The authors of a new book about money and relationships discuss the importance of understanding each partner’s money history and defining ‘enough.’
Today on the podcast, we’re going to be chatting with Heather and Doug Boneparth. They’re co-authors of a new book called Money Together: How to Find Fairness in Your Relationship and Become an Unstoppable Financial Team. Heather and Doug know a little something about money in relationships. As you may have guessed, they’re married. Heather worked as a lawyer for more than a decade before joining the family business as Bone Fide Wealth’s Director of Business and Legal Affairs. She also co-authored the couple’s first book, The Millennial Money Fix. Doug is a certified financial planner and founder of Bone Fide Wealth, a wealth management firm in New York City. He serves on the advisory councils of CNBC and Investopedia.
Money Together: How to Find Fairness in Your Relationship and Become an Unstoppable Financial Team
The Millennial Money Fix: What You Need to Know About Budgeting, Debt, and Finding Financial Freedom
The Joint Account: Helping Couples Talk About Money
“Beyond Prenups: Building Financial Intimacy Before Marriage,” by Heather Boneparth, helloprenup.com, Aug. 5, 2025.
“I Graduated From College With Over $200,000 in Student Loans. Here Are the Things I Wish I Could’ve Told My Younger Self About Debt,” by Heather Boneparth, businessinsider.com, May 27, 2023.
“Six Financial Red Flags You Can’t Afford to Ignore,” by Heather and Doug Boneparth, thejointaccount.com, Feb. 26, 2025.
“Op-Ed: Allowances Are for Kids—Not Your Spouse,” by Heather and Doug Boneparth, cnbc.com, April 13, 2024.
“Why Financial Transparency Might Be the Best Valentine’s Day Gift You Can Give,” by Douglas Boneparth, Investopedia.com, Feb. 14, 2025.
“Show Your Work, Fellas!” by Heather and Doug Boneparth, thejointaccount.com, June 4, 2025.
“Manisha Thakor: Finding Your Enough,” The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, Aug. 8, 2023.
“Financial Literacy, Financial Education, and Downstream Financial Behaviors,” by Daniel Ferndandes, John G. Lynch, and Richard Netemeyer, researchgate.net, August 2014.
(Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.)
Christine Benz: Hi and welcome to The Long View. I’m Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar.
Before we get started today, I wanted to give a quick heads up about some changes in our hosting lineup. Ben Johnson will be joining the roster of hosts for the podcast, along with me and Amy Arnott. Ben has long been an analyst and thought leader for Morningstar, and I’m excited to have him join us on The Long View.
Ben, welcome.
Ben Johnson: I’m thrilled to be here today, Christine. Longtime listener, first-time co-host, really looking forward to continuing to shape terrific conversations on the podcast with you.
Benz: Ben, we’re really excited to have you here. Today on the podcast, we’re going to be chatting with Heather and Doug Boneparth. They’re co-authors of a new book called Money Together: How to Find Fairness in Your Relationship and Become an Unstoppable Financial Team. Heather and Doug know a little something about money in relationships. As you may have guessed, they’re married. Heather worked as a lawyer for more than a decade before joining the family business as Bone Fide Wealth’s Director of Business and Legal Affairs. She also co-authored the couple’s first book, The Millennial Money Fix. Doug is a certified financial planner and founder of Bone Fide Wealth, a wealth management firm in New York City. He serves on the advisory councils of CNBC and Investopedia.
Heather and Doug, welcome to The Long View.
Doug Boneparth: Great to be here.
Heather Boneparth: Thanks so much for having us.
Benz: Well, we’re excited to have you here. And we want to talk about your book, which is a delightful read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Can you talk about the initial spark in wanting to talk about this topic and write about this topic of couples and money? I wonder, were you both equally interested in the topic or did one get interested and then bring the other along?
Doug Boneparth: I think we found ourselves in a position in our lives that prompted us both to say, hey, there’s something interesting going on here as far as our own relationship with money was concerned and the evolution of the roles that we were playing, not only in our careers, but in our household. And then everything else happening around us in the wealth management space just kept pointing to, wow, what an opportunity to talk about love and money. As someone who’s been in the space for more than 20 years, there’s just not a lot here. And boy, if we’d done a good job as an industry talking about so many subjects, there’s so much content out there. But this was an area that didn’t look like it had a whole lot. And we put two and two together, got super excited of this idea to explore obviously money together.
Heather Boneparth: And I think also we have enough self-awareness to know that at a certain point, if we’re having a difficult time talking about this—my husband’s been a financial advisor for more than 20 years. I’m a corporate lawyer who at one point was incredibly engaged in our finances. And I found even myself slipping through various life experiences that we were going through, one unprecedented event after the next as the elder millennials that we are. And I thought to myself, if we’re having a difficult time with this, everybody else is too, right? So, I think we set out to solve a problem that we saw.
Doug Boneparth: You have to understand that Heather is such an incredible writer. And as long as I’ve known her, which is a long time, has always been writing, and I’m someone who’s infatuated in the personal finance space. And it just seemed like such a great combination to put this kind of thought leadership out in the world.
