Nicole comes home with a purchase that I’m not excited about or didn’t fit in-line with the budget. If I come up to her and ask her a bunch of questions about it in almost an accusatory way, she’s going to get very defensive. She’ll say, “Hey, I’m just trying to live my life and enjoy myself. Back off. I don’t want to feel like I’ve got somebody on my back all the time.” But if she’s able to share, emotionally, how she’s feeling, instead of us getting into a fight she could say, “Hey, when I’ve purchased something and you start barking at me like I’ve done something wrong it makes me feel like I’m not an independent person.” That’s a little easier than just like calling each other names. And then on my side, I can do the same, “Hey sweetheart, when you go out and buy things that are above and beyond our budget it makes me feel like you’re not respecting the time that we spend during our budget parties where we’ve figured this out.” Then we can come together and talk about both of our feelings during this episode and try to figure out where we can meet in the middle. If she’s really excited about purchasing something in the future and it’s outside of our budget range then that’s a time that maybe we should have a meeting or send a text or something like that. That way we can kind of figure it out together. We’ve definitely done the opposite where it’s like, “Hey, I don’t want to buy that and you do. You’re a princess and I’m a… she would call me cheap or something like that. When we get into the name calling that’s when it gets in a bad way. But if we’re able to sit down and effectively communicate—and a big part of it (if you’re a young parent) is trying to separate that time so you can actually speak to each other. If you’ve got a kid hanging on your leg when you’re having these serious conversations, it does not go well. Even if you don’t have kids, put away the phones for these serious conversations. Put away the distractions. Don’t look at the TV. Look at each other and take serious time to talk because as you know money fights can be a major cause of divorce and you’ve got to act like your marriage is the most important thing because you’ve committed to it for your whole life.

Tom: For sure. I had the same issue with accusing around spending. I know you mentioned this house decorating portion of the budget but going back further when you were trying to fix your finances, did you still keep a certain allotment for each of you? Sort of “no questions asked” spending money?

Andy: That’s a great question. Something we’ve been talking about a lot lately too is whether we need separate accounts for each of us to have this “no questions asked” money. What we’ve been doing is we’ve been doing it as a budget line item for quite awhile. We have a few of them and one of them is called Nicole’s fun money. Another one’s called Andy’s fun money. And then we also just have a random one on the bottom called, whoops! Because stuff happens. Maybe I’ll get a parking ticket or something. Things happen throughout the month that you want to cover. Through trial and error we’ve also developed other categories that are really important to both of us. Something that’s really important to her is to be able to go out and have drinks with her girlfriends during the month. And it’s important to me to meet up with my guy friends and grab lunch or grab a drink. So we have line items for those things in our budget that are called out so there is no issue anymore. Having the line item for her to get her hair done when she wants we periodically put that in there as a as a line item. We have talked about physically separating it so it’s in separate accounts versus just budget line items. And I’ve brought that up to her wondering if maybe she’d like this. I want her to feel like she has the autonomy. I don’t want to feel like I’m putting my thumb on her especially since she’s a stay-at-home mom and I’m working. I don’t want her to feel that I’m telling her what to do. But surprisingly, she doesn’t want to do that. She really likes the way we have it now and that there’s a budget line items. Again, I think we’ve developed these through trial and error. We didn’t always have all of the great line items. But now that we have grown in our relationship we’ve found out what’s very important to both of us and included that in the budget. It’s been an evolving budget over the time but that’s really helped us.

Tom: I like the idea sort of resetting your budget line items as you go instead of this idea of a set budget that’s not adjusting for life. One thing that we have found to work a bit—I’m actually not personally a huge fan of budgeting for myself. I still recommend budgets to all sorts of people but we just found it a little too restricting as long as we’re still controlling our money. So what we did to kind of keep the spending under control was set how much spending money we had every month, period. The idea of that was actually to encourage saving money where we can. If you can spend less on groceries then you have more spending money. The whole big pool of money every month isn’t questioned now. It’s got to cover mostly necessities. But what’s left, spend it.

