3. Love, Marriage and Money

So far, we’ve talked about how your personal finances are linked to self-worth and stress especially negative stress.  We’ve also worked on helping you identify your money mindset.  Now we want to discuss how our finances impact our love relationships.

One way to estimate the degree to which money plays a role in love relationships is to examine its role in divorce.  Like so many areas of human study, we discover that the experts don’t agree.  Many believe money ranks in the top five reasons for divorce.  Others say we just don’t know the extent of its relationship to divorce because people can’t accurately identify the causes for their relationship problem.  However, experts do agree on one thing: divorcing couples list disagreements about money as a common theme in their failing marriages.  Wouldn't it be good to have a positive, healthy relationship with money so that it is not impacting your love relationships in a negative manner?

To hold onto your money, make it grow, and meet your financial obligations – like financing college – you’ll first need to understand how your thoughts trigger certain emotions and how these emotions influence your earning, spending and saving habits.  You need to understand that you have control over these thoughts and that with practice you can improve your feelings and behaviors about your money matters.  Let’s start with where feelings come from and then move to what you can do about taking charge of your feelings and your money.