Johnson: So, I’m curious, while you both contributed to the book, it’s written in the first person by Heather and Heather, very clearly, I think in your voice. I’m wondering how you landed on that decision?
Heather Boneparth: Well, as Doug mentioned, writing is beyond a passion to me. It is a part of my life. I feel inauthentic when I’m not writing. And I think it was very important for the story to be told. We had actually considered this being written as a we. But it did not feel as authentic that way. I really want to give readers a perspective of someone who has struggled with money in various ways throughout my life and in our relationship before and during our relationship. And we really wanted to bring that human element to this, the vulnerability and the self-awareness. And that came from writing in my first person. There are countless, countless books out there by financial experts, and they can include tidbits from their own life. But I think there is a level of relatability that comes from really a lay person saying, “I want to explore my own relationship with money, my relationship with my financial expert husband, and our relationship with money.” I think it’s going to bring people in that would not have picked up a book like this before.
Benz: Well, Heather, I have to say, I especially enjoyed the personal stories that you both share in the book. And I’m wondering if you can talk about the decisions to share those personal journeys, financial and nonfinancial, and whether there were any sort of bright lines, like in the interest of protecting your family’s privacy, did you say, OK, we’ll talk about this, but not that? Did you have to have a little bit of a navigation there while you were settling on how much to share?
Heather Boneparth: Well, yes and no. I always err on the side of writing whatever I want to write in the sense that we probably wrote more, and a lot got left on the cutting room floor because I think, one, this is not a memoir. It is a love story, but it is not a memoir of our lives. We really wanted to include the stories that felt pivotal with respect to our relationship with money and each other. So, we did leave certain details of our lives out, of course. Were there things that we left out because we wanted to protect ourselves?
Doug Boneparth: I don’t think so.
Heather Boneparth: I don’t think so. We made decisions. We spoke about my family more because it was more relevant to my relationship with money as a young adult and as an adult. I wouldn’t say that there were things we said, “these are entirely off-limits topics.” It was really, really important to us in the context of writing this book, especially if we were going to ask couples. We interviewed dozens and dozens of couples over the course of over a year, we were probably doing those interviews. How could we not share as well? We make a point of saying we’re going to go first.
Doug Boneparth: Yeah, it was a lead-by-example there. More importantly, our lives are pretty open books. I’m out there on the internet all the time. So, I don’t think that was much of an issue for us.
Johnson: You mentioned leading by example and having read the book, just have this mental image, Douglas, of you reaffixing a headlamp to Thomas, “the Nissan Altima that could” with double-sided tape. Is that an example that ultimately allowed you to discover some of the other couples, some of the other individuals featured in the book? How did you go about finding all of these different stories that you’ve so elegantly woven together in the pages of the book?
Doug Boneparth: You’re going to hear me give Heather a ton of credit over and over and over again, but I’ll tell you how I used 20 years of experience in working with clients. This is just part of what I do on any given day, which is go deeper than numbers and try and figure out what’s really moving people when it comes to their money. So, from a practitioner standpoint, this is what I do in the laboratory every day. And then I think about Heather and what her skill set is and has an incredible attorney for the 13 years she practiced or was inside a large corporation lawyering, not only did she develop amazing skills when it comes to …
Heather Boneparth: I’m pretty good at asking questions.
Doug Boneparth: Yes. She maybe has deposed a person or two in her time in law, but more importantly, Heather’s a fantastic storyteller and the story wins.
Heather Boneparth: Well, I think also that we definitely leveraged Douglas’s social media to find these couples. Douglas is perpetually online, and I said, well, let’s put this to good use. And that was really the best place to start was online. And so, we did know some of the couples we’ve interviewed from various places in our lives, friends of friends who had been in a situation and somebody recommended them to us, and we reached out. But then, yeah, social media really played a big piece in how we were able to find the couples that we interviewed.
Doug Boneparth: It’s the gift that keeps on giving as far as the professional and personal endeavors that we’ve gone down.
Benz: So, delving into the substance of the book, early on in the book, you make the point that so much of the discussion about how couples interact with money relates to scarcity, that there’s not enough money and decisions have to be made and couples disagree about those decisions. But you make the point that couples’ money problems are not limited to scarcity, that wealthier couples tend to disagree and have issues with money as well. Can you talk about that? And Douglas, maybe you can share some perspective from your practice because I’m guessing that your client base is not especially strapped. So maybe you can start there.
Doug Boneparth: Yeah, a lot of the things that come up in practice and certainly in some of the interviews that we had are what’s the formation or what’s the identity of the individuals, their values, their upbringing, their culture, their religion? These are the areas that have shaped you and your attitudes around money, and you don’t just find the person you love and it’s all homogeneous and you all get along when it comes to the thoughts that you have around financial goals.
So, there’s no amount of money that solves for some of these differences that inherently exist between two individuals. And it goes further than just your beginnings. It goes into how power goes back and forth in your relationship, how people value their time, and it even extends into appetites of risk and the visions that people have to move forward in their lives. These are all critical components that go, again, well beyond just how much money you have.
