Episode 31: Part 2 – Couples With Unequal Incomes: Fairness, Pressure, and Partnership
This episode is Part 2 of Episode 30: Couples With Unequal Incomes: Fairness, Pressure, and Partnership. Listen to Part 1 here or watch on YouTube.
Episode Takeaways
Is a promotion or higher-paying job worth the added stress and time away from your family? Before deciding, you and your spouse need a clear picture of what you’re working toward together.
In this episode, Danton Troyer and Kyle Luetters continue their conversation about marriage and money by exploring how couples can make career and financial decisions together. Through personal examples involving income differences, promotions, returning to work, travel, and family responsibilities, they explore the trade-offs executives and business owners may need to weigh with their spouses.
Danton and Kyle explain how shared financial goals, regular money conversations, and a family SWOT analysis can help spouses weigh additional income against household costs, personal fulfillment, and time together.
Danton and Kyle discuss:
- How couples can decide whether a promotion or higher-paying job supports their shared goals
- Which financial, personal, and family trade-offs to consider before accepting a new role
- How one-year, five-year, and long-term goals can guide major career decisions
- Why regular money conversations can reduce resentment around income and family responsibilities
- How a family SWOT analysis can help spouses evaluate opportunities, concerns, and priorities
- And more!
Resources:
- Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace course
- Family SWOT analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats
Connect With Danton Troyer:
Connect with Kyle Luetters:
Transcript
Wit, Wisdom, and What Matters Most
Episode 31: Part 2 – Couples With Unequal Incomes: Fairness, Pressure, and Partnership
Transcript
Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Wit, Wisdom, and What Matters Most with Danton Troyer and Kyle Luetters from Moneta Wealth Management. In this podcast, we help corporate executives and business leaders navigate the real-life uncertainty around new financial life stages. From complex benefits and career changes to retirement and legacy planning.
Join us as we explore these career and life shaping moments with our guests, helping listeners find clarity so they can focus on what matters most to them
Kyle Luetters: And welcome back to another edition of Wit, Wisdom, and What Matters Most. It’s a podcast from Moneta’s Gast Freeman Troyer team. My name is Kyle Luetters, joined by Danton Troyer. And this is part two of a conversation around marriage and money, and talking about, among other things, possible disparities in either income, net worth, how we treat the overall family unit from a financial standpoint, as well [00:01:00] as how do we have some difficult conversations?
And Danton, where we left off last time is it’s great to talk about all of these things about the what ifs, but from sitting in the financial planner’s chair, how do you start facilitating some of the conversations around getting out of people what they truly want in their family or in their marriage-type unit?
‘Cause you left off with a great what if of I have no idea how much it would take monetarily for me to move a state away from my family for a period of time. But how do we tee up those conversations, or how do we give people a framework or a thought process to think through those things?
Danton Troyer: Yeah. The specific case that most resonates with that is, it was really like this is the possibility.
And the client’s coming to me asking should I take the job, and that directly, and I pushed back immediately. I said, “I can’t tell you that. What does your wife think, first of all?” But the conversation we had more so was what does that dollar amount do for your family? What are the things [00:02:00] that are important to you?
And a lot of the same stuff tends to come up. This allows us to send our kids to college fully paid for wherever they want. That’s pretty powerful and may be a reason you start thinking about it. But if you just say, hey, you’re gonna get $5 million, I mean, that sounds like a lot of money to a lot of people, and it is, but if you can’t…if you don’t need that, if that’s not your goal from a family standpoint, is it really worth it?
And I again, if I’m not on the spot and I don’t have to make this decision right now, but I don’t know if I’d move for $5 million tomorrow. I don’t know that I would. I don’t know that our family would change that much. The things that we have, and there’s, we’re pretty simple in the things that we like to do, so I don’t know that we would do it, but I’m not in that position right now, so I can’t emphatically say I would turn it down.
Kyle Luetters: I think you hit the nail on the head in that you don’t ever fully know the implications of the decision and the weight of the decision until you’re faced with it.
I go back to a number of conversations with clients [00:03:00] that have either been high-level executives or they’ve been business owners, and you wanna talk about two subsets of people that are high performers, high achievers, and there’s always something around the bend. When you get through some of the meatier parts of their year, sometimes the conversation is around, and I’m not saying this is right or wrong, some of them are happy that they punched the gas.
