56 Minutes of Money Wisdom for High-Earning Couples

**Ramit Sethi** (0:00)
50% of the couples who talk to me do not know their household income. Money for most is not a source of connection, it's a wedge.

**Sam Parr** (0:06)
I wanna go deep on this, this is actually cool.

**Ramit Sethi** (0:08)
In most relationships, there is one money person, and this is a huge mistake.

**Sam Parr** (0:13)
How do you get someone who's a worrier to start spending?

**Ramit Sethi** (0:16)
You need to learn the skill of managing money, but you also need to learn the skill of spending money meaningfully.

**Sam Parr** (0:22)
Tell me what to do.

**Ramit Sethi** (0:23)
I have seven quick steps, it's very easy.

**Shaan Puri** (0:25)
First off.

**Sam Parr** (0:35)
All right, we're live. We're meat. So the reason I wanted to have you on was because Sean and I were talking the other day, and at the end of the episode, at like minute 55, we got to the total end, and somehow it came up that my wife, Sarah and I, we do this thing that we just call our monthly money meeting. And the way it works is that we break down our monthly expenses, our income, and we also look at our net worth, and we talk about how can we spend the next month to make ourselves happier? Like how can we use money as a tool, and are we happy with our consumption and whatever the previous month? And Sean made fun of me, and he was like, you're running that like a corporation, like a business. And at first I was embarrassed to say that I'm running my marriage like a business, and then afterwards I was like, actually no, I can love my wife, and that's the number one reason why I do this. And also, in order to make it run effectively, you kind of have to run a tight ship like a business, or have like business attributes. And you have this book, Money for Couples, and you tweet all about this stuff with your relationships and running it like a business, and I thought you should come on and kind of talk about the other stuff of a relationship other than love, which requires running it a little bit like a business.

**Ramit Sethi** (1:46)
Well, first of all, I appreciate that Sean makes fun of you. That's one of my favorite parts of this pod. But when you are married, you are running a business. It is the business of running a household together. And it's only in the last hundred or so years that Americans became infatuated with this idea of love as the only reason to get married. That's ahistorical. That's not been the case for a long time. And just to give you an example, it's so culturally dependent. My parents knew each other seven days before they got married. So you have to remember that it's not unromantic to talk about money. I actually find it very romantic that you are building a connection. And there's a whole bunch of other benefits that I'm sure you and I both experience because we talk about money regularly.

**Sam Parr** (2:36)
You got this amazing podcast and a lot of the people, you have some like really wealthy people. I think you had someone who was making like two or three million dollars a year and they talked about spending. But I think your typical bread and butter is low ish six figures. But our audience makes like, I'm gonna just make up this avatar of like two to four hundred thousand dollars a year and they work at tech companies.

**Ramit Sethi** (2:57)
I think this topic is so fascinating to me because it cuts across psychology, numbers, communication. And I personally think it's underexplored. I think there's a lot of people online who talk about how to make money, how to invest money. Very few people talk about how to spend it meaningfully and even fewer talk about how to do it in a relationship. So if you're listening and you're single or dating or you've been married for 20 years, odds are very likely that you have not substantively talked about money with your partner. And it's important.
It's one of the core things in a relationship. That's why I love talking about this.

**Sam Parr** (3:37)
Do you remember Tim Ferriss in The Four Hour Workweek? He had this thing called like the dream scenario or something. It's very similar to the stuff that you do. It's something like write down all of the things you want to own and then reverse engineer it to figure out how much do you have to earn in order to afford this and just be intentional about what you want and specifically say it and work backwards towards it. So I used to do that as a 22-year-old. I think I had like... At one point, I've owned everything that was on that list. And I was like, oh, half that list, I don't really give a shit about even after I owned it. But I remember a year into dating my wife, it was like, hey, this is promising. It appears we're going to...