Johnson: When you talk about people’s money histories, their backgrounds, you wrote in the book, “We were lucky to meet young, not necessarily so we could influence each other’s formative years, but so that we could bear witness to them.” As somebody who met my own wife now 20-plus years ago—first date was Patch Adams when it was first in theaters over a quarter of a century ago—that really struck a chord with me. And I’m curious from your perspective, do you think the couples who meet younger in life have the opportunity to influence the other, and is that because you’re still sort of unformed as a human being, you’re still malleable?
Heather Boneparth: I think in a sense, sure. I think when you grow up together, you certainly have an opportunity to influence each other’s decisions, goals, even things like where you live, what career you end up pursuing, what job you might take, sure. But in the context of that statement, I view it like the benefit was not just that he was there to help me, the benefit was so that he saw the emotions that were infused in the facts surrounding my story. So, it’s different from saying like, yeah, my parents got divorced when I was a teenager. He was there. He was there to emotionally support me during that time. And yeah, he saw it firsthand. So, I think he, as we grew up together and became adults together, was able to really understand and have context for why I acted the way I did, whether it was right or wrong as an adult. So that context, that emotional context is really, I mean, it’s a gift to have when you’ve known your partner that long.
Benz: You make the point in the book that it’s essential for couples if they are to get along with respect to their financial affairs, that they do understand their partners’ earlier life experiences and not just around money, but relationships. Can you talk about how couples can inquire about each other’s lives to help better understand how they’re approaching money matters?
Doug Boneparth: Absolutely. And it doesn’t always need to be directly to the ones and zeros around money. It’s simple things like, what was it like growing up in your household? How did your parents go about dealing with money? Do you remember your first memory of money? What kind of friends did you hang out with? All of these questions helped paint a picture of what life was like, particularly around money during your partner’s formative years, during their childhood, their adolescence.
Heather Boneparth: These stories, they really reveal a lot. You don’t have to directly talk about, well, you don’t have to understand your partner’s parents’ complete financial landscape to understand how it made your partner feel. And that’s why we focus a lot on feelings and on subjective perception of somebody’s upbringing, because that’s what they’re carrying into adulthood. And for us, it was really important to make that distinction, because what you don’t want to do is have this race to the bottom of who had it worse. “Well, you’re not allowed to carry those feelings into adulthood because you had more money than me when you were growing up. You had whatever you wanted.”
Doug Boneparth: “I had food insecurity, that’s much worse.”
Heather Boneparth: You don’t want to do that because that really discounts so much about the way their feelings are infused into their actions today. Even if they need to change, it’s not going to be constructive for you now in a partnership.
Johnson: I think one of the areas where that manifests most prominently is in potentially differing definitions of what is enough between a couple. And you note that some of these differences can be the source of stress in relationships. So, I’m curious how couples can come to the table to clarify their own definitions of what’s enough and begin to try to reconcile those differences.
Heather Boneparth: I think perspective is incredibly important, perspective on your values. But first, opening up the door to that question. I don’t know if I’d ever explored that question before we started in this work. And we asked almost every couple we interviewed. At the beginning, I think we were still fumbling around a bit in the early interviews …
Doug Boneparth: Lots of questions.
Heather Boneparth: Yeah, lots of questions. But as we got going, we started asking every couple, do you have enough?
Doug Boneparth: They would say enough of what?
Heather Boneparth: They’d say enough of what? Some of them, enough money, enough time? Well, it was interesting because some of them did. Some of them questioned. And then some of them said immediately, yes, I have my health, I have our family, we have a roof over our head. I have my faith—I received that a lot. Some people were crystal clear. And I think understanding the difference between those that answered without hesitation, yes or no, was really a great insight into their values and whether they were crystal clear on what they were.
Doug Boneparth: Also, their motivations. We had a lot of serial entrepreneurs who consistently answered that they did not have enough. One even questioned if they ever would.
Heather Boneparth: The question brought her to tears.
Doug Boneparth: Yeah. This realization that they may never be satisfied or satiated no matter how hard they worked was an interesting moment to catch in the life of someone we were talking to.
Heather Boneparth: And I cannot tell you how powerful this one question is because I feel like this book is my enough for a host of reasons and to identify that during the course of working on this project for the past two-plus years, it was really—it was eye-opening.
Doug Boneparth: Even Heather and I answering our own questions that we were asking of the people we interviewed, we would say, hey, let’s do this exercise for ourselves. And Heather just said it like, hey, I’m working on feeling like I have enough. And I was one of those people that was the, yeah, I have everything I need. I’ve got my health, my family, what more could I ask for?
Heather Boneparth: And identifying that is so important. See, I think especially when one partner says “yes,” and the other partner says, “not yet,” then that opens the door to the conversation of, “Well, what is it that you’re not feeling content with? What is it?” And if it is a material thing, then you got to dig a little deeper and say, “Well, why is that so important to you? And what can we do to get us there? Maybe we can start forming our financial goals around reaching that version of your enough.”