And they’re like, “That was absolutely the right decision.” Others of them will sit there and say, “I really wish somebody would have sat me down and said, ‘What’s really important?’ And held me to task because, yeah, we punched the gas, and either we zoomed up the corporate ladder or we really made this business grow, but I didn’t see my kids for four years. I don’t remember that part of thing, and we realize now that family time is very important to us, but nobody pulled us aside and made us think about that.”
And that’s some of the uniqueness of the conversations we get to have as planners [00:04:00] because any time somebody comes to us and says, “Hey, I’m up for this new job, I’m up for this new position,” my first question is, “Okay, so what do you really want?”
“I don’t know. This sounds really great.” No. Right What do you and your spouse really want? What are the implications for this?
Danton Troyer: Yeah.
Kyle Luetters: At one point, there was a job opportunity in my line that could have been economically amazing, fantastic. However, the more and more we talked about it, the more and more we realized what trade-offs are possible, likely even, and they didn’t align with the future vision that we had. Once we get the kids grown and gone and this and that, it did not necessarily get us there quicker. In fact, it was a bumpier or a wavier road, whichever way you wanna take that.
And really, when we sit down and have conversations with families, whether executives, business owners, so on and so forth, it has to [00:05:00] come back to time is the only resource, other than land, but really time is the only resource they’re not making any more of.
Danton Troyer: Yeah.
Kyle Luetters: How do you wanna allocate that time? What is going to matter the most when you look back on the time that you had that you did do? What did you use with it? And that’s what I found is at least a good starting point around the goals conversation as to bringing this all together. Where do we want to be together when we look back on how we spent our time that we were given?
Danton Troyer: Yeah. I certainly value time a lot more than maybe when I was younger and it seemed like you just ran around and did everything you possibly could. And even my wife and I kind of went through this in, I don’t remember what, some point in our careers, and my wife’s a kindergarten teacher, so there’s an income disparity between the two of us.
And I was, like, pressuring her and upset ’cause all her friends were leaving the school district she teaches in and going to a different school district and taking decent pay raises. And I was like, “Man, well, why don’t you do this?” ‘Cause in [00:06:00] my career I’ve always tried to move up and better the income that…you know, that’s just my mindset. That was what is important to me in my career, and I do see the value that it provides my family, and to me, that was it.
Finally, you know, after arguing, and I was resentful for a while, but I stopped to think. It was like- Why? If it adds extra stress to her life where she’s not as happy, then we’re not gonna be as happy, and then there’s ramifications to the kids’ education as well that…
And all I could think about was we’re turning down this extra chunk of change every single year that really could help us, but not really. It’s not gonna change our lives really. So I had to step back even myself, admit I was wrong. And, and say, “Oh, yeah, you might have been right on that one.”
So hopefully she’s not listening to hear that I was wrong once. Only once, though.
Kyle Luetters: Only once.
Danton Troyer: Yeah.
Kyle Luetters: I think they’re, speaking of some of these, maybe these income disparity situations-
Danton Troyer: Yeah …
Kyle Luetters: I’ll go back to [00:07:00] one where, typically where we’ll see this most frequently is when we have someone that stays home with kids while they’re growing up – whether that’s mom or dad. There gets to be a point where the kids get to a certain age where there’s this thought of, “Okay, they’re big enough. We can go back. We can do this. We can do that.” Similar to your wife, my wife, in another life, was a kindergarten teacher- and elementary school teacher.
She decided that a couple years ago, “Hey, the kids are big enough. It’s probably time to go back.” What did we always say? “The extra income would be nice.”
Danton Troyer: Yeah.
Kyle Luetters: That’s always said. That’s always said.
Danton Troyer: Yeah.
Kyle Luetters: I’m gonna be honest with you, that was the year from H-E-L double hockey sticks. And just because this image of what we had for our family and our family life got completely turned upside on its head when you had two people gone all the time.
And by the way, all the extra money that we had? More takeout, [00:08:00] more convenience things
Intro: Yeah
Kyle Luetters: We didn’t even really net. a lot more. But again, that’s where it comes down to each and every family, and you’ve got to think through this matrix. If your goal, and when you’re sitting down with your spouse, whether the incomes are even, there’s a disparity, whatever.
If you sit down and your goals are to say, “Hey, look, we want to push, push, push because we want to be done at this time, and we want to be doing this by this certain point,” by all means, but you’re locked in on that together. Or, if you’ve decided what you want this to look like together, you’re willing to make sacrifices.
That’s just part of it, but it’s easier for the two of you to buy in, and there’s less likelihood of there being resentment if you’re both working towards a shared, common goal that you’ve agreed on together. And that’s where facilitating conversations around what does it look like for us to spend our time I think’s the biggest thing.
