273 - Money & Multiple Partners
Ride Free Fearless Money
Hadassah Damien, our guest for this week, is a professional strategist, entrepreneur, educator, facilitator, and award-winning queer artist. She is also the founder of Ride Free Fearless Money, a finance consulting firm and blog that helps embolden people and empower their relationship to money. Through consulting, online training, and workshops, Hadassah provides financial strategies with actionable steps and measurable results.
Hadassah’s tips
In this episode, we pick Hadassah’s brain with several in-depth questions from our listeners. She gives us her professional insight and opinion on the following topics:
Staying on budget
How to not go broke by going on dates with different people
Income and class inequality within a relationship
Bringing up the topic of money in a new relationship
Property ownership and retirement in a poly relationship
Listen to the full episode to get all of Hadassah’s tips and advice for finances when you’re ethically non-monogamous. Visit her website for tons of valuable resources and to read her blog, and follow her on Facebook and Instagram!
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking all about money, money, money with Hadassah Damien. Hadassah is a professional strategist, award-winning queer artist, entrepreneur, facilitator and educator. In 2015, she founded Ride Free Fearless Money, a blog and finance consulting firm with the mission of stabilizing progressive communities by empowering people's relationship to money. She offers consulting, as well as online training and workshops to help people create actionable and equitable financial strategies. Hadassah, thank you so much for joining us today.
Hadassah: I am stoked to be here. Thanks for having me.
Dedeker: We're also super stoked to have you here. This is a topic we get questions about all the time, just all the time, and it's always a topic that we're hesitant to weigh in on because we're not necessarily experts and we all have come from different financial backgrounds and different levels of financial education. We're super excited to have you here. I know a lot of our listeners are very excited to have you here and have sent us a bunch of questions, which we're going to be tackling a little bit later.
Before we get to the questions though, we initially heard your interview on Kelly Wright's Podcast, Queersplaining. If our listeners want to hear more about Hadassah's full story, we highly recommend they check out that episode, Receipt Femme on the Queersplaining podcast. Just briefly, how did you get into this world? Has this been a lifelong interest for you or was there a particular thing that was a catalyst for you?
Hadassah: I definitely did not have in my life plan become a financial coach. I am a creative, I'm an artist, I'm a technologists. I'm a systems and process person. For many years, I was really writing the line with my creative projects, and for any of you who are like the spreadsheet person in your group, you're going to feel me on this, but I was always willing to be the spreadsheet person and the organized person in whatever creative project I was doing.
"Yes, I will figure out how to set up the archives." "Sure. Yes, I'm going to figure out the website." "Oh, we need to be a business." "Okay, great. I'm going to figure out how to make us a business." "We have taxes? Okay, I'll figure that out." Over, honestly, a decade of doing queer arts organizing and touring, I developed a bunch of expertise, and really trial by fire in how to use money with groups of people.
Because I was working with queer artists, we were really engaged with questions of equity, and fairness, and accessibility financially. Again, because of the communities that I'm part of, we were, and are still, really thinking deeply about how to use money in ways that are transparent, and intersectionally, inclusive as possible. I ended up just developing this skill set through needing to learn how it works in order to make my art and live my life in a way that felt aligned to me.
From that, I just started building up a small practice of writing about money, which became coaching, which became workshops, which became bigger workshops, and now it's been five and a half years and it's been really fun, because at this point, I've been able to talk to all kinds of people who are thinking through so many different types of things. There's just so many pattern and anything we can get into that, but that's how I got in here.
Dedeker: Yes. I just wanted to comment on when I think about the task of organizing the financial side of queer art projects and communities and stuff like that. That feels like a very, very different task than what I usually associate with people who have a financial planning background, which is managing estates, and very, very, very large amounts of money.
I'm guessing that this background for of have of not only needing to be very, very intentional with money, but also managing money in a field that's not banking, essentially, and high-stakes trading and stuff like that. I would think means that then that's a little bit more maybe translatable and relatable to I think all of us out here in non-traditional communities, just kind of hustling and scraping it together for a living?
Hadassah: Totally. Think about it as even a statistic. How many people need to do large volume high-stakes trading in their lives? Just a few. The day might come for one of us, but that's a might. Most of us though have to make decisions every day about how we want to use money and how we want to use it with other people. There's a whole set of really common decisions and things we need to figure out that aren't at the level of, how do I set up my estate?
Emily: We received a bunch of different questions from our listeners on money in general. Some of them came more from like, "How do I deal with money from a non-monogamous viewpoint?" And some were more personalized. For me, I know, I feel like I'm trying to figure out my financial situation in a way where I'm finally making headway on it.
I guess from from that standpoint, for example, I received my stimulus check and I was able to put 1,000 of it in my savings, which I haven't had $1,000 in my savings for a very long time. I know that that's one of the things that you hear from a financial standpoint like, "Have $1,000 just so that you have a cushion in case something happens and you need to fall back on that." From there, what are the kinds of things that you would give to somebody really from a very basic level in terms of their financial planning and what they should be doing with their money from there?
Hadassah: Yes. It's a great question. I love that you framed it in terms of like, "I got this basic one. I have some money on hand." To me, the question, and I think the empowering way to think about it is, "Why do we want to have some money on hand? What triggers the understanding of how much money to have on hand?" To me, the 101, where do we start with understanding money really goes to this question of like, "Well, what do you do with money?"