Doug Boneparth: Or maybe you find there’s a hole that needs to be filled or addressed that goes deeper than a material possession. And that brings us right back to those values, the things that you’ve experienced in your upbringing that require a much deeper introspection and honestly a lot harder work to deal with.
Benz: You talked to Manisha Thakor in the book, and she calls it the cult of never enough, that there are some people who are just constantly striving and beating themselves up. I loved her contributions in your book.
Heather Boneparth: As did I. I loved her book.
Benz: She’s amazing.
Heather Boneparth: Yeah, she is. And that book gave me a lot of perspective on my own life because never enough is not just things. That mindset is damaging because it can manifest in accolades at work. There are so many ways to feel like what you have is never enough. And the danger of that is eventually feeling like your partner is never enough. You end up looking at the people closest to you and never being satisfied with any of it. And your partner’s not going to want to feel like a moving target.
Doug Boneparth: Yeah. And I think we’ll probably talk about this later on, but social media and how noisy things have become, the influences that are constantly bombarding us, has not made this any easier, certainly over the past decade or so.
Benz: Well, yeah, let’s talk about that because I did want to follow up on that. As you say, the social media as well as Kardashian, Real Housewives culture, to what extent is that exacerbating this problem where people see these glossy, perfect lives and experiences and really feel like they’re falling short and just feel bad about themselves? What do you think we can do about that and how can couples help each other feel better in the face of all that stuff?
Doug Boneparth: Oh, yeah, I think it’s a lot more difficult today. You have algorithms that are trained to pull you in the directions that they want to pull you in, whether that is to consume, whether that is to compare, or whether that’s to motivate you to do something you wouldn’t normally do. This environment we’re contending in, it’s sometimes insidious.
Heather Boneparth: I think one of the most toxic parts of social media is the message that you should be doing something else. It’s not just a showcase of what other people are doing. That’s bad enough because that creates envy and feelings like that that can result in all sorts of financial consequences. But this idea that you should be or that you’ve normalized that everyone is doing this, that is the feeling that seeps in, that I deserve to do this because everyone is doing this. It’s not true, but that is the way the algo works, so it makes you feel that way.
What can couples do? The danger in that, of course, financial consequences are very real. I firmly believe that if you know that your partner is consuming content and messaging online that is damaging to your relationship, particularly in this context, content that has financial consequences that’s causing your partner to overspend. But we could even go beyond that. There are all sorts of really damaging gendered content. If we talk about like trad wives and allowances and over-glamorizing this fake idea of like a stay-at-home girlfriend and how she’s like pampered, there’s all sorts of negative, negative messaging that we get online. If your partner is overconsuming that and that is seeping into your relationship, you absolutely have a right to say, “Hey, I really think we need to have a conversation about your media diet and what you’re consuming online because this is really harming what you value in our relationship and it doesn’t feel good for me.”
Johnson: Everything we see on social media is clearly a very narrow framing from a very specific perspective, mostly of people living their best lives as the best version of themselves. When you think about coming into a relationship—I’m happily married now for over 20 years, so haven’t been on the dating apps—but I can guess that on the dating apps as a form of connectivity and venue of socialization, people aren’t sharing their balance sheet and their W2s and saying, “Hey, look at me. I’m over six feet tall. I’ve got a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of student debt, and my income is below the national median.” What sort of forcing functions do you see? You’ve got an interesting take, for example, on prenups of coming into a relationship, being fully transparent and trying to as quickly as possible reconcile everything from combined income statements to balance sheets to lay the groundwork for a healthy financial relationship, which ultimately bleeds into all other corners of a couple’s relationship.
Heather Boneparth: Yeah, look, when it comes to prenups, I think that they’re losing a lot of the stigma that you saw in the late ‘90s and the millennial lots. There was a time when my parents got divorced, nobody was getting divorced. There were not conversations around prenups. They were reserved for the ultrarich, not for the everyday person. And now we see this becoming a lot more normalized because prenups are not setting your marriage up to fail. They are about setting expectations in situations where that is warranted, whether that’s for your own personal comfort level or because your financial landscape as an individual, let’s say, really warrants it, where maybe you are marrying—I’ll just give an example, you are marrying into money or someone who will likely receive a sizable inheritance. That’s one reason to have a prenup. Second marriages are another reason to have a prenup. These are just two examples that we give in the book. And it’s really about outlining expectations for the duration of the marriage, not just for whether it doesn’t work out. You can outline all sorts of details on how you’re going to share your money during the course of the relationship, too.
Doug Boneparth: Money is a practice, certainly in your relationship. And even as an individual, this is something you get better and better at. So, recognize that you’re not going to get married and all of a sudden everything’s merged. You’re on the same page. It takes time. It takes effort and energy and a commitment to being consistent around this. And again, like Heather said it really well. When you think about prenups, it’s setting expectations for a whole host of outcomes that could occur throughout your life together with someone.
