Dear Eric: I have an amazing boyfriend who really has shown me this is the man I want in my life for the rest of my life. We have been together for six and a half years and we currently live together.
My family loves him, and my friends get along with him, but he is terrible with money and in debt for just being stupid with his money. I cannot trust him financially in any way and it drives me crazy. It makes me scared for the future with him.
I’ve been saving up to buy a house and hopefully start looking in early 2025. And it makes me scared that I may have to take the step alone. I see what he spends it on because we sit down every payday and go over all his bills. So, I’m not worried he is hiding anything. How can I get him to stop spending and start saving?
—Costly Relationship
Dear Relationship: Don’t come within 10 feet of a mortgage with this man until he’s willing to take an equal role in your shared financial well-being. Don’t even walk by a bank together, just in case.
“Their best bet is going to build a system that bypasses the old habits and forces new ones,” Sam Erdman, founder of Anchor Wealth Advisors, told me. Managing money is “not generally a game of knowledge, it’s a game of behavior.”
Both of your behaviors should change here: you’re taking on too much and he’s doing too little.
The first thing Erdman would encourage you to do, however, is have a conversation about your values. “They can start with their dreams for the future and why they do what they do. This will help them understand where each other is coming from.”
Once you understand each other’s values, you can construct a plan for living those values.
Here’s a path that Erdman laid out:
Determine where he is overspending.
Reconfigure these numbers for what he wants them to be moving forward.
Set up different bank accounts that will be funded based on the budget: an account that pays all the recurring monthly expenses, one to hold the money for upcoming non-monthly expenses, and a spending account for him.
Lastly, you don’t have to combine finances if your values aren’t aligning. A financial coach or adviser can build on the advice Erdman gave, as can lower cost or free resources like Vicki Robins’s book “Your Money or Your Life”.
(Send questions to R. Eric Thomas at eric@askingeric.com or P.O. Box 22474, Philadelphia, PA 19110. Follow him on Instagram and sign up for his weekly newsletter at rericthomas.com.)
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