Andy: I like that a lot. And for all of these things the gurus out there, the personal finance experts, would say this is the way you have to do it. You find the way that works for you and your wife and stick with it and move forward because everybody’s marriage is different. That works well for you guys. This works well for us. Find what works for you. Maybe it’s through trial and error, but find what works for you over time. We’ve been married for almost 10 years and it’s taken us about 10 years to figure it out and I’m sure we’re going to continue to learn more throughout the process.

Tom: I think limits are certainly necessary. One thing that was not working for us was we had certain budgets for everything like groceries and whatever else. What would happen is we’d have these oopsies. If something was considered a necessity that was putting us way too far over the budget… maybe suddenly one of the kids needs new shoes or we’ve got to put them into swimming lessons or something, we weren’t keeping track of it so that’s why we coming around to this idea more lately that it’s all got to fit in this certain pool of money. The we can see where we end up at for spending money within that month. But yeah, whether it’s full-on budgeting or by half-way budgeting we’ve certainly found success by at least making sure there are limits instead of saying you have $200 to spend and the rest is all on necessities. All those necessities can add up pretty quick. How many children do you have?

Andy: We have two. We have a 7-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy.

Tom: How have—I was going to say, how have they gotten in the way but that’s not what I’m going for. How have they changed your ability to keep striving towards reducing the spending and staying financially independent?

Andy: The reason I started paying attention my finances in the beginning was because I was becoming a father. My kids have only enhanced my life. Everything that comes from being a father—I mean, they cost a little bit more. We’ve got to save for college. We’ve got to pay for the swimming lessons. We’ve got to pay for extra food and things like that. That’s the most important money I’ll ever spend and I’m going to figure out a way to cover that. When I think about how if they inhibited the plans, I don’t think they’ve inhibited the plans at all, really. I just see it as the cost of being a father. The opportunity to become a father, the table stakes for becoming a dad. That’s really what I’ve wanted. I’ve wanted to be a dad for so long. It’s so important for me to be a father so it really brings the most joy in my life. I’m excited about it. I’m excited about being a parent that loves his kids who is also on his path to financial independence

Tom: Does it really just go back to budgeting? There are all sorts of extra expenses but it’s just a just a matter of being ahead of the game.

Andy: We factor it in. For example, we’re planning the summer. Zoe’s always been interested in doing tennis so we want to give it a shot. We to have her learn some life skills that she’s interested in so that’s going to be another $100 a month. What aren’t we spending on in order to make that happen? Can we dial back the weekend entertainment so our daughter can learn a new skill? Sure. We’re lucky enough to be making six figures plus so it’s not like I’m scraping by. There are a lot of folks out there where it’s a very big luxury to be able to have your kids do all of these extracurricular activities. And I feel very blessed to have that opportunity. We are going to be making some transitions over the next couple of years and maybe we won’t be able to live on six figures and still figure that out. There is always an opportunity for us to look and decide what is a top priority in our life right now. Are we going to be able to do kid birthdays with themes this year or next year when we’re not making as much money? Or are we going to be able to take that out? Those are just little things that if we allow our kids to get used to (as the norm) then they’re always going to expect it. But we’ve had a lot of conversations with our kids and we’re open and transparent with them about why we spend money and what’s important to us, and that all of these things do cost money. And I think if we continue to have those conversations with them they’ll be on the journey with us. They’ll get it. They’ll understand. At least I hope they will.

Tom: Once again, it’s very similar where I’m not sure—I’ve said this in past episodes too but I’m not sure if I’m fully teaching my kids about money as well as I want to. I think they still find it a bit magical that you can whip out a credit card and they can get toys. I’m trying to close that gap a little bit by giving them chances to earn money now and buy their own things. It seems like when we’re new parents, granted, we were a lot worse with their finances because that’s when we’re just starting to turn things around. When we were new parents they were so many toys and all the time we started to reduce that. I’d still like to reduce it more. Things like birthdays and Christmas. We would buy those toys and then the rest of the extended family would buy them so many toys. I’m a little concerned when you bring up how to teach your kids about this. We’re finding a little bit of trouble there. Your kids are about two years younger than mine. Do you find that you’re dealing with this? How do you teach them this?