Benz: I like that the book discussed a lot of common problem spots that couples might run into with money. And one of them was student loan debt, and especially if one partner has a lot of student loan debt and the other doesn’t, and it’s sort of this burden on the shared household. Can you talk about that? And I thought your stories there, your personal stories, were illuminating in this context.
Heather Boneparth: I think that my story juxtaposed against the other couple that we spoke with was just the quintessential example of how two people can experience something incredibly similar and take away completely different feelings around it. And it was the perfect example of that. And the danger in calling something a mistake is the shame that comes with it. And shame is such a damaging feeling for you as an individual and for you as a couple.
Doug Boneparth: Absolutely. In Heather’s own story around her student loan debt from law school, this was a very big piece of our financial relationship as things became more serious and even into getting married. And you’ll see how we tackled that throughout that story. And it took me a while to realize that what was getting Heather down was the shame she experienced through the decisions she made to go to law school in the first place and carry that into the relationship. And it formed into something that wasn’t allowing us necessarily to move forward.
Heather Boneparth: Brené Brown said that shame is not I made a mistake, shame is I am a mistake. And I felt like my student loan debt was not a number on a ledger, the way that the other couple felt like this was a financial hurdle that was part of their life that they had to tackle. My debt was me. I was the deficit. I was the person that wasn’t deserving of the job. I wasn’t deserving of the love. I wasn’t deserving of the support. And I didn’t deserve to have a driving seat in our family finances when Doug and I started getting more serious in talking about marriage and building a life together. I really believed it. It is so incredibly powerful in a bad sense.
Doug Boneparth: Should I share what we did to break through that?
Heather Boneparth: Yeah, sure.
Doug Boneparth: So, I realized there was not a lot of lip service or words that would really help her through that. I could tell her every day, “You’re doing great. Don’t worry about it. We’re working hard. We’ll overcome it.” But ultimately, it’s actions that will speak louder than words. And we had the opportunity to refinance that debt. And the way that we would be able to do that would be if we both signed off on that loan, if I joined her on that note. And for me, it was a no-brainer. We were together. We were committed to each other. This was a financial opportunity of a lifetime. And I would discover that those actions of putting myself in her shoes to alleviate the shame that she was experiencing would ultimately be the action that allowed us to move forward and her to reconcile those decisions.
Heather Boneparth: You entered the fog with me. But it’s true. It was somebody for the first time—and again, I’m a product of divorce. I’m an only child and grandchild on both sides of my family. Those are unique circumstances. And I had not had someone be willing to reach out a hand to me and say, “Your burdens are my burdens. And I believe in you.” I cannot tell you how powerful that was in my life. But I want to also give this caveat anytime we share this story that Doug doesn’t hold himself out as my savior.
Doug Boneparth: No way.
Heather Boneparth: He is not a white knight with a savior complex that is common and swooped in and saved me as this damsel in distress. It may have felt like that at the time. But I commend my husband, and I make this point in the book as well, that he could have held this over me my entire life. And instead, we’ve used it to empower me to pull me up to his level. And for us to say, “No, you deserve a seat at the table here, too,” not in any sort of negative power sense that he would hold this over me my entire life.
Johnson: That’s a very powerful example of how via refinancing you effectively turned a me and I into an us. In all instances across all of the conversations that you’ve seen, where are you net out on merging finances across a couple and where it might make sense to keep certain elements of couples’ financial lives separate. What are the pros and cons to each approach?
Doug Boneparth: Yeah, all the studies and statistics that we’ve looked at bear out that couples that join their finances together and operate as a team tend to do better overall. And that’s financially better, relationships better. So, in practice and personally, I believe the best thing that you could do is create a shared financial environment to operate out of. Now, having said that, truly the thing that works is what works best for you and your own household. I’ve seen every configuration imaginable and even though I might recommend something different, I’ve seen a lot of other setups work.
So, a lot of that really is there being autonomy for the individual. So, people still like to feel like they have a level of independence. So definitely have your own checking account. There are just things that go on in the lives of people where you want to be giving gifts and you don’t want your partner to know about that. You just want the feeling of the independence. Fine, I get all of that. But I think maybe greater than that is maybe having a shared number when it comes to spending. Is there a number you should check in with with your partner? So, you don’t really need to worry about individual accounts versus joint accounts. It’s just a matter of, hey, you have systems in place to make sure that the decisions you’re making, whether that be on a daily basis or throughout the year, are ones that you both agree with.
But again, for me, and I do like that the statistics bear out, you’re playing a team game here. And also, just from a transparency point of view, I would add everyone having access and the ability to see everything, again, just creates better teamwork and a better framework around money.
Benz: One topic you delve into in the book related is financial infidelity where someone maybe has a serious overspending problem and isn’t sharing any of that and racking up credit card debt and so forth. Can you talk about that? How big a problem that is?
Heather Boneparth: Oh, it’s a problem.
Doug Boneparth: Yeah.
Benz: How would you define it to financial infidelity? What is it, do you think?
