Dave Ramsey took a call from a woman who had done everything right — or so she thought. Married ten years, she and her husband still kept their finances entirely separate. She was the responsible partner, and the arrangement had always suited her fine. Then she lost her job.
What came next wasn’t the lecture you might expect from the man famous for blunt financial advice.
Ramsey didn’t question her motives. Instead, he cited a number: the survey his company ran of 10,000 millionaire households, and the financial habit the vast majority of them shared.
That number — and the reasoning behind it — matters beyond this one couple’s situation. If you’re in a marriage where you’re keeping finances separate, here’s why Ramsey’s answer is worth understanding.
What the separate-account logic misses
Ramsey’s argument isn’t that separate finances destroy marriages. It’s that shared finances build millionaires. Here’s what the data shows — and the reasoning that makes his case stronger than sentiment:
The wit and wisdom of Dave Ramsey
This isn’t the route Ramsey took, however. He didn’t assign blame, didn’t talk down to his caller, didn’t in any way imply that her sudden change of heart was motivated by the fact that a situation, that worked well for her before, suddenly didn’t seem so attractive when she had no money coming in. Instead, Ramsey took a kinder and bigger picture view of this couple’s relationship, and homed in on what they hoped to accomplish beyond this particular incident of one spouse (or the other) temporarily being out of work.
Statistically, he said, couples tend to have stronger and happier marriages when they combine finances. What’s more, statistically, the “vast majority” of 10,000 millionaire families, that Ramsey’s company surveyed for a recent study, were found to have “had shared finances.” And “statistically” therefore, “if you want to be a millionaire,” then the best way to do this appears to be by first combining finances with your spouse.
Why might that be?
Think about it like an investor. If you invest in a company with a single product, say a biotech startup that has a single cancer drug in phase 1 trials, well, that might work out really well for you if over time the drug goes through phase 2 and phase 3 successfully, comes to market, and becomes a blockbuster $1 billion-a-year drug. Or it could fail fantastically, if that single product fails its phase 2 trial, kind of like a spouse losing a job.
Investors like myself try to limit the risk of such a flame-out by investing in companies with more than one product, or investing in more than just one stock. It’s called “diversification,” and while it may limit the upside (like one spouse not having to worry about the other spouse’s spending, because they keep their finances separate), it also adds stability. If one revenue stream fails, there’s another revenue stream still coming in to keep the company (or the portfolio, or the family) afloat long enough for the other half of the company (or the portfolio, or the family) to recover from the setback.
Why diversification works
Thus diversification of revenue streams, within a single company, portfolio, or family, lends stability that can make it easier to reach the goal of building wealth over time.
But getting back to the caller’s scenario, Ramsey’s advice is for the spouses to sit down and agree on what they are trying to accomplish, financially. Then, any time one spouse wants to make a purchase, they have a common framework to examine the decision, and agree on whether it helps or hurts the shared long-term goal. The family shares “one checkbook, one budget, one set of goals.” They also share one or two incomes feeding into their shared budget and contributing to their shared goals.
Come what may, that unity of purpose and sharing of income contributes to reaching those shared goals. Sounds like good advice to me.
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