Episode 42 - Real Talk about Marriage, Money & Misunderstandings
Marriage is both a gift and a challenge. Whether your relationship is in a season of ease or strain, this episode offers practical encouragement rooted in timeless values. Host Deb Meyer also shares a personal example of how forgiveness, not perfection, builds a lasting partnership.
Episode Highlights
Why seeing marriage as a covenant, not a contract, can anchor you in tough times
How social media and quiet comparison can erode your sense of connection
Real ways to refocus on your spouse’s strengths, especially in seasons of frustration
The role of money personalities in marriage and how to work through differences
One small step you can take today to reconnect and show love
Valuable Resources
Free Marriage & Money Guide: Four conversation starters to grow closer
Sincerely, Stoneheart by Emily Wilson Hussem
The Deal by Chuck Neff, a faith-forward story of marital renewal
More to Explore
Episode 11: Building a Legacy of Fiscal Responsibility with Amanda Teixeira
Episode 15: Mastering Marital Finances with Den Murley
Episode 25: How to Build a Fulfilling Career and Financial Future with Crystal Ware
New Format Update
Starting this summer, episodes will shift to once a month with a combined interview and personal reflection format. Expect deeper conversations, fewer interruptions, and even more intentional education.
Full transcript
Deb Meyer (00:02.862)
Today's episode is all about marriage. I'm actually recording on my anniversary. My husband, Bryan, and I have been married 18 years. And I know, just speaking from personal experience, marriage can be a really great thing, but it can also be a very hard thing. Before we dive into the main message of this episode on marriage, I do want to share a quick announcement regarding a format change to the podcast.
The format we've had since the beginning in November of 2023 was a bi-weekly episode. So an episode every other week, we would, you know, limit it typically to about 30 minutes per episode. One was always an interview format, and then one was always a format with me just speaking solo like I am today.
With this change, we're actually going to go to just once a month and have a lengthier episode. It's going to be an interview first, and then I'll add some insights at the end, just on my own account. I'm targeting about 45 minutes for the total episode length, but it will just be once a month on Thursday, and still figuring out the exact Thursday of the month that will start this feature.
It will go active this summer. We'll try it out for the summer and see if this is a good new format. And, if it works well, we'll keep that format. If not, we can go back to the way things have been. So, all right. Another announcement is to download the Marriage and Money guide. It's four conversation starters to have with your spouse. And I'm going to link to it in the show notes, but if you just want to go right now, you can go to Worthy Nest, W-O-R-T-H-Y-N-E-S-T.com. That's the homepage and then scroll all the way down and you'll see a link to download that Marriage and Money guide for free. So that was a, um, I think I put together after my interview with Ryan Koral, back in November of 2024 that we released that episode, but he had suggested it and I ran with it and, yeah, I hope it's beneficial for you.
So first I'm going to talk about marriage a little bit more broadly. And then we'll get into the second half of the episode, talking more about finances and marriage. So broadly, there are some statistics around, you know, family units and the fact that they are stronger when parents stay together. Now I'm not advocating if you're in a abusive relationship or, know, you're, you're in physical danger to stay in the marriage.
But for marriages that just fall on rocky patches once in a while, I am advocating to try to make things work. And when you look at some of the recent research, they have the Institute for Family Studies did a 2024 report and they said married parents have more time, money, and emotional bandwidth to invest in raising children than single parents.
You know, it's probably pretty common knowledge, but, it's, it's a good reminder that, know, if you really do care deeply about family, and I think you do because you're listening to this podcast, it's worth trying to make that marriage work, even if you do fall on hard times. I am just going to share a few quotes, that I enjoyed. was doing a little research before the show and like, okay, I like this one. So.
Mignan McLaughlin says, a successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person. And then Diane Sawyer said, a good marriage is a contest of generosity. So I hope those are encouraging quotes for you. Those were two of my favorites. I've also heard, you know, the old wisdom that you should never go to bed angry. And I think there's some differing viewpoints on that, but.
yeah, these were just somewhat inspirational and, and helped me, put things into perspective in my own marriage. So again, I said today I'm recording this. It's my 18th wedding anniversary, but being truthful, you know, my marriage hasn't always been rainbows and butterflies. And, I'm not going to go into all the details of, you know, some of those trials and tribulations, but I will say the way my husband and I have.
Deb Meyer (04:50.166)
emerge stronger as a couple has been, you know, really our faith and treating marriage as a covenant. When we got married all those years ago, we were in the Catholic church and we, you know, we're there before God saying we're going to love each other till death do us part. So we take those vows very seriously, even when, you know, sometimes we don't like each other. Not the case today, but in the past. So.