Heather Boneparth: It’s a two-part—and of course, I love this as a lawyer, like lawyers love frameworks and we love rules. So, it is a two-part definition according to a wonderful professor who’s doing great work in this space—Jenny Olson and her colleagues—would be one, when you engage in financial behavior that’s going to elicit disapproval from your partner and two, not disclosing the behavior, lying about it, covering it up. So, it’s a two-part decision.
Doug Boneparth: Being bad and lying about it.
Heather Boneparth: Being bad and then intentionally covering up that you were bad. And I think that it’s the cover-up part that you really lean into, it’s not just an omission, like, I think that I wouldn’t quite say that, “Oh, I took a trip to Target and I bought a little something-something for myself,” is not quite living up to the definition of financial infidelity and the gravity of how that can impact a relationship. But the intentional covering up of something that you know your partner would disapprove of is a breach of trust and that is worthy of the definition.
Johnson: I’m curious in such circumstances, a case where there has been a breach of trust, if you’ve got any specific examples, or Heather maybe as a lawyer, some frameworks that you can share with respect to how couples might repair and recover from an instance of financial infidelity.
Heather Boneparth: Well, I wish it was as simple as having a framework to recover from financial infidelity because I think …
Doug Boneparth: Yeah, these cuts are deep.
Heather Boneparth: These cuts are deep. It can be a breach of trust that is as damaging as actual infidelityin your relationship because it impacts your family’s livelihood. An example of financial infidelity that I think cuts incredibly deep would be taking out debt that the other partner doesn’t know about sometimes in their name. We’ve seen it happen, and this has a grave impact on a relationship. So, it may not be as simple as just saying like, “OK I’ll never do it again.” The level of transparency that you need, it’s radical transparency. You really have to completely bear your financial life and maybe even more than that in order to even begin to step forward and move forward from it. And also, there has to be a desire to get better from this. I think sometimes you see these things happen in patterns. And if one partner—and I asked this to one of the couples’ therapists that we interviewed for this section—I said, how do you know when it’s time to throw in the towel? And what happens? Like, how do you know? She said, “When one of you is committed to moving forward and the other is standing still and is not showing any true interest in evolving or improving or getting better.” And that’s very relevant in the context of money behavior.
Doug Boneparth: I think a lot of people are very afraid of a very realistic outcome that it might not work moving forward. And you’ll do almost anything to avoid the tough conversations or answering what Heather had pointed out or discovering that one person is not committed to doing it. So, it’s obviously very delicate, very hard, and it requires a ton, a ton of work. And you obviously want to potentially work with other professionals that can help navigate this very tender stage, hopefully never find yourself in.
Benz: I wanted to ask about household financial management. When I think about my parents’ generation, it was very common for the man certainly to handle investment matters. And sometimes his wife would be the bill payer, the check writer. Douglas, from your perspective, in your practice, having done this for quite a while, have you seen an evolution, are couples getting better about sharing responsibilities, and it not being so gendered as perhaps it was in the past?
Doug Boneparth: Yeah, I love that I do bear witness to, and I serve mainly a millennial demographic, Gen X millennials on down. And whether that’s because we have a dual-income households to a greater degree than ever before.
Heather Boneparth: Technology as well.
Doug Boneparth: Access to technology, the ability to have equal access and transparency. These are all tailwinds for both partners to be active participants in their financial life. What I think still holds true is we see one person handle more of the day to day. There was an article about the CFO of the household versus the CEO of the household. In our own relationship, obviously, as a financial professional, I’m going to handle the day-to-day stuff, whether it’s the investments. But there is not a moment that Heather doesn’t understand what’s going on, where our money is, how to access these things, what would happen if I’m not around. And I see this throughout my practice. I see this with my clients. I see this with our friends. And it’s very refreshing that it’s there. And it gives me a lot of hope that we’ll continue down this road. There’s a lot of work to go. So, from a relative measure, yeah, historically speaking, across generations, things have improved. Do I wish them to happen a lot faster? Absolutely. I hope we get there.
Heather Boneparth: And I think you brought up a good point, which is, yes, money management can be broken down into tasks. And we talk about that in the context of division of labor, and these tasks being part of the labor of a household. And you can divide those up, and you can take ownership over them from the other partner. But what you can’t delegate is your knowledge of money, and your understanding of where things are to the extent that you’d be able to carry on should your partner not be able to, whether that’s for a period of time or forever. And we’re a great example of that, because, of course, Douglas is going to handle more of our family finances. This is what he does for a living. And it is complex when you own your own business. Our family finances and our personal finances are …
Doug Boneparth: Yeah, we don’t have a luxury of just being two W2 employees, and it’s a little bit more …
Heather Boneparth: Right, it’s a little more complex. But because of that, and especially now that I’ve joined our firm full-time as of 2023, we spend even more time talking about it, because I have questions constantly, and we meet often to see where everything is, and Doug never shuts me down. Just even out of a curiosity standpoint, I’ve got something I want to know about even how the business is run, we talk about it.
Doug Boneparth: The vast majority of clients that are partnered up or married are coming to the financial planning conversation together. I rarely find what we call like a one-legged process where we’re just dealing with one partner. And I love that.