Andy: Something we started a couple of years ago is a chore reward program at our house. Every Saturday we get up, the kids each have three chores to do at our house in order to contribute. For those three chores they get a dollar for however old they are. So Zoe gets $7 and Calvin gets $5. All the chores are age appropriate. My 5-year-old will help me go around the house and empty the waste baskets. I’ll hold the bag and he’ll dump it and or vice versa. We’ll do it together. Or he’ll empty the dryer and throw things in there. These are all age appropriate activities. But the point is they’re learning that with contribution you get reward. And that’s just sort of how we want them to understand how life really works. You do hard work and you get paid for it. Afterward we take that money and separate it into three different jars. One is spend, one is save and one is give. We have conversations around each of those. With spend; want them to make smart money decisions with that money. It’s different for each of my kids. My Zoe loves the spend jar so much so talking to her about giving is a little bit more difficult. The conversation around giving for Calvin is a little easier. He likes to save. And with me being the saver guy I have a little bit easier conversations with him versus Zoe. My wife helps with the responsible spending side of things with Zoe too. It’s been fun to have these conversations. I haven’t always been the best giver, personally. In 2017 our family gave about one percent of our income and in 2018 we gave three percent and this year in 2019 we’re going to try to give five percent. The reason we’re trying to give more is not only because I feel it’s the right thing to do, it’s also something where I realized when we started this program I was teaching my kids to make sure they give their money—but I wasn’t really giving my money. So how am I going to be a good example if I’m not doing it myself? It was also a learning process for me. How do you give money? How do you find something that you’re passionate about in order to give it away? Being such a saver myself that was kind of tough for me to open my fist and let the money go. It’s been a learning process and the kids are really helping me become a better giver. We’re doing it together. I guess to answer your question is the chore reward program has been great. And we’re doing our best to model good behavior whether it’s with spending, saving, or giving for that matter.

Tom: With the giving, that’s when you got to pull the old fashioned, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Andy: That’s it, exactly.

Tom: With the splitting into jars, is it equally split?

Andy: For example, let’s do Zoe. She gets $7 so we do a dollar in her give jar and two dollars in her save jar and the rest goes in her spend. If you think about it, in a typical budget maybe somebody is saving 20 percent and they’re giving 10 percent and then the rest they’ve got to go to their spend. Obviously, in a typical budget you’ve got a lot more things to spend on with your bills and everything like that. But it’s just helping her understand that a little bit goes in each jar and they all have a purpose. So for the give jar, every quarter we get together and we pool up that money and do something called, The Big Give. I review three charities with them which I found that might be interesting to them. I show them little YouTube videos or videos on their website and they get to learn about these charities and say, “Hey that one calls out to me. That’s interesting to me.” Or they bring one to me that they learned about in school and then we get online together and give to that charity. We get a milkshake to make it a little bit more fun for the kids. You see what I’m doing here? It’s like the budget parties and then The Big Give. I try to try to bring that word party into it or give them milkshakes. But something cool really happened the last time we did the budget party in the fall. We wrote a little note to a charity that we gave to. It was one of Mitch Alban charities. He’s a very good author that we’re very fond of here in Michigan. We wrote, “This is from 4-year-old Calvin who wants to give his money to help people get roofs.” Lucky enough, the Mitch Alban organization wrote us back and asked if they can do a little story on Calvin. And so we contacted them and they wrote a little story on their blog and then they had a little radio-a-thon maybe a month later where they invited Calvin to be on live TV with Mitch Alban and meet him. It was just a really cool moment and it all started from just this great program we we’re doing with the kids. We got to meet a New York Times bestselling author and be a part of this really cool memorable moment that I hope he’ll remember through the Facebook video and everything like that that we collected. It will become something that will be a tradition for our family.

Tom: That’s great to get that instilled in them early. When something bigger like that happens that’s something that they’ll actually will remember. They may not remember their three jars necessarily but that will put a little more attention on it. So for listeners of this episode, how can they make this change? If they haven’t done this yet—they’re new to fixing up their finances, they have a spouse. There are certainly different types of people—those who budget and maybe frugal spenders, how they bridge that gap and take this next step?

