Money is one of the hardest topics for people to talk about in a relationship. During a health crisis, practicing good money habits isn’t at the front of anyone’s mind. But, in times of uncertainty, it’s one of the most important conversations couples should have after a major health situation occurs.

27 million people were uninsured for health coverage in 2021 according to the U.S Census Bureau. Without the protection of health insurance, fixing a broken leg can cost up to $7,500, a weekend hospital stay is about $30,000, and cancer care treatment can cost thousands of dollars.

If a relationship is strained from the effects of financial stress, the added burden of healthcare costs can feel insurmountable. Here are some ways couples, therapists, and relationship counselors can use Money Habitudes to cope with the added financial stress a major health event can cause.

Impacts of financial stress

The United States saw a record high increase of Americans putting off medical care due to costs in 2022 – up 12% from 2021 according to Gallup’s annual Health and Healthcare poll. Lower income households, women, and young adults reported higher rates of postponed medical treatment for a serious condition.

When you combine money stress with other types of stress, communication can break down. This causes more stress and feeds a perpetuating cycle of conflict and miscommunication. Like other forms of stress, financial stress can feel overwhelming and can affect many areas of a person’s life, including their physical and mental health.

If the stress becomes intense or chronic, other health problems like anxiety, depression, or heart disease could occur. With the majority of Americans experiencing some kind of financial hardship, the anxiety and worry about medical bills on top of a health concern can make it hard for a couple to cope.

How can people manage money and an illness?

Medical expenses can fluctuate in their price and occurrence, which makes it harder to manage money in both the short and long term. When tensions are high, the emotional triggers of financial stress can cause people to make poor or impulsive spending decisions, making the financial stress greater.

To help couples manage their money habits, emotional wellness, and health, therapists and relationship counselors can use Money Habitudes as a tool for identifying people’s emotional financial triggers. Knowing a person’s emotional financial triggers will help when deciding on future strategies to combat negative spending habits. Here are some ways Money Habitudes can help manage money stress and start finding stability while dealing with a medical condition.

Have a conversation

When a person experiences stress, the body responds by activating our natural fight-or-flight response to prepare the body for the challenges ahead. This can be great in the event of immediate physical danger, but when stress becomes a chronic problem, our bodies never leave that fight-or-flight mode. The energy of managing physical, mental, and financial stress makes it hard to communicate in a relationship.

If a partner has a poor relationship with money, it can be hard for couples to spark healthy conversations in a positive, collaborative way. Having a conversation with the help of professional marriage or relationship counselors can help couples work on their communication skills. Once a couple can deploy proactive, rather than reactive discussions, they will have more control over their emotions and understand their spending habits.

Analyze money habits and behaviors

Trying to budget your money and stay financially afloat can be especially tedious during a health event. Unfortunately, no amount of budgeting can save a person from their own biases or emotional spending triggers if they aren’t aware of them. When a couple can start communicating in a relationship, it’s important to understand the root cause of each other’s emotional associations and behaviors around money. If you don’t understand your spending habits and behaviors, you’re not going to be able to make effective changes. The Money Habitudes personality assessment can help you set goals and bring awareness to challenges you might not be aware of.

Money Habitudes help partners navigate challenging financial situations by deconstructing habits and emotional responses to money in a fun and stress-free way. The Money Habitudes results provide couples with rich, user-friendly insights based on a person’s money personality in a way that allows them to see their spending patterns and the motivations behind them.

Take a financial inventory

Regaining a sense of financial control can feel like an uphill battle for couples dealing with high medical debts. The good thing is, once people become aware of their emotional connections with money, they can manage money more easily. But, to get out of the cycle of debt, a couple needs to know where their money is going. This is where a budget becomes a handy tool for detailing monthly income, debts, and expenses.

Once a financial inventory is in place, couples can plan ahead of time for recurring or unexpected medical expenses, like cancer treatment costs, copays, prescriptions, or emergency room visits. Having a financial inventory in place will give you more ownership of your finances and will allow you to plan for the moments that are impossible to plan for in life. With over 50% of Americans lacking the savings to handle an unexpected emergency, taking inventory now should be a priority.

Gather resources and support

The cost of a medical emergency is expensive whether you have health insurance or not. For people without healthcare coverage, the out-of-pocket costs of medical bills are extremely high, where you’re expected to pay everything from lab and service fees to specialty services and other medical costs. Thankfully, it’s possible to negotiate medical bills with a hospital by setting up a payment plan or receiving special discounts as an uninsured patient. Working with the hospital’s financial department can help adjust bills around a person’s ability to pay to help ease financial burden.

Establishing healthy spending behaviors takes time. In times of crisis, people often find help to address their immediate needs for food, shelter, medical care, and safety within their communities. Once the initial crisis is over, money issues can still go unresolved. Depending on a couple’s situation, financial assistance and additional resources could be a helpful option for help with bills or managing a chronic illness.

In some cases, it might be beneficial for a couple to get advice from a professional who can help them manage their illness and their finances. Alongside other resources, Money Habitudes puts a positive spin on how to think and interact with money and helps manage financial struggles easier when health issues arise – Helping couples pave the way to financial freedom, one step at a time.

Cara Macksoud, owner of Money Habitudes

It’s important to know how to discuss money. This is true if you are discussing money with a friend, sibling, parent, partner or spouse. It’s also important for professionals like financial planners, financial educators and therapists to be able to discuss money with clients and patients.

How NOT to discuss money

First of all, people often pick the wrong time and place to discuss money. The the money discussion doesn’t go well. That only reinforces the idea that it’s hard and not productive to discuss money. Here are some tips so you can avoid discussing money at the wrong time. Think about the acronym, HALT. Don’t discuss money if you are:

• Hungry
• Angry
• Lonely
• Tired

In the same vein, it’s not a good idea to talk about money when you spring it on someone. Instead of trying to discuss money with your spouse when you are upset about a charge on your joint credit card, put the issue aside for a bit until you are calm enough to talk about it.
And research has shown that your environment can have a big effect. In an experiment conducted by Sonya L. Britt and John E. Grable, professors at Kansas State, it was found that just installing comfy chairs or a sofa in a financial planner’s office improved the interaction by reducing financial planning clients’ stress levels. What’s the takeaway from this professional setting for those at home? Be comfortable. Think of the dynamics of sitting across from each other at a table, interrogation style, versus sitting next to each other on the couch.
Also, think about discussing money as walking up a set of stairs:
At the top of the stairs are money discussions that are big and serious and have the biggest chance of causing discord. This might be bringing up a prenuptial agreement. It might be getting your credit reports and going over them before getting married or buying a house.
At the bottom of the metaphorical staircase are money discussions that are much less charged and easier to have. Discussing money here might look like talking about the first purchase you remember making on your own. Was it a doll, a bike, a basketball, a car, etc.?

The first time you discuss money

Many people don’t discuss money until they have to discuss money. Think about the couple where one person manages all the finances and everything is going swimmingly … until someone loses his or her job. Then they have to discuss money and it’s a really stressful situation.
If you don’t talk about money unless there’s a problem, it’s easy to connect “talk about money” and “problems.” (That’s true too for a therapist, financial educator or financial planer who only talk about money when they need to “fix” something.)
Therefore, plan to progress through various levels of difficult money discussions over time. Start with the easiest conversations. And have those conversations at good, healthy, convenient times. Think about the different conversations that come out of setting up the conversation in these two ways:

• “Let’s plan to share some of our early money memories over a nice dinner next week.”
• “We need to talk about our finances tonight!”

Although Money Habitudