Discover four essential strategies for couples to achieve financial harmony this Valentine’s Day. Learn how open communication, shared goals, and celebrating milestones can strengthen your relationship and enhance your financial well-being. File photo.
By: Mariné van Brakel
Building a life together means sharing dreams, overcoming challenges, and working towards common goals. Just as strong relationships thrive on communication and trust, financial success is achieved when couples plan, save, and grow together.
Money is often seen as a source of conflict, but it can be a powerful tool to strengthen your relationship when managed together.
Tips for financial success as a couple
1. Start the conversation
Recent studies reveal that couples who openly discuss their financial goals and habits are more likely to achieve them. It’s common knowledge that money problems are an often-cited reason for the breakdown of committed relationships. However, it’s not necessarily money, but a lack of transparency in this important area of life that leads to the breakdown of the relationship, transparency is what builds trust, and a lack thereof breaks it.
2. Set shared goals
Whether it’s opening a credit account, taking out a loan, or customer protection insurance, financial harmony starts with setting shared objectives. There’s an old saying that goes, two people rowing in opposite directions will never reach the shore. Common interests draw partners together, but common goals are the glue that keeps them together.
A great place to start is by creating a budget together. This will allow you to work as a team to document your expenses and develop a realistic plan that balances your short-term needs with long-term ambitions. Couples who plan together, prosper together.
3. Leverage the right financial tools
Money can be a sensitive topic for couples because it’s deeply connected to our basic need to feel secure. Making big financial decisions—like choosing a credit provider or making a major purchase—requires a lot of trust. It can be even harder if you and your partner have different views on money. For example, one of you might like to save every cent, while the other enjoys spending freely.
Exploring financial products like joint credit accounts, budgeting apps, and tax and investment platforms that simplify shared financial management can ease some of the tension and give couples a joint view of where their money is going. Platforms like the Credit Gateway by RCS and the Welltec Group also provide consumers with advice and recommendations on practical steps they can take to improve their credit scores. The platform has been designed to assess financial needs and tailor solutions aimed at helping people, and couples, to develop good financial habits.
4. Celebrate milestones to build momentum
When achieving your financial goals seems like a lifetime away, it can be easy to get bogged down by the sacrifices you’re making now. Celebrating small financial victories like meeting a monthly savings target, staying within your budget for the week or even making a debt repayment, will keep you both motivated to keep working toward your major goals.
This is also the psychology behind the snowball method of paying off debt where you list your debts from smallest to largest and pay them off in that order, freeing up more disposable income to put into the larger debts as you go.
* Van Brakel is the deputy CEO at RCS.
PERSONAL FINANCE