Andy: I think the first and best place to start is just with a relaxing fun night with your spouse where you talk about your dreams. What’s most important to you? What’s the end goal? What kind of marriage do we want to have? Do we want to have a marriage of purpose? Do we want to start our own business? Do we want to travel a lot? Do we want to leave a job that we don’t like? What is going on in your brain? Both of you share, individually, what your big dreams are. And nothing’s too lofty in this session, on this date. Have fun with it. Say things like, “I would love to travel the world. I would love to be a part of a mission that helps cure this disease. I would love to quit my job and be a fulltime photographer.” Share those dreams with each other because that’s really where it starts. We got married not just to talk to ourselves and be who we are individually. Combined with our spouse we’re a super team. It’s great. We’re going to help each other to fulfill our dreams. We’re going to have fun while doing it. So if we can think about marriage in that fashion and have an opportunity to share with each other those big dreams, I think some incredible things can happen. And then all the little tactical things can of course happen after that. Yes, live on a budget. Spend less than you make. Pay off the debts. Those are important things. Invest for the future. But it really has to start with the dreams and your partner being there to understand what’s most important to you. Because, at the end of the day they want to make you happy. They want to help you with your dreams and you want to help them too. That’s really what the partnership’s about. So if you can start there it can be a great way to kick things off.

Tom: I feel like I should’ve asked this in the other order because I want to go from that great description to the negative side. What if this is breaking down a little bit? You mentioned all couples will get in fights but what if this money thing is becoming a real issue? Instead of just going from sort of a flat level to wanting to improve, how did they turn it around where they’re really not butting heads? Like if someone just won’t stop spending. How do they make that work out?

Andy: Well, if you’re having repeated communication about things that are really important to you and sharing your emotions and it’s just not coming across, there is nothing wrong with going to a third party—a marriage therapist. Nicole and I started sessions about a year and a half ago with a marriage therapist. Originally, I thought, “Man, is this feeling like there is something wrong with us? Do I feel like failure or whatever? We went for our first session and it was so nice. This person is there to help you effectively communicate better. If you wanted to get in shape, you’d go to a physical trainer, right? Think of marriage therapy is the same fashion. You go and this person helps you to effectively communicate better. They help you think about reasons that maybe you have problems about money or certain views about money. A lot of it comes from our childhood. That’s what I’ve discovered a lot through this process. I think about money in a certain way because of the way I grew up. Or because of the way my parents talked about money. And my wife does too. And again, there is nothing wrong with either one of our views about money. They are just different. So if you could just put yourself in their shoes and understand where they’ve been, that’ll help a lot. And a marriage therapist will help you a ton in this process. For you frugal folks out there it’s an inexpensive copay for me to go there and pay for it, so depending on your insurance situation, it might not be an expensive venture at all. But, if you’re going to make an investment, your marriage is a great place to do it.

Tom: That’s great. You gave a much more positive answer than I set you up for. I like the idea of talking to a counselor. Again, this goes beyond just money. But certainly it’s good relationship building either way. Can you let people know where they can find you online?

Andy: Absolutely. I have a weekly podcast called, Marriage, Kids and Money. It can be found on any major podcast player but the blog is a great place to find me at marriagekidsandmoney.com. And for your listeners, I have a free e-book there called The Young Family Wealth Playbook where I’ve had the chance to interview over 100 young millionaires, debt-free parents, and rock star entrepreneurs. I’ve shared it all on this document for people to succeed and have a great family life. Again, you can find that at marriagekidsandmoney.com and download it there.

Tom: That sounds perfect. Thanks for being on the show.

Andy: Thank you so much.

Thanks Andy for not only some great insights in discussing money issues but also just having solid communication with your spouse in all matters. You can find the show notes for this episode at maplemoney.com/andyhill.

Have you joined our community on Facebook yet? You can be part of the Facebook group by looking up the Maple Money Show community on Facebook or going to maplemoney.com/community. And speaking of Facebook, next week we’re going to have Bobby Hoyt on the show. Bobby has an awesome Facebook side-hustle that might be for you. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.