By: Preston Young
There is a question we ask almost every new couple that walks through our door, and it never fails to generate an awkward pause. “If something happened to one of you tomorrow, does the other one know where everything is and how it all works?”
The silence that follows tells us everything we need to know.
It’s not that couples don’t care about each other’s financial wellbeing. It’s that money – the day-to-day management of it, the planning of it, the worrying about it, almost always defaults to one person in a relationship. And the other person, consciously or not, is more than happy to let it. For a while, this arrangement works just fine. Until it doesn’t.
We’ve sat across the table from widows and widowers who had no idea what accounts existed, who the advisor was, or where to even begin. We’ve worked with divorced individuals who realized mid-process that they didn’t understand the most basic elements of the financial life they’d shared for decades. And we’ve watched couples approach retirement with fundamentally different assumptions about what that retirement was going to look like, assumptions they had never actually compared notes on.
None of this is unusual. All of it is avoidable.
In most households, one partner handles the finances. They pay the bills, manage the investments, coordinate with the accountant, and carry the mental load that comes with all of it. It feels efficient. And honestly, it is. There is nothing wrong with this arrangement — in fact, it’s how most financially successful households operate. Someone has to own it, and when one person is naturally more inclined or more organized, it makes sense for them to take the lead.
The problem isn’t the division of labor. The problem is the knowledge gap it quietly creates over time.
The financially engaged partner gets more comfortable and more confident each year. The other partner gets more removed, and often more anxious about their own lack of understanding. By the time a couple is in their 50s or 60s, the gap can feel so wide that the disengaged spouse doesn’t even know where to start asking questions. So they don’t. And the cycle continues.
This is exactly where we come in.
One of the most intentional things we do at Nexa is make sure that both spouses are part of the relationship — not just the one who manages the checkbook. We don’t just encourage this. We ask for it. Because in our experience, the households that are most prepared for whatever life throws at them are the ones where both partners have at least a working understanding of where they stand.
That doesn’t mean both spouses need to become financial experts. It means that the spouse who isn’t in the weeds day-to-day should still be able to answer basic questions: What do we own? What are we trying to accomplish? What would I do if I had to handle this on my own?
The way we help couples get there isn’t through one big overwhelming conversation. It’s through consistent, accessible communication over time, meetings where both partners are in the room, portfolio reviews that explain not just what is happening but why, and check-ins that create natural opportunities for the less engaged spouse to ask questions without feeling behind. Our goal is that every communication we send, every meeting we hold, and every report we share gives both of you something you can actually use regardless of who does the heavy lifting at home.
For the spouse who manages everything, we serve as a sounding board and a strategic partner. For the spouse who is less involved day-to-day, we serve as a translator and a consistent point of reference. Over time, that consistency builds real financial literacy, not from a textbook, but from lived experience inside their own financial life.
Here is something that might surprise you: in our experience, couples fight less about money than they do about what money is for. And those are very different conversations.
One partner wants to retire at 60 and travel. The other hasn’t thought past 55 and has no particular interest in leaving the workforce early. One wants to help the kids with a house down payment. The other believes the kids should figure it out on their own. One thinks they should be giving more to charity. The other thinks they should be saving more aggressively. These are the conversations that get avoided because they feel uncomfortable, or because couples assume they’re already aligned when they’re not.
Having both partners at the table when we talk about goals isn’t just good practice. It’s where some of the most important planning work actually happens. We’ve facilitated more than a few of these conversations where it became clear, pretty quickly, that two people who had been married for decades had never actually articulated what they wanted the next chapter to look like. Getting there together with someone in the room whose only job is to help translate those goals into a real plan, changes things.
Beyond goals and account balances, there is a category of conversation that most couples avoid almost entirely: what happens if things go wrong? Disability, death, cognitive decline – none of these are pleasant to discuss. But the failure to plan for them creates real and sometimes devastating consequences for the surviving or caregiving partner.
Does your spouse know where the estate documents are? Do they know who the beneficiaries are on your retirement accounts and life insurance policies? Do they have a relationship with your advisor, your accountant, your attorney or will they be starting from scratch at the worst possible moment?
These aren’t morbid questions. They’re practical ones. And they’re exactly the kind of thing we make sure both spouses have clarity on, not just the one who set it all up.
If any of this is resonating, the bar to get started is lower than you might think. The minimum viable version of this isn’t a total overhaul of who does what at home. It’s simply this: both spouses should be part of the advisory relationship. Come to the meetings. Read the updates. Ask questions, even the ones that feel basic. That alone, showing up and staying engaged is enough to close a meaningful portion of the gap.
We’ll do the rest. That’s what we’re here for.
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