One of the other things that really woke me up to this is a passage. I've been reading this amazing book. It's called Sincerely Stoneheart. And it's adapted from C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters. So it's actually written from a mom's point of view, married mom. And I think it's a really great book for any mom trying to raise kids. If you have any kids at home, still in the throes of raising kids.
This is a really stellar book and I highly, highly recommend it. So I will link to it in the show notes as well. It's by Emily Wilson Heesam. I'm probably mispronouncing her last name, but it is called Sincerely Stoneheart. And just to put a little bit of insight into it before I read this passage, it refers to God as the enemy, capital E.
And then in this case, it's also referring to the devil as chief, capital C. So the idea here, yes, it's going to weave some faith aspects into it, but I do think it's applicable even if your faith license isn't super strong. still think this passage on marriage would really speak to every, every mom that's been married for any length of time. So let me get to the passage here.
And it's gonna be a couple of pages, so just bear with me. All right. You're doing well with fostering comparisons, so now we build upon it. Let us look now to your subject's marriage. She vowed before her enemy and a group of others to love her husband until the day she dies. With faith as the center of their mutual promise, sewing division is considerably trickier than it would otherwise be.
Deb Meyer (07:08.28)
but there are still a number of ways you can keep her struggling with her promise. Your main task is to see if you can get her to compare her marriage to the marriages of other women around her and those she witnesses on her portable abyss. In this case, portable abyss is your cell phone. It's often the easiest road to getting her swimming in dejection and negativity. Comparison often lends itself to feelings of insufficiency, which easily leads to resentment. resentment.
one of her oldest and dearest friends. If you execute this well, as she compares and contrasts her marriage to those of others, resentment toward her husband will build. We love to see a wife who resents her husband, especially when the resentment is such an undercurrent in her heart that she doesn't even notice its appearance. Slowly but surely, inch by inch, this can overtake her heart and provide an easy avenue for destruction down the road.
You'll begin here by causing a fixation within her on the way other husbands love their wives. Each of her subjects has unique ways they express love. You'll find this true for her and her husband as well as with others. They all live differently, some more voluntarily with words, some with actions, some with gifts. It varies. Some are more public, some are more private. Some husbands are far more expressive than others. Some perform extravagant displays of love, some do not.
The subject's will aid you greatly in helping her fixate on this. Whatever strengths other wives publicly display or allude to about their husbands, you must always cause her to see it as a deficiency in her own. It can be husbands making poetic public tributes on special occasions, like birthdays or anniversaries, or buying their wives something beautiful and unique, or publicly displaying acts of service that her own husband would never think to do.
You use all this to make her conclude that everything about her life is insufficient, both within her husband and within herself. It's not good enough and never will be. When all she sees is her husband's lack, how she will lament the place where she finds herself. When she places daily focus on this, it will make her blind to her husband's strengths and the ways he is trying to love her. This is how the resentment steadily grows. When she's focusing on what he lacks,
Deb Meyer (09:32.782)
Pride will get a foothold in her heart. She'll be so focused on where he can improve that she won't take a moment to look within herself. This is good. When she struggles in her relationships, especially in marriage, you always want her convinced that the other person is the problem. She's not a contributor to the struggles, but only the unlucky receiver of another person's deficiency. A recipe for destruction, wouldn't you say?
Understand though that the goal isn't just destruction in a partial sense. We're going for total collapse. We're not there yet, but every day we plod away in hope of it. Within the vows she made on her wedding day are graces that break through all this. Do all you can to keep her from remembering those vows, those graces. You want her wasting her energy, heart, and time comparing herself with other wives because then she has no time or energy or space in her heart to invest in her own marriage.
In the midst of her lamentation over her circumstances, she has no bandwidth to sit down and reflect upon her husband's strengths and remember all the reasons she chose him in the first place. Comparison takes up a significant amount of brain power for them all. The more cluttered her brain can become with this deceit of ours, the more she and her marriage become like clay in our hands. Go for broke, Stoneheart.
All right, that's the end of the chapter and I hope you understand it's the book is essentially trying to encourage women to like get off a good pathway. So everything in that chapter is about trying to make her solely focused on the bad things in her marriage instead of the celebrating the good things. So even if you're a man listening to this, if you just kind of put it into a different perspective and think of yourself.
you know, as the main person being spoken to and your wife focusing on your wife's weaknesses. I do think it can be helpful for either gender to be listening to that passage. So anyway, that was something I just wanted to share because I do think it's important to find the good in your spouse, especially if you've been together for a long time and you might be going through a rough patch.
