Three Principles to Guide Your Financial Collaboration
How well do you and your spouse collaborate on financial matters?
The answer to this question matters to your marriage. Research from Nova Southeastern University found that couples who engage in joint financial planning and maintain financial transparency report higher levels of marital satisfaction. At the same time, those who lack openness are more prone to dissatisfaction and conflict.
Many families buy into the idea of working together on finances, but struggle with how to do it well. Other families concentrate the financial responsibility on one person. Below are three principles designed to make working together easier. And even if you’re single, these simple principles can help you develop healthy financial habits and learn what it means to be a thriving Kingdom steward—especially if you engage with someone who can offer some guidance and accountability along the way.
Three key principles of financial collaboration:
Everyone is a Steward
Everyone is Responsible
Everyone is Accountable
Everyone is a Steward
Being a good and faithful steward is part of being a disciple. Every spiritual formation approach I have seen includes giving or generosity as one of the practices. Excluding someone from financial matters limits their spiritual growth. No one would seriously argue that one family member should do all the praying, serving, or scripture reading because they are better at it.
Keeping a spouse from playing an active role in the decision-making process when it comes to giving affects more than just generosity. According to the Practicing the Way discipleship study, generosity is just one of the three practices that lead to the most significant degree of spiritual growth across all the practices. Giving pays meaningful spiritual dividends.
Everyone is Responsible
Although everyone should participate, participation doesn’t have to be equal. While everyone should read scripture, not everyone should lead a Bible study. How you divide up the responsibility will be based on ability, time, and role. In our household, I am responsible for income, investments, and the first draft of the budget. I love working, hold the Chartered Financial Analyst designation, and lead a stewardship ministry. Those are my strengths.
I am blessed with a wife who manages finances well. She often serves as the treasurer for organizations she volunteers with. She stopped working outside the home eighteen months after our wedding. She manages our bills, bank statements, and a host of nonfinancial items, like getting our youngest son to sports practice. Even if she were only 75% as effective with finances, she would still oversee these areas because she has the time and fills that role well in our household. Her primary reason for assuming that role is to manage the spending, and the resulting statements help her know where she spends our money and if we are spending too much. The other reason is that I just don’t have time.
Even if the gap in financial abilities is wider, sharing the responsibility is highly encouraged. A less financially inclined husband with mechanical aptitude might be responsible for how much to spend on household and car repairs, while a less financially inclined wife who does the vacation planning might be responsible for setting reasonable limits on the travel, lodging, and dining budget.
Everyone is Accountable
Spouses must remain accountable to one another. At the risk of quoting controversial verses, Ephesians 5:22-33 speaks of submission, loving sacrificially, and being united in marriage. Financially, the person responsible for an area is accountable to the other spouse.
I have worked with too many households, Christian and secular, where the husband earns the money and treats financial matters like my dad treated his woodworking shop. I’ve also seen too many wives happily abdicate their stewardship responsibilities.
Beyond the discipleship damage referenced earlier, this approach has many practical drawbacks. If the family experiences financial stress, the husband bears the burden, and the couple is ill-equipped to solve the challenges together. If one spouse is left out or opts out, the family’s full interests aren’t considered. I’ve also seen many cases where the financially stronger spouse dies first, and the surviving spouse is ill-equipped to steward the remaining assets. It doesn’t have to be the husband who takes control of the finances. In a recent video, I joked about how “poor” Travis Kelce is compared to his much wealthier fiancée, Taylor Swift. Humor aside, the truth is that financial responsibility isn’t about who earns more—it’s about working together toward shared goals.
In my own marriage, I update my wife on our investment portfolios every quarter. We talk about risks, balances, and how they align with our long-term goals. My job is to unpack our situation in a relevant way, and hers is to engage and ask relevant questions. While I may do the lion’s share of the work, she is still an equal steward.
Your situation will likely be different, as every couple divides their financial roles and responsibilities in their own unique way. What matters most is that both partners have a voice and a shared understanding of where they’re headed and how they plan to get there.
Stewardship is a team effort, and when couples set their goals and make their decisions together, they strengthen not only their financial health but their spiritual health as well. And whether married or single, God has given us everything we need to be thriving stewards of what he has entrusted to us.