Danton Troyer: Yeah, I think you’re right. As we just step back and think about from a [00:09:00] financial planning, everybody thinks dollars and cents. But there’s one screen on our software that talks about goals, and that’s where we spend the majority of our time, and that’s where clients’ eyes light up. Talking about again, we go back to those needs, those wants, and the wishes, and that conversation.
I’m sure there’s other ways that should be discussed as well. But I think that really starts a great conversation because bringing them both together. And the clients that come together and do that exercise together I think are… because then it’s a little bit easier for whatever spouse is staying home, let’s say, they can see why that is important to the family because these are things we’re gonna accomplish. Because the one spouse is traveling 100 days of the year at least. And so they’re gone, and the kids, and there’s, the stay-at-home can maybe not see it as much, and vice versa. The person who’s traveling, doesn’t see that the kids are driving whoever crazy. They don’t see, ’cause you’re separate. So if you’re not coming together and say, “This is why we’re doing this,” [00:10:00] it just, then it I think, to your point, everybody just starts getting resentful against each other, ’cause whatever you’re doing is of course the most important thing.
And you don’t, there’s no why behind it. And if there’s no why, then it gets real tough real fast.
Kyle Luetters: When we were going through our own premarital process when we got married, it was very interesting to me that we did something through our church, and the biggest takeaway that we had was actually from the Dave Ramsey Financial Peace course.
And it had nothing to do with numbers.
Danton Troyer: Yeah.
Kyle Luetters: The biggest thing was is how do the two of you get on the same page from a goals standpoint.
Danton Troyer: Yeah.
Kyle Luetters: And I remember vividly in that class him saying If you can paint the picture and tell someone where the finish line is, and get them to buy in on crossing that finish line, they will hook, line, and sinker it, and that is my wife to an absolute T.
If you can get her on board, [00:11:00] and she has the say so in the goal of where we wanna be, and you layer out what needs to happen, here are the data points that have to be checked in order to get there, I kid you not, she has a stubbornness to achieve that that is unmatched of anything I have in my brain.
‘Cause unfortunately, because God has a sense of humor, I’m the nerd in our family by nature of what I do, but I’m also the spender in our family. So that’s why I have to do this stuff. But it just never ceases to amaze me that when we get the chance to sit down, and we usually do this, and this is a good tip for a lot of folks; we give this in premarital stuff, but we also give this to our clients: once or twice a year, if you’re married, sit down with your spouse away from all other distractions. Put your phones away. If you be the type of people that enjoy an adult beverage, go get a nice bottle of wine or something, please.
We have some folks that can actually recommend some [00:12:00] good bottles for you. Sit down and have the conversations. Where do we wanna be in one year, five, and then pick some other milestones. For us, a big one is when our last, when our youngest one gets graduated from college. We have a very big financial goal to hit, and we have a timeframe on that, and that’s when that little guy walks across the stage, grabs his diploma, holds it up, smiles at his mother. I’m gonna sit there, and I’m gonna clap and go, “We need to be at this point.”
Danton Troyer: All right.
Kyle Luetters: Because that’s what we agreed to, and we’re both working toward that. And then that gives us a framework of decision process that anytime something comes up, whether it’s a promotion, I need to pour a little extra gas in at work, she needs to be doing something around here.
If we can tangibly connect that activity towards getting closer to that goal, the resentment’s not there. The I’m putting in more, you’re doing more or less, that’s not there. We’re both working toward something [00:13:00] together.
Danton Troyer: Yeah. And we have those meetings after they’ve had that glass of wine, and they come to us and they’re like, “These are all the things we wanna do.”
And those are great meetings, and so much more productive. And then we can add the dollars and cents to it and say, “All right, these are the things we need to check off to get there.”
And I think you’re spot on. If you got everybody bought in, and the hard part, I think, is at the executive level, sometimes it’s difficult to find time to have that conversation.
And so I think the best thing is, to your point, keeping a schedule’s tough, but it needs to happen on a more regular basis than just when it comes up because it’s too hard that way. You’ll have people, you’ll go three, four, five, …you look back 10 years, you’re like, “Oh, yeah, we said we wanted to do this, but that, that doesn’t even make any sense anymore.”
And so then I think it can creep in, so it’s not just that one conversation, there needs to be some upkeep along that as well.