Deb Meyer (11:54.222)
You know, don't try to focus on those weaknesses really try to focus on the strengths and why you chose that spouse in the first place and one of the other things that's really been helpful for me and my husband we When we moved back to st. Louis, we actually did some marriage retreats through our church. So the the first one was a evening event for a couple of hours and
That was helpful, but I think the one that really helped us even more was a daytime retreat. I mean, it was several hours long. And again, it just helped us reconnect. were some prompted questions and things. It just helped us reconnect with how we fell in love in the first place all those years ago. it's, it's possible. even if you do find yourself in a darker spot, as long as you and your spouse are both willing to.
you know, try to invest in that marriage and each other, get off the screens a little bit. That's something else that this book woke me up to. I've been intentionally trying to stay off social media a little bit. I still am connected, but I'm not frequently checking every day and even deleted the Facebook app from my phone. So I'm a work in progress, just like I'm sure every listener is, but yeah, those are some things that have been helpful for me.
The other thing, there was a book I read, it was recommended out of the longer marriage retreat and it's called The Deal. Again, it's gonna be a little, how should I say it? It has a great message, but it's a kind of Hallmark movie-esque wrapping to it, even though it's a book. So just be prepared for that if that's of interest, but.
Those are some things that I think have helped in my marriage and again, strengthening it. Even though we've had our, our share of ups and downs over the years. All right. So let's take a quick break and I would encourage you to share this episode with a friend or a family member. I know even if your marriage isn't really struggling or perhaps you're not married, this is still a great episode that can benefit a lot of different people. So if you know of anyone that.
Deb Meyer (14:14.126)
Maybe it's not even a struggle, but just would appreciate hearing some perspective on marriage and then also we're going to get into the money side of marriage in a few moments. All right, so it's no mystery here that money issues are one of the leading causes of divorce, alongside incompatibility and infidelity. Those are usually the top three, not necessarily in that order, but money issues, incompatibility, infidelity, and
Those last two could be around financial issues, right? If someone's opening a secret debt, you know, if they have debt and they're not letting their spouse know about that, that can be a serious infringement on the marriage. So I always look back to money personalities and those are something that typically emerges when you're a child. And I've seen it in my own kids, but like from an early age, I knew
I was always more of a saver mentality. That was just kind of what I wanted to do growing up. So when I got my first job at age, I think was 13, I just started saving and saving and saving. So I was able to just keep working throughout high school and college and graduated with very little debt because I had lots of savings and could pay off a decent amount of debt as I was going along the way.
That was my money personality growing up. Not everyone has that saving mindset and depending upon who you're married to, they might have a very different mindset than you, which, you know, it's great if you guys can have the same kind of money personality type. Probably going to have fewer arguments, but even if you don't have the same money personality type, it doesn't mean you're destined to struggle forever.
I think two important points on those who have different money personalities would be number one, you probably were already aware of it before you got married. Like you probably already had some inclination that your spouse went one direction and you went this other direction. And then if you think about it and anytime you're looking at like team building, it can be really beneficial if you have people that are a little bit different than each other.
Deb Meyer (16:38.382)
So in this, it can actually complement one another. You have someone who's naturally inclined to spend, they can let that saver have a little bit more fun sometimes. And then if you have someone who likes to save diligently, again, they can be a source of not restraint, but just more financially minded to help you guys reach your long-term goals. So there are some complimentary ideas there.
The third one that I haven't elaborated on too much is sharing. So if you're very inclined to do charitable giving or just gifts to others, that could be another money personality. It's not as prevalent. Most people fall into the spend or save kind of typical money personality, but we all have different degrees of that as well in different stages. I mean, I'm more of a saver, but there have been plenty of times in recent years after my mom passed that I'm like, gosh,
Life is short and sometimes you have to spend on experiences and do things because you don't know that tomorrow was guaranteed. So even though my tendency is to naturally save, there have been plenty of things that I've done more recently that I shouldn't say I, I've talked about it with my husband and we've agreed to spend on some other things like we.
We did a boat membership a little while back in Florida and like that was a really fun way not only to honor her, but also to have great family times and points of connection with other families in that area. So those were, you know, some of the decisions that we made together. But again, it shouldn't be a point of conflict all the time if you guys have different money personalities and
Having that free guide that I mentioned at the beginning, that's also going to be a good step in facilitating some of these conversations so you guys don't get emotional in the heat of the matter when you do come up with money disagreements. There are some other resources I want to point out as well. There are a couple of episodes that we've done with interviews that have had some really great nuggets of wisdom in those episodes.
Deb Meyer (18:59.754)
One of them is episode 11, and that was with Amanda Teixeira called building a legacy of fiscal responsibility. Again, I'm going to link to all of these in the show notes, but I just want you to have those episode numbers and titles in case you want to look through your podcast app directly. so some of the finer items we touched on in that episode would be the process of merging bank accounts and viewpoints. How a shared vision is pivotal.
pivotal to our harmonious future. And then some budgeting strategies that respect individual money personalities. So again, if you come at it from different standpoints, having some actually solid budgeting strategies can be really helpful. And Amanda even points out in her marriage that her and her husband came with different money personalities into the marriage and they're stronger than ever and they run while it went together. So it's great.
One of the other episodes that I'd love for you to listen to if this is an area that you could use some encouragement would be episode 15. It's called Mastering Marital Finances with Den Merle. Again, episode 15 Mastering Marital Finances. And Den is actually a certified financial behavioral therapist. So he understands some of the money conflicts couples have at a deeper level.
And he really does shatter that myth of the spender saver binary that you have to be either or. So as I said before, there's some natural propensity, but you might sway in one other direction as different life events unfold. And then he also discusses how to navigate shared versus separate accounts. So each of these episodes I'm highlighting because different people operate differently. They're going to have different perspectives on
whether you should have everything in a shared account or if you can have separate accounts and still find financial harmony. Episode 25 with Crystal Ware, she's talking about how to build a fulfilling career and financial future, but I do ask her towards the end about her marriage because her and her spouse exclusively have separate accounts. They don't really have shared accounts. So we talk about some of the benefits and drawbacks of that. And in her particular family, it worked well.
Deb Meyer (21:27.17)
They got married later in life. She had already been very independent and self-sufficient from a financial standpoint. And she talks a little bit as well about, you know, just some of the decisions they made as a couple from an investing standpoint, things like that. So those are three different episodes that you can listen to and just get a little bit of additional information and perspective as you're navigating what is going to work best for your family.
when it comes to cash flow and money decisions. All right, so we have a little bit more time. I am gonna share an example from my own marriage. And I did get my husband's permission before this, but even though we are both like-minded in wanting to save, there was a time many, many years ago, I think it was when we had our first son, my husband was up late one night and he was watching some kind of infomercial.
And it was an inversion table. So if you're not familiar with the concept, it's where you hang from your feet and then your head is down. You're essentially hanging kind of like a bat, I guess. I don't study bats or anything, but I would presume bats are doing the same kind of thing when they're sleeping at night. So it's supposedly a good thing to help with back.
pressure, I'm not exactly sure of the science behind it, but again, it was on an infomercial and this was fairly early in our marriage and he didn't ask for my permission because it was an infomercial. It was one of those you got to buy now and act now to get it. So I think it costs like $350 and I find out about it after the fact, after he had already purchased it.
And I'm like, this is a waste of money. I'm sorry, but I just can't imagine that you're going to really use this year in, year out. And this is, you don't even technically know if it's safe or beneficial for your back. I just thought it was a kind of frivolous purchase. So sure enough, we get the inversion table. He uses it religiously for like a month or two, and then it just collects dust in our basement. And,
Deb Meyer (23:49.428)
Eventually when we move out of that house, I think we just get rid of it. Then I donate it because we're like, there's no sense in moving this if we're not going to use it. But that was one of the early decisions where I was like, come on, we at least now have to have some kind of dollar amount threshold of, okay, if it's above this amount, this is what we're going to consult each other on before we go and make that purchase. So that was our lesson learned early in our marriage. But
In terms of like an example where I did something stupid, I mean, there've been plenty of times where he's like, gosh, it just seems every time we buy or sell a house, always lose money on it. And yes, a lot of that has been me. So my financial mistakes in some cases have been much more costly than, you know, a $350 inversion table. But the point is in both of those situations, we're able to forgive.
We're not necessarily gonna forget, right? Like I still remember all these years later about the the silly inversion table But we're able to forgive and say okay was an accident or whatever. Let's Learn from it and move on and that again would be my encouragement to you if there have been conflicts in the past about things Just seeking that forgiveness from each other if it's been your responsibility. You were the main decision maker on that, asking for forgiveness from your spouse. And usually they're pretty understanding. yeah, hopefully that helps again if you're having some difficulties specifically around financial matters. And lastly, I'm just going to do one more plug for that free marriage and money guide. I do think it's beneficial to at least have some good starting questions if you're not in normal discussions about finances.
One spouse kind of takes the lead, and the other is really in the dark financially. It's just not a great place to be. I mean, if something happened to that spouse who is in the know, it would be very hard for the spouse who's not to carry on if something medically happened to that knowledgeable spouse. I would just, again, encourage as much as possible. I know it's not ideal in your world, especially if you're raising young kids and you’re still in the thick of it.
I know it's not ideal to say, hey, let's set aside time for money discussions on a regular basis, but it's still important to do. And even if it's just like once a month check-ins, there are some guidelines of when to actually hold those conversations so that you're not creating even more conflict on an already stressful situation. And in closing, I would just like to encourage you to do something nice for your spouse today, just because :-)