Like, "Literally, how much money do you spend? What is your use of money look like?" Because that has a ton of information in it that you can use to the back to the question of like, "Well, I want to have some money in case something happens." Say, a global economic pause, for example, but how much money should I have? When you can start to answer the question of like, "Well, how much money do I have to use? How much money would I use if I had a little bit more than what I have to spend?"
That starts to help answer these questions of like, "Well, if I want to have savings, how much savings should I have?" To me, I'm a really big fan of specifics where possible. Often for people that really looks like almost having two ideas of what your spending is, one is your reality check. This is what really happened last month or the month before, and then one is the ideal of like, "All right, if I was true mistress of my destiny, what would I be doing?"
We don't have to like numbers for them to be helpful to us, for them to serve us, and for us to be able to make informed decisions from them, but the knowledge of how much money am I spending, really, really has this super powerful quality because then you start to be able to develop a plan around it. Both for what's the ideal amount of saving would be related to how much were you spending, because that's, at least within how much you're spending is, how much money you need.
Often for most of us, on top of that, there's how much money am I also spending that is more choiceful for me? There's like, "How much money did I save from that?" Then there's, "Well, do I like how I'm spending my money? When I stop and like get that real deal, look at the numbers, does it feel aligned with how I politically want to show up? Socially want to show up?" Then we can start to start answering some questions about, "Well, what does it mean to spend in a way that feels good and without guilt," with feeling like, "This is right." There's a report that came out recently that said that one of the many things that's coming out of the many economic changes out of Coronavirus, is that people are thinking about spending their money differently. About 25% of people said that they wanted to spend their money in ways that was more, what was the word? That was more aligned with their values essentially. This is a good minute to stop and say, "If I was going to do that, spend my money more in line with my values, the first question to answer is, "How am I spending it now? What am I doing?"
Emily: I think you hit the nail on the head there because I know for myself, the fact that I did get laid off, I am on unemployment currently. For whatever reason and I think that there are a lot of reasons, I'm actually spending way less than probably I ever have in my adult life. Part of that is because I'm not driving every day, I'm not having a huge commute.
Also, I'm not going out and spending a huge amount of money in that fashion. Because it's a scary time, I'm also not spending on frivolous things. I do think that all of that is really interesting when you are put in this position where you have to evaluate and assess, "Do I really need X, Y, & Z thing in my life or can I instead choose to make financial headway in these other ways?"
Hadassah: Totally, yes. I've been calling that New Realities, New Priorities Budgeting, because so many of us have new realities right now. Even for people whose income didn't change, many of us, if not all of us, our reality has changed based on our understanding of how we're going to operate in the world.
For those of us who have lost work, been laid off, et cetera, there's a bit more of a have to, in terms of reassessing what you're spending and how you're doing it. Emily, you make a really good point. Many of us are actually changing our habits and changing what we do in terms of going out less or driving less that we're also seeing the way that we're using money is just different right now.
Emily: Yes.
Jase: I feel with a lot of things that do you become a habit. I think a lot of our spending also can be a habit. Whether that's buying coffee or retail therapy or whatever way that looks. I find with a lot of habits, it's easier to change them when there's a big shake-up, rather than just you're doing your same routine but trying to force this habit to change. In a way, we've all been given a little bit of that push toward like, "Here's a little chaos," that you can maybe take and direct in a certain direction to try to change some habits. I never really thought of it like that.
Emily: Yes.
Jase: Going back to this question of just how do you budget at all? How do you get a sense of this? A question that specifically comes up a lot with non-monogamous folks is, "How do you avoid going broke from going on dates all the time with multiple people?"
Jase: Let's We'll think about that more generally, not just right now where it's like, "Well, you can't."
Emily: You're not till you're done.
Hadassah: You're right but you could be sending flowers, you could be renting things on Netflix together or whatever. I can imagine plenty of ways that we could be connecting and trying to spend money, although yes, not as many as before. I would. It's a really good question. I would slightly change the framing of that question to be, "How do I choose how I want to use my money in ways that make my life awesome?"
I would imagine that going on dates with my partners, my dearest friends, and myself makes my life awesome. Each of us has priorities. Everybody has different priorities. That's great. That's what makes us all exciting human, different people. To me, it's about how do you decide how much money you want to put to your priorities based on what you have available to spend?
You can go about that two ways. You can go about it in a monthly cash flow way. This is easiest for people who have regular income, whether that's like a salary-type job or a relatively regular consulting where you know how much money is coming in. You look at how much money is coming in and you look at all the things you want to spend money on. You assign an amount of money to dates with my beloveds.
Maybe that's 250 bucks a month. You're like, "All right, this is what I got. I'm going to decide how to split it up." Maybe that's 50 bucks a week. However, you want to split it up, you start by defining how much that's going to be. For people who have more irregular income, that might look like a certain percentage of every check that comes in.
You're like, "I'm committed to going out, living life, and being with the people I love, doing fun things that make us feel connected. I absolutely want to make sure I have money for that. I'm going to intentionally allocate a certain amount of money for that.
Jase, the other side of your question is like, "How do we make it okay with our partners and friends to say, "I do have money for this," or, "I don't have money for this?" How do we avoid going broke, going out with all of our dates is I think transparency about our financial situation, which is--
Jase: All right. It's easier said than done.