Kyle Luetters: This is gonna sound really weird, but a couple of years ago, somebody turned [00:14:00] me on to the idea, and this was after we went through a business exercise. So I’m speaking right to our executives.
If you’re on an executive team, you know what a SWOT analysis is. Now, take me through this thread just a little bit. The crux of the conversation with this person, who was a high-level coach, he said, “You have a SWOT analysis for your business or your executive team. The most important relationship, if you are married, in this world is with your spouse.”
Danton Troyer: Yeah.
Kyle Luetters: Do a SWOT analysis on that relationship: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You’re gonna find a lot of conversations come out of those, and that exercise, if you’re already in the business world, you have a general framework of how to do it. You basically take a sheet of paper, you draw it into fourths.
S-W-O-T. You kinda come through that, and you work through that, and somebody’s gotta be the note-taker. Usually in a relationship you know who that person is. It’s either the person that can actually write quickly or have legible handwriting. [00:15:00]
But that in of itself, like, I hear what you’re saying. In the executive world, you make time to do that because you’re running your business that way. You need to start treating the way that you run your family that way as well, too.
Danton Troyer: Amen
Kyle Luetters:. Danton, we’ve got just a little bit of time left. Final thoughts around the horn? I’ll let you go first, and then we’ll take it on out of here.
Danton Troyer: Yeah, we, after however many podcast episodes we’re on now, a lot of the, quote-unquote, “problems” get resolved, we say this a lot – it’s communication. But that’s easy, but it’s being committed to it, and then having those conversations. And sometimes they’re not fun, and so we put ’em off, or sometimes we’re too busy, we put ’em off, but making sure we are always finding the time to have the conversations.
And that’s why I think, a little biased, but our profession is needed beyond AI; we facilitate some of those conversations as well, that just having someone there that’s unbiased and, but also understands the goals and understands [00:16:00] what’s possible for you, I think that’s the value we can provide and do provide.
And honestly, more fun for me at least than, “Hey, let’s open a Roth IRA,” or, “Let’s do this.” That stuff comes later, but that’s not the point of this. It’s how do we take these dollars and make them something for our family?
Kyle Luetters: I agree and I echo that, and what I’ll say is, so much of what I think people think we do is the very technical or the mechanical side of things. Like, candidly, like in some ways I think it’s easier for you to open your own account on Schwab versus me to do it for you. Actually, I think that portal for the retail investor is easier.
What is not, is having and facilitating these types of conversations around difficult topics by having somebody that is basically an honest broker in the room.
Danton Troyer: Yeah.
Kyle Luetters: And if I were to speak to folks out there that are either struggling with the disparity thing, or am I putting in enough, or are they putting in enough, this or that, [00:17:00] I’d be a praying man. I think that’s probably the best way to put it. Been to a lot of services. I was even actually a participant in my own marriage.
And a lot of the times they would go back to a scripture very, actually the beginning of Genesis where it says, “For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother, be joined with his wife and form one.” This version of that, and whether you’re a believer or not, this version of this relationship, this family unit when you start having kids, is being one.
Not four individuals, not two individuals, how many you have in there, but one unit, one entity. If you’re in the business world, one business unit. Makes a huge mental shift in your mind onto how you view things and how you ultimately come up with what’s going to be the best for the overall thing and not just each and every person individually.
You all can get your wins out of there. You’re not always gonna win all the time. But if the main thing [00:18:00] continues to win, I’ll just say from personal experience as well as sitting on the professional side, I see more fulfillment, more contentment under that model than I do other models. I’ll just leave it at that.
Danton Troyer: I certainly agree. Just thinking through clients that aren’t fully bought into the we’re one unit. Creates some friction and just makes things more difficult than they probably need to be.
Kyle Luetters: So before we create any more friction, this is I think a great place to jump off.
But what a wonderful conversation. Thanks for having it. It’s been great to pop back and forth. Danton, where can folks find us and get a hold of us and the show as wel,l too?
Danton Troyer: Yeah. Our website’s witwisdomandwhatmattersmost.com, but we’re also on YouTube, search the same. We’re on Spotify, all the major platforms as well.
Professionally, we’re on LinkedIn, both of us, and Moneta as a firm, and the podcast is out on LinkedIn as well. So we are [00:19:00] available if you guys have any questions, it’s pretty easy to find us.
Kyle Luetters: Yeah. And again, this is Wit, Wisdom, and What Matters Most. It’s a production of Moneta’s Gast Freeman Troyer team headquartered here in St.Louis, Missouri.
Until next time, enjoy what matters most.
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