Heather Boneparth: But I think that has to do with your demographic.
Doug Boneparth: Absolutely. And that’s the point. Are we seeing this happen more with younger generations than what maybe we’ve historically viewed from older generations? And that’s a good thing.
Benz: Going back to Heather’s point about how one person may not be able to do the job, even if you divide and conquer, from a practical standpoint, that may not be possible. There was some research, I think, it was from John Lynch at the University of Colorado that looked at how, if you don’t practice something, your skills can go fallow. If you have not been the one who has been the bill payer, you didn’t realize that, oh, we do it this way. I pay it through the bank portal or whatever. It seems like there are real risks if you’re doing too much of the delegating, where one person is taking sole responsibility and the other really doesn’t have the ability to do the job.
Heather Boneparth: Well, I think you could broaden that. And it’s one of our goals in this book to broaden the conversation around money to also include other types of labor and ways that we contribute to the household. Because I think you see a lot of women who don’t feel like they have the support at home that they need through all the other tasks and responsibilities, both visible and invisible, that women and mothers, it ends up falling on their shoulders. Money may feel like the only thing that they can tap out of, that they know will be taken care of.
So, I think you see that happen. And I don’t know if women who are truly shouldering 98% of the family operation, I don’t know if they can step into a greater role in their finances, unless their partner is willing to step into some of their responsibilities too, which is one of the main goals of this book is to also view this so much more holistically. It’s not just about money management. It’s about your household and partnership and teamwork as a whole that allows these things to kind of reach a more equitable playing field.
Johnson: I’m curious in that broader framing, you’re just thinking about division of labor and one of the most critical jobs that I think we all have, especially when it’s not just the couple, but there are family members in the mix is caregiving. And I think the book includes a lot of different stories, a lot of different insights, including from your own perspective. So Heather, if you could maybe touch on your own decision for a period of time to be the primary caregiver for your daughters, which having lived through similar circumstances in my own life with my wife, it’s very difficult and sometimes simultaneously, oddly, very easy decision to make.
Heather Boneparth: Well, I have to first, I guess, correct the record that I did not take a step back from my corporate law career to care for my children full time. But what did happen was during covid, we found ourselves in a situation where we were both working full time from home and caring for our children full time from home. And in that moment in our careers, Doug’s firm had taken off. His platforms were rising. His star was rising, as we would say. And I felt completely plateaued in my legal career, which is not a surprise when you look at the environment for women and the broken rungs in the ladder oftentimes that women find themselves facing when they have young children in careers like law and many others. So, when we were faced with this “unprecedented time” of covid of having an 11-month-old and a four-year-old, and Doug was earning three times my salary, it was not difficult for us to come to the conclusion and for me to come to the conclusion that his time seemed to matter more than mine. That was not a correct message. That was not the right message, but that was the message that I had told myself. And it wasn’t just in that moment of covid, but that was built up from the years of trying to navigate my career as a young mother and attorney at the same time. So, we found ourselves in a position where I was handling the lion’s share of caregiving for our children. I was also handling the mental load that came with covid. Going through a pandemic with young children carried a different level of decision fatigue that I can’t—do we have an hour on that alone? You want to say something I can tell. So, say it.
Doug Boneparth: Well, yeah. Ultimately, that’s what brought us to where we are today. It started to create resentment, which is absolutely corrosive in a relationship. And I give Heather a lot of credit. I give us a lot of credit for sitting down together, finding out what wasn’t serving us, pointing out the imbalance of workloads across all of the things that Heather mentioned, from mental to physical to the work that we were doing in our careers, and putting ourselves in a position to correct that. And it, for me, was super uncomfortable. And I’m glad I got uncomfortable because it put us in a better position to move forward.
Benz: One thing that you repeat as a mantra in the section about caregiving is that caregivers are providers, which I loved. Can you talk about why it’s so important to mainstream that line of thinking if one partner does step back from paid work, how it’s important to really recognize his or her contribution to that household that it is providing in a truly important sense?
Heather Boneparth: You know, it’s funny. I usually answer this question and Doug gave such an amazing answer the other day about this, that I’m like, you know what, you can talk about caregivers because I love that. I love that you’re the one speaking to this point.
Doug Boneparth: Yeah, the stigma here is that people feel that the financial contribution is the most important part here, the typical setup of, “Well, I bring in all the money, you take care of everything else.” And when you think of it like this, it becomes quite a joke. Like the person that feels that way would not be able to do anything that they were able to do if it wasn’t for their partner who was holding it down virtually in every aspect of their lives together. And when you hear it like that, you start to understand that yes, caregivers are absolutely providers because the person bringing in the money wouldn’t be able to do that without that being there, without that person being there. And this is such a fundamental shift that needs to take place when we realize that our time should be valued the same, the time that we put into navigating our lives together, but ultimately in pursuit of the goals that we share. And I think that’s a more salient point.