Emily: Yes, it's easier said than done.
Hadassah: For sure. For sure.
Emily: It can be.
Hadassah: I can also imagine a scenario where it's like, you want to not just be transparent about your financial situation but you're also hoping to be equitable in how you're splitting up the resources that you're putting towards different experiences with different partners and having transparency within that. I can imagine a scenario where you might want to make sure that you could go on a big vacation with a primary live-in partner in your life. You're like, "Look, I need to make sure I allocate a fair amount of money for this." My partner and I, we like to say that, oh my God, we're like vacation lesbians now but we like to go to--
Hadassah: We went to Europe, we've been to Iceland. That shit's not cheap. We saved up a couple 100 bucks every month and then we bike across the Netherlands, which I recommend by the way.
Dedeker: Sounds amazing.
Hadassah: Do it when it's safe again, of course. You come back home and you're like you want to make sure you have resources for a weekend away with another one of your partners. Maybe it's a smaller thing that you're doing. You want to go rent a house and be away for a little bit. What you have to do, whether you have no partners, seven partners, more or less, anywhere in between, you step back and you say to yourself, "What am I trying to accomplish in the next year? What do I want to do in the next six months? How much is it going to cost me?"
Then you walk back from that and you say, "Well, if I'm here today and I've got this $3,000 Europe trip. I want to make sure I have at least money put aside to go to weekends away with two of my other partners. I need to make sure that I'm putting $4,000 aside so I can do this." That means that maybe one last big night out of a month, but it means that I'm able to do these other things.
It's strategy, it's planning. That's where money seems boring but it's actually interesting because it means that you're enabling yourself to do some of these bigger and other things you want. That's where you can go into a conversation with one of your partners and be like, "Look. Yes, I know we always go do X, Y, Z, but I want to change me doing that because I want to make sure that I'm able to go on these trips that are really important to me." You frame it in terms of what's important to you and why are you making a change or being intentional about something in one way or another.
Jase: What you are just getting to there also ties back to just how emotionally we feel about money. Part of that challenge with this date question is, like I have a good friend. He and I are both non-monogamous, both had multiple partners at different times in our lives. In terms of the way that we go on dates, he does a lot of very expensive dates with his partners. I would say roughly, let's assume income-wise, were pretty much same as each other. It's not like he's got way more money and that's why.
For him, I do think there's this emotional, either that I want to do this to give this experience to my partners or maybe that he feels like he has to, like he needs to do something big enough to indicate that he loves them or cares about them, whereas I tend to not do a lot of very expensive dates. I guess I'm just not so convinced that there's qualitatively a difference in our relationships and the quality of our dates. I do know that for him, there's feeling of either needing to do that or something that's tied to the amount of money something costs. Is that something you find comes up a lot with clients?
Hadassah: I think what it is, is, 'how do you express love and care?' For some people it's acts of service, for some people it's listening, for some people it's touch. That's a whole, I think, other language that we speak. If you know yourself and you know how you express and in the example of your friend, if part of what is really important to you is lavish kick-ass dates, then great, no judgment.
No judgment on any priority that anybody has, or any choices that we want to make. It's then saying, "All right, this is how I want to set my life up and this is what's important to me, and therefore, I need to make sure that I've got a chunk of change put aside for these dates that I want to go on."
Again, I think there's this financial concept called Sinking Funds. I really wish I knew where this came from, but it's also, I think, known as the envelope method. It's this idea that every month you take a certain amount of money or every time you get paid, you take a certain amount of money and you put it in either a real envelope or a special savings account and you don't necessarily spend that amount of money every month.
In boring-land, this is how you save up to make sure that you can cover car expenses when they come up, or if you have a house that you can fix your roof when you have to do it, but you're like, I put 200 bucks a month into an account and that account or that money, you use it triggered by a particular scenario. The scenario, I have to fix my roof, I have to fix my car, or it's my date fund.
It's like a boring but effective way to just make sure that you've put those resources aside ahead of time for yourself. I also think on the other side, for some people who struggled to feel like it's okay to spend money on things, this is a way to make sure that that money is put aside. You've already said this is what the purpose is, you're living your life with your other money, however else you're managing it, then you're allowed to spend that money on fabulous dates for yourself and your partner partners.
Jase: That's so huge.
Dedeker: First of all, I just want to point out, I love the term boring land. Second of all, the setting money aside so that you're allowed to spend it, ironically, I know that's something that's been huge for me as far as my own emotional connection to money. Pretty much the only lesson around money I got growing up was, "There's not enough, so don't spend it." That instilled in me a lot of very tight-fisted, very scared, very scarcity model relationship to money.
That for me, as soon as I switched to this is the, I literally, for me, my envelope method is, I literally put it in an account labeled, 'Guilt-free Spending', to try to remind myself whenever you spend this money, you're not going to feel guilty about it. It's really changed a lot, it's really really revolutionized, I think, my own relationship when it comes to spending on things like that.
I want to move us on to the next topic, which is a doozy, which is handling income or class inequality within a relationship. Seriously, we got no less than 1.6 factillion questions regarding this specific topic because as you can imagine, even in a traditional monogamous relationship, people have to deal with that and then combined with, we see a lot of people where it's like, "Well, with my nesting partner, we figured out this money thing."