We are, or should be, in a partnership working toward the same ultimate outcomes here, whether that’s financial independence, whether that’s a certain kind of lifestyle or experience you’re looking for on a reoccurring basis, or what it is you hope to do with your kids and the people that they will become. So again, going back to this notion that, “I do this and it’s the most important thing. You’re not playing.” This isn’t an individual sport. This is a team game that requires you both to be participating to get to the results and the goals that you have for yourself.
Heather Boneparth: Well said.
Johnson: When you think of your own family and your daughters and the people they’ll become, how do you work with them, be it directly through just trying to educate them about financial concepts, what money is, what enough may or may not be. And I think equally if not more important, how do you think about modeling some of the lessons that you convey in the book to them?
Doug Boneparth: I love this question. I’m asked this quite a bit, given that our clients and our friends all have young kids and they want to know, how can we start instilling good money lessons and behaviors. And for the record, I have given two money presentations at my daughter’s girl scout troop meetings here.
Heather Boneparth: One went very well.
Doug Boneparth: One was all right. The other went just so off the rails. The eight-year-olds were a little bit better than the six-year-olds.
Heather Boneparth: There was candy involved.
Doug Boneparth: Yeah, there’s always. The candy represented stocks. We might have gotten a little too far in that one.
Heather Boneparth: You went a little too deep, yeah.
Doug Boneparth: But I remember being asked this when our girls were even younger than they are right now. And the first thing I wanted to do was create an association between work and the experience and things that they have in their life. My older daughter once asked, “Why does mommy …”—when I was taking care of her at home in the mornings and Heather would commute into the city on the train—she’d go, “Why does mommy have to go on the train?” I’m like, “Well, you know, sweetie, do you like all this fun stuff we do on the weekends? Do you like the experiences we have when we see your grandparents and things like that?” She goes, “Yeah, that’s fantastic.” I’m like, “Well, that’s why mom gets on the train.” And it’s that simple, certainly for young kids, to create these connections of work, why we earn money, what it does in terms of our ability to have experiences, buying goods and services, things like that. And I think when we put this in the context of money together and the book that we wrote, we’re the ones who have the greatest influence as parents in our children’s lives.
And just like we talked about in beginnings, what your first memories around money are, do you want that first memory to be about your inability to communicate with your partner when it comes to an important subject like money? We’re the ones setting the examples and the tone. So, I think if you’re practicing the work and biting down on the stories that we share as examples of how to improve your financial life, you too will find yourself leading by example with your own children.
Heather Boneparth: I think the best thing that Douglas and I model for our children is equality between the two of us. And the way that the kids see it most is equality of our time, that Douglas and I both have time not only to work, but for the things that interest us, we each take turns doing things. There are very few jobs in our family that we can’t toggle back and forth between the two of us. And that in itself models such an egalitarian family unit for them that I think sets their expectations higher for their own partners someday. And this all has to do with money. Time and money are inextricably linked.
Doug Boneparth: Absolutely.
Heather Boneparth: And so, I think that yeah …
Doug Boneparth: Because they know not one of us controls any one thing in that regard. So, it can go to either one of us.
Heather Boneparth: Yeah.
Doug Boneparth: If I say, I can’t do it right now. They’re running over to Heather to see if she can.
Heather Boneparth: But I do think that our generation of parents do have a major uphill battle in front of us in terms of teaching our kids about money because of how seamless payments have become. Money is conceptual to them in many senses now because you don’t even see it. Like they know that we use our phone, we use Amazon Prime.
Doug Boneparth: I’ve lost my goggles. You can get another one tomorrow …
Heather Boneparth: I’ll never forget that. When our three-year-old once said to us when she was three, she said, “That’s OK that I lost my goggles at camp. Mommy will order a new one on Prime and it will be here tomorrow.” We face an uphill battle that requires conscious decisions to teach those lessons in new ways. It’s not just counting and math and like the little math sheets with the dimes and the quarters.
Doug Boneparth: Things don’t just show up.
Heather Boneparth: Things don’t just show up.
Doug Boneparth: You did not need to explain that. You used to just go to the store and go through this whole process to acquire this thing. Now it just shows up next day on your doorstep.
Heather Boneparth: But that’s why we have to manufacture some of those lessons in ways that they just happen in everyday life, I think, for generations before us. And that is a challenge we don’t have all the answers to.
Benz: Well, Heather and Douglas, this has been such a fascinating conversation. Congratulations on the book and thank you both so much for being here.
Doug Boneparth: Thank you so much for having us.
Heather Boneparth: Thank you both.
Benz: Thank you for joining us on The Long View. If you could, please take a moment to subscribe to and rate the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can follow me on social media at @Christine_Benz on X or at Christine Benz on LinkedIn.
Johnson: And at Ben Johnson, CFA on LinkedIn or @MstarBenJohnson on X.
Benz: George Castady is our engineer for the podcast and Kari Greczek produces the show notes each week.
Finally, we’d love to get your feedback. If you have a comment or a guest idea, please email us at TheLongView@Morningstar.com. Until next time, thanks for joining us.
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