Or maybe we've been living in the past 10 years with basically equal income and it's been okay. Now, suddenly, I have this new experience of dating someone who makes significantly less or significantly more than I do and I don't know how to handle that. We can just start out again with the basics of that of, we have a lot of people asking, how do you manage things like splitting vacations or dining out or living expenses if you're in a relationship with someone who makes a vastly lower or a vastly higher income than you do?
Hadassah: What I think is so interesting to go back to this question of talking about money as hard is that, pretty much anytime we interact with somebody, a friend, a stranger, a partner, we're interacting with somebody who makes a different amount of money than we do. It's actually very rare that we're always on equal playing field. That's just a heuristic right cemental model that we have, but it's only with people who we have intimacy with that we start talking about and engaging around money and resources.
I just think it's really interesting that it's like, this is where it comes up in relationships because it's always happening. We're always navigating this this field of, we are different than other people around money and resources. I'm noticing it a lot in terms of seeing calls for donations and sharing resources for people who aren't unemployed right now and the tensions around that, but I do want to answer this question because it's crucial.
How do you split income or how do you split costs, or how do you start thinking about splitting costs with someone with whom you have transparently shared, or at least have a sense that you have different income levels? I think there's a couple of ways to do this. The most basic way to do it would be to get out a little piece of paper, put the emotional part aside for a second. Don't actually put it aside permanently, just for a moment.
If you have a piece of paper, you're like, all right, you make this much, I make this much, your costs are this, my costs are that. You have this much left in spending money, I have that much left in spending money. We can add it up, get a total, you have a percentage, I have a percentage. That's like, "Okay, great, the total amount of money we have between the two of us is $5,000 a month. $3,000 of it is mine, $2,000 of it is yours. I'm 60%, you're 40%.
That's the basic layer, but the thing that I think is important for us to remember is that, how much money you make and bring in is absolutely only one part of the equation because we all have different needs for money to go out. That isn't usually correlated to our income.
When I think about needs for money to go out, I'm thinking about the person who sends money back home or helps their mom or their sibling. I'm thinking about somebody who has a chronic illness, or some ongoing health need or mental health needs and they're spending a lot of money on therapy, health, wellness, et cetera. Or I'm thinking about the person who has a massive student loan payment they make every month.
There's so many really real and realistic things in there that I think it's important for us to not just look at how much money comes in. For each of us, what are your taking care of myself holistically things that money has to go out to every month before you really start to compare how much money you have to somebody else.
I also think it can be really helpful before you compare to start answering questions about, "Well, what does it mean or how do we both get to a scenario where we make different amounts of money?" I think it's also not quite equitable to say, "Well, you make $2,000 a month because you choose to work part-time because you feel really comfortable working part-time because you feel you don't need to save money because there maybe are financial resources in your family."
"I choose to work full-time because there aren't financial resources in my family, so I have more money, but I also don't feel comfortable working part time." You can also account for that with what I would call just like an equity, you would just tweak the amounts of money that you're comparing with a, I call it an Equity Adjustment. It might be like, for that, in that scenario, "Let's take these percentages that we get to," which are just a conversation starter anyway, they're not written in stone and change them because we're accounting for something on the back-end.
For example, with the partner who I live with, that's what we do. She is in school, she is on a very small stipend. I have a day job, I have a project, I have investments, I make this.
Throw a zero on the end of what she makes is what I make. It's not that I pay 90% and she pays 10% because we do this equity adjustment because I come from a working class family and for me, I'm like, "I got to save a lot of money to just feel like I've got this stable nest under myself."
With each of your partners in any of your relationships, whether it's a romantic partnership, a platonic life- Excuse me, a platonic life partner who you're going on a trip with, whatever it is, you can have this conversation and think about, "Well, what is right between the two of us based on what comes in, what we need to spend and the situation in which we're in." On a positive, it's like a time in there.
Emily: No. It's great.
Dedeker: No, that was fantastic and it reminded me, I want to give a shout out to your website and we'll direct listeners to some more information about where they can find you and your resources at the end of the episode. I noticed on your website, since you offer a lot of your services, sliding scale, you have this really robust chart for figuring out sliding scale.
It sounds like it's kind of that equity adjustment that takes into mind things like your family resources, your level of education, the amount of debt that you have relative to how much money you have. I do think that when it comes to money, we are so used to attach him to the number and the number feeling very black and white and so it's like, "Well, you make $100,000 and I make $50,000." That's all the information we need when that's not necessarily the case.
Jase: Or on the other side, there's the opposite seemingly black and white argument of like, "Yes, but we're both equally getting to enjoy that date so it should be equal." It's like on either side, you can make this black and white argument, but neither of those really feels good or equitable.
Hadassah: Totally. I'm imagining when I'm going on a date with someone who I wanted to be on a date with, I want us both to feel happy and comfortable. We can really show up and just be present. If I worry that that person are stressed out about the money that's going to get in the way for each of us being able to be present, which is rough.
To me, I think about having these money conversations and it's setting up ways that you want to try approaching money together. I always say the thing that you put together with your person or people, it's just the thing you're trying now. You can always come back to it and change it if it's not working, you're not writing it in stone.
With whatever it is that you're trying, it's always going to be in service of everyone being able to show up and be more present. I think just knowing that that's happening also can open people up to want to be able to participate in these conversations a little more or figure it out. It is, I think perfectly okay for someone to come in and say, "I'm really on the split it equally tip and I feel kind of weird that we're talking about not splitting it equally. Can we unpack that with me?"
That person is as entitled to being heard and having their proposal for how to do things considered as anybody else. It's all, to me, money is really about decision making, which is why it's interesting. Because we're taking information, weighing how we want to decide on it and then moving forward with whatever decision we come out with.
Emily: To continue along with this idea of what is equitability and what is being equitable in your relationships, we got a listener question about-- I think this pertains to those people who do live together. The question is what if my partner makes more than me and expects me to compensate for the income inequality in housework or other types of labor like maybe emotional labor or something along those lines? What does that entail? Is that icky? Is that okay? Et cetera.
Hadassah: To me, that's a question of how do you and your partner or partners want to be in conversation about how you get things done in your household. Because money is just one resource that goes into making a household run. There's all the time of getting things clean, there's all of memory of executive function and emotional labor of just remembering things and doing emotional work. As I remember, I'm like, "Oh, it's a lot."
Anyway, so one thing you could genuinely do and something I've done with groups of people is to like literally list out, what are all the things that happen in our household to make our household work and run? Then this is a conversation with the group or two of you. Okay, great, who's going to do what and how do we want to make that work?
Then that's your opportunity for potentially someone who maybe works more/makes more money, those two aren't necessarily. The same thing to say, "Hey, I spend a lot of time working, therefore I can't do ABC." Or, "I have resources. I would much prefer--" I worked with a partner with two people who one person who was like, "I work a lot, I would like to pay for a housekeeper so that I'm responsible for the housekeeping, but I'm outsourcing that work."
Then this thing for our household is done and then what are you going to do? The other partner took another thing or two on the list. The question, my partner wants me to do other things because I'm not contributing financially? To me, that's an opportunity to step back and say, "Okay, what are all the things that our household needs and how do we want to intentionally consensually, actively choose to split those things up so that we can all feel good about how we've decided to try moving forward?
Emily: That's a great answer.
Dedeker: We also got a lot of questions from people who are in arrangements like this, where either they make a lot more or a lot less. Again, to bring it back to the emotional side of things of, a lot of people ask about how to handle the feelings that all this brings up. Because we had a lot of people who maybe they're more financially privileged and maybe they may feel guilty or sometimes taken for granted.
Someone who's in a less financially privileged position, especially if their partners may be supporting them, they may also feel guilty or feel insufficient or things like that. I guess I wanted to bring it back to talking about the financial side and especially the guilt that I think comes up when there's an imbalance of some kind here.
Jase: I mean, having had pretty deep money conversations with, man, four or 500 people at this point, something that I've noticed is that and you just nailed it. It's like coming from either side, there's this sort of guilt, there's this discomfort. My hot take is that almost everyone has the secret feeling that they're doing money wrong, regardless of what you're doing.
That almost everyone, certainly not, almost everyone that has like some thing about money that they feel uncomfortable or ashamed, or like it's not right about, which I think is connected to the I think I'm doing it wrong. I hear that with so many people to me I start to think, well this is not like an individual problem. This is not a particular couple or partnership or household.
This is a cultural narrative that many of us have just really deep in how we understand how we're supposed to, or not supposed to be interacting and talking about money. What do we do when there is something that's like, "We're not supposed to talk about, and it's bad, and nobody can do it right, and it's like, shameful." It's like, get it from behind the curtain out.
There's this like famous study that people would rather talk about sex than talk about money. I think a lot of us have had like, thankfully, a lot experience and practice in talking about desire and sex and sexuality and consent. These skills can serve us all really well when it's time to talk about money because it really is about listening to other people and asking questions from a place of curiosity and non-judgment and practicing non-judgment with ourselves too.
An exercise I like to give people is to do some money storytelling with your partners. That could look like anything as simple as, "What was your first money memory?" Or, "Fill in the blank, I think money is a--" Or, "My family failed to tell me X about money, but here's how I learned it."
You can actually increase intimacy and know more about where someone else is coming from, by asking them a question about how they approach money to start building the practice of literally just talking about money as a topic. To on-ramp yourselves to about, "Well, now that we have just even told a little bit of our money stories, how might we engage on this topic between the two or three and number of us?" It's okay that it's emotional.
One of my biggest learnings was figuring out how to apply nonviolent communication to talking about money. That was a skillset that I learned when I was dating a number of people and really needed to get good at having sort of what could be highly emotional conversations. Those skills are really applicable to talking about money because again, so many of us have this feeling we're not doing it right, there's shame, there's gnarly feelings. How do we stop judging ourselves so that we can have a conversation with somebody else?
I think with partners, I work with a ton of partners who have, again, there's always going to be someone who makes the most money. That person, whomever they are, even if they don't make a lot of money, there's always, "These are just numbers. It's just facts." That person, I think there's a cultural norm about like, "You make more money. That's supposed to mean something." Why? What is it supposed to mean?
These are really, really old narratives that, of course, we carry with us because it's not like you can just wake up one day and destroy all the gnarly stuff that we've been embedded with. That's not how it works. One thing at a time.
I think a lot of it is like it's not fair that the person who makes more money feels ashamed for it, or the person who makes less money feel ashamed for it. If we know that everybody's having a similar feeling from a different facet, we can start to just acknowledge that the feeling is there. It doesn't have to be right or wrong, it's just present. That you can still have a conversation and make plans, even if and when and because those feelings are there for you all.
Dedeker: Wow, yes, that's really beautiful.
Emily: It's really powerful.
Dedeker: We got more specific questions about the communication side of this as well. Before we talk about that, we're going to take a quick break to talk about our sponsors for this week's episode.
Emily: We want to move on to talking about communication when it comes to money. I think one of the first things that people might ask when it comes to this and talking especially to a new partner about money is when is the time to start talking about money in a new relationship? Because even just broaching that subject seems particularly daunting at times.
Hadassah: That's an interesting question because to me, that's really connected to potentially what your goals are, which is a weird thing to say in terms of relationships. Not always, or what you think is going to happen. What I mean is like, if you're a first date, second date, maybe not the time, but if your first or second date and ends up being like a super expensive trip to Reno, then maybe you are going to talk about money earlier on because you're going to be actually having that conversation of like, "Who's paying for the hotel?"
Some of it is just going to be about what are you trying to do practically. I think also if something you're trying to do is find a nesting partner, find somebody who you're trying to live with, within not a horribly long amount of time, I would say within a couple of months. You probably do want to start having that conversation of like, "Hey, how do you approach money from a household and operational standpoint?"
Some of that you can observe just by watching how people do their money transactions when you're out and about with them. Some of it is a conversation, "How do you think about your finances? Do you have financial goals that you're working towards? Do you ever think about sharing money with a partner?" You don't have to immediately go to the how would you and I share money, because you don't know that then. You can start seeding the conversation. That's a hard question to answer because it's going to be so situational.
Dedeker: I think related to that, I really like you talking about the money storytelling. That seems like that's really good especially if you've been in a long term relationship with someone. Actually, you know what, I changed my mind about that because I feel like the money storytelling seems like an exercise that's building intimacy ultimately.
The same way that we tell stories to each other about sexual experiences or childhood trauma or things like that. I feel like money could very easily get roped into that. That's something that I feel could very easily happen relatively early on in a relationship depending on the relationship. People do ask us like, "What's the easy, suave, cool and totally non-awkward way to bring up the topic of money with a partner? What's the super coolest way to actually see to that conversation with somebody?"
Hadassah: Again, I'm like, wow, it really depends on the person. Does that person like jokes and you're probably going to lead with a joke? Does that person like internet memes or documentaries? Then maybe you're going to lead with a documentary.
Emily: Money documentary.
Hadassah: Yes, I know. Nothing says fun, but are you watching content together. Like that guy invented how money got made in the United States. Then maybe that's your cool suave where, "Let's listen to the Hamilton soundtrack and actually talk about what happened after this guy invented the Federal Reserve."
Maybe you're going to watch a documentary like a little short. It doesn't have to be a whole two hours of your life. It could be 12 minutes about like the Financial Independence Movement. You're going to be like, "Wow, how are these people doing that? What is that?"
Again, it's a really interesting world of money landia because it's people who are like how do I take a norm and do something totally different and just completely hack this norm? Maybe you start the conversation with someone by not talking about yourselves, but just talking about like how does money work? You start to understand--
Jase: The concept.
Hadassah: Yes, how does that person think it works? We're watching economies in so many of our countries change, like slow down in the US. We just reported a 14.5% unemployment rate for April. You could just try a topical conversation, like what do you think about that? Why do you think that's happening? Who do you know that's impacting? Or if your person is impacted, "What's it to be part of this large number of people? What do you think?"
It seeds a conversation because now you're asking, what do you think? How do you feel? It can get you into a conversation of like, do you ever wonder what you want to do about that? What are you thinking is next for you? It lead you into this conversation so that you're not approaching it-- It's like we never want to be the awkward dad who's like, "Sit down at the table with me. We're going to bust out a notepad and I'm going to ask you awkward questions." Nobody wants that. Unless that's your thing, then that's totally okay.
Negotiate first always, always. Maybe really the question is like, how do you approach talking about money in a way that lets that person feel like it's a consensual choice to go into the conversation? Maybe when it is time to have a money conversation, you make a date for it, "Hey, I really want to be able to actually talk about how we use money together. I know this could be a sticky conversation, when will it be good for you to talk about that with me?"
Jase: Yes. The idea of setting up a date for it, the thing that this conversation has been making me think is, we have a thing called Radar, which is this regular monthly check-in that you can do in a relationship. There's a list of topics you go through and one of those topics is money. I was just thinking something that we should add to that in the money section is just each time you do it, ask a few of these storytelling questions.
It's not just like, let's sit down and practically do this. I'm actually excited next time Dedeker and I do a radar to be one of those questions you said like, "What's your first memory of knowing that money was a thing and how it works," or something like that. It could be really cool way of, like you said, building intimacy, but also having that question on a deeper level than just like, how are we going to afford to fix the leak under the sink?
Hadassah: Totally. Then like you said, then you're not dreading the conversation. You're actually thinking about how you're going to learn something about somebody that you care about, which is always a positive to understand each other better.
Jase: The next question that we got here is, what's the best way to support a partner who's going through financial stress if it's not desired or not appropriate to financially support them? What's a good way to support someone other than that?
Hadassah: One of the greatest things about having partners is that you have somebody you respect, you like, you care about, who you are incentivized to show up for. To me, then it's like having someone who's a cheerleader, who's on your team. You don't have to do all the same things to have a great relationship with somebody else. One thing you can do is to say, "Hey, is there like a task I can take on for you?" That could be anything from like pulling a credit report for someone and reading what's on it. Those things are gnarly. People can have really reasonable but really intense blocks by wanting to look at that. It could be like opening old bills or old nail that someone is feeling like, "Oh, I'm overwhelmed, I don't want to look at this." It could be setting up an online account for someone who just feels like, "I just can't."
I encounter a lot of folks. I think this really gets tied up with the like, "I don't know how to do money, I'm not doing it right." Folks get I think, really genuinely stuck in feeling fearful and like, "Well, I don't know how to do it right so I'm not going to do it. Now it feels worse. I'm definitely not going to do it." A way you can support someone is by intervening in that cycle and that really does often look like organizing paperwork, like finding accounts, making phone calls on someone's behalf.
I think for a lot of people, someone else calling to get some information on their student loans would be the greatest act of love ever because then you don't have to do it. These are the kinds of things that I think our romantic and platonic partners are great for because, again, we can trust them, we like them, we respect them and so you just have to go in and be like, "Look, I'm not going to judge what I find in here. I just see that is stressful for you and I want to take it off of your shoulders. I'm happy to get this done for you."
Speaker 1: Could I ask the opposite side of, what might be some things that are not appropriate? Not great ways to help because I feel like I see that too, this desire to like, "Well, let me come in and tell you how you should be doing it."
Hadassah: Yes. You're telling someone how to do-- Here's my hot take, there's a lot of ways to do money. We all think that we don't know it, but actually, there's a ton of ways to do it right, it's just about finding the way that works for you. Hounding someone on what your way is, is pretty much guaranteed to get someone to not want to do it your way. It's like a pretty good way to not get what you want.
It is about finding that line between like, "Hey, you're telling me you're stressed about this. I'm offering to do this part for you, do you want that?" I consent always. "Do you want me to do this thing for you?" I also think a thing you wouldn't want to do is, if you had a partner who for some reason you didn't fully trust, don't give them your bank account numbers and social security number. These things I'm suggesting are with someone with whom you have a trust relationship.
That's might be known but probably we're saying, anyway. I think from the other side like shaming someone for not doing something the way you would have done it or on the timeline you would have done it on, it's really unhelpful because that person is probably already feeling shameful that they have not done this thing. If we go back to the most people have some feeling or shame connected to money somewhere. Those things don't help.
Dedeker: That makes sense.
Emily: Finally, we're going to move on to big picture future type stuff. Our listeners were curious if it is ever possible, and I think where my head with this, was like a V-scenario for instance, in non-monogamy. Is it ever possible to intertwine finances with multiple people without it just being like a big convoluted, complicated mess?
Hadassah: It is possible to intertwine finances with other people. I think without it being a convoluted mess, I'd like to find convoluted for me and tell me how organized you want to be.Then I can tell you like how it's going to work. What's interesting to me is that because I'm a business owner and I work with lots of people who have businesses, the thing that I think that people find difficult about working with money in the business context is that, you have to have a fair amount of tracking and transparency for it to work.
You have to have some systems that you set up where you know what's getting spent, and you know how much money is in this account, and who has the cards and what's our plan, you have to have a little bit more front end work. Then you have a system and you work it. Then it's not necessarily convoluted at all, you just work your system.
It is possible to have multiple people use money together in a way that's pretty transparent, but everyone doesn't have to do everything. I think some of the best models come from the world of business and come from worker cooperatives and democratic workplaces where people are really thinking about how to have these conversations about money transparently. Oh, no. Go ahead, please.
Emily: I'm sorry, I just say, in terms of something being convoluted, I guess, I was thinking of like, if I'm the hinge and there was a person who I'm splitting my resources and time between two other people in ways, but they are not doing that with each other. Then there is a potential maybe for more convoluted things to happen. I guess what you're saying is that, yes, you can still figure it out in various ways.
Hadassah: Yes. I mean, it's like you kind of will be working two plans. I worked with a triad who was essentially setting that up. The person who was the hinge, first to go back to the very beginning, had to know how much money was coming in, had to know how much money it cost, they were rent splitting in two places. They're like, "All right, what are my costs with this household? What are my costs for that household?"
They had to be pretty clear on what they needed so they could set up this kind of bifurcated plan. I think the way that they have it set up where it's like, one person was someone who lived with most of the time one. They had shared accounts and they managed their money together in one way. Another person who they were with, they just spent weekends with sometimes, but regularly.
They didn't have shared accounts but they have this other way of managing their money together. It wasn't super easy to set up, they did have to have two working plans that they worked differently. From their experience perspective, they were like, "Well, I know how much money I have and how much I need to make sure I have available for these two scenarios that I'm in so I can make it work."
Jase: It's like it takes intention. It's not something you just throw this together and then it's done.
Dedeker: I don't have any personal experience with this. I don't think the three of us have necessarily personal experience with this. We get people who ask about things like property ownership or bigger purchases that have more than just a couple involved. I mean, we have people like seven or eight polycules, not necessarily that everyone's in the same relationship together, but they're connected in like a chosen family unit choosing to go all in on a home. Do you have any experience with that or any advice for that?
Hadassah: I do. The first thing I will say is, once you get into owning things, you're also going to want to tap a friendly lawyer, just to make sure that you're setting things upright in your state. Once you own things with other people, especially like assets that whenever you own something with somebody else, you want to think about the end state. There's two end states, one is, we want to sell this or I want to get out, but the other end state is, one of us passes away.
Once you're owning property, even with just one other person, you really want to think about, well, God forbid I get hit by a car and my evangelical brother ends up co-owning this because I didn't set up a will. Now you own a house with this person you never tried to own a house with, you want to think about the end state. That's going to be different depending on where you live, which is why lawyers are very helpful, to say, understand exactly how to set things up.
That caveat, firmly in place. It's interesting because property is, at least in the US, which is what I understand the best. In the Western world, is set up to flow really nicely with a nuclear family marriage scenario, and the sort of like, who owns what really fits well, if you just want to be married and own property together. Anything else, you're a bit of an edge case, but it's very, very doable.
What I often will see people do, not often but with decent regularity is, one or two people will be on a mortgage. If this is a getting a mortgage scenario, which for most of us it is but not all of us. One or two people will be on the mortgage because mortgages, they are not going to put seven people on a mortgage unless you're getting a commercial mortgage and you will have an LLC together. That's a whole other scenario, it's much, much harder to get.
It is a way easier to get a mortgage for a residential mortgage. Often, maybe one or two people will go on the mortgage, again, two, if you are married, or you really are willing to hack the paperwork together. Then as many people as is appropriate for your chosen situation, go on the title for the property. Again, if you're going to own something like a property with someone else, you want to trust them, you want to think about the end. That's absolutely how I see people do it. It's interesting because then you will also have an opportunity to really think through probably not everyone is going put in the same amount of money at the beginning. If we go back to this like, "Everyone has different amounts of resources. Certainly, somebody makes more money than everybody else because that's just numbers and facts. "How do you want to set up the difference between-- Or, do you want to have a difference between money that goes in to start up this project and money that we put in along the way, money that we might get out if one of us needs to be bought out or if we sell this?"
It's just a chance to really talk about how do we want to set this up. I have a post on my blog about buying a house. Regular people hats off to you, so you can link it. It's super interesting. It's totally possible. I think more and more of us are thinking about it as property ownership just becomes, in general, more expensive as we're thinking about choosing the families and the people that we want to be with and having space for more people that I like to be in.
Jase: We have one last question here that's about future planning and is very much related to this, which is just, how does planning for retirement look different for people who intend to not ever get married? I know for a lot of poly people or solo poly or have just decided, "Yes, I want to have these relationships, but I don't want to do state-mandated marriage." How does change things like retirement?
Hadassah: It's interesting because pack into retirement I think is often the like, "Where will I be and what will I be doing?" Which is a question that hypothetically is just automatically answered by marriage. "Well, I'll be with this person and we'll be wherever we decide to be."
Jase: In our house that we own.
Hadassah: In the house that the two of us on. Yes, and it's just easy. In some ways, retirement planning changes, but maybe in a deeper way it's envisioning the life that you want to have for yourself. It just takes more intentionality when we don't follow the standard path. What are the things that you might think about? You might really just think about-- Something I hear a lot of people talk about is like-- Me and my friends were like, "Well, where is the old punks retirement for like wayward queers?"
I'm like, "Where is the spot that has a cabin that we can add another cabin?" To me, what that is, is that's resilience planning outside of traditional norms, which a lot of us I think are thinking about especially right now. Maybe the question is, "What types of ways are you hoping to be resilient when you're older, and when you're not working?" Because I think for some people there is the farm dream and for some people, there is a traveling dream and for some people, there is the city condo dream.
In all of those dreams, we have the opportunities to think about, "Well, how might going to have other people who are important to me be part of those dreams?" Then you get to start deciding for yourself. "Do I want to be my own center point, but make sure that I have physical space to welcome people in?" Or, "Do I want to make sure that I have resources so that I can go travel to be with people who matters to me?"
I think it's thinking a little more expensively. "Do I want to have a fully paid off commune with a well by the time that we're 50 and everyone can just stop working?" Like whatever. Everyone's going to have their dream. It's doing that a little bit thinking forward where you go, "Okay, what would it take and who do I want to bring with me," and starting to actualize on this dream.
Jase: I feel like we need to go have serious conversation.
Jase: I like that idea of resiliency planning though, rather than just thinking retirement. As soon as you say, retirement it's like your mind gets filled with I guess these traditional visions of what that is, or just question marks fill up your brain and it's like, "I don't even know what that could even look like. I like that idea of just resiliency planning or just, in general, what would I like my life to look like then and the people would be involved in stuff? That's great.
Dedeker: Well, Hadassah, this has been fantastic. That hour went by so quickly, and there are so many good things here. I'm really excited to hear what our listeners have to say. Before we go, where can our listeners find more of you?
Hadassah: This has been so fun. I love this convo. Folks can find me at Ride Free Fearless Money at the internet places. ridefreefearlessmoney.com is my website, my blog. There's just tons of writing resources there. Ride Free Fearless Money on Instagram, Ride Free Fearless Money on Facebook, RF Fearless Money on Twitter, which I use in a mediocre kind of ways. Find or not, up to you. Those are the spots.
Dedeker: I can definitely attest that your website, Ride Free Fearless Money, so many resources between your blog and online courses that you offer and workshops and things like that. I highly recommend people go and check it out. There's just a wealth of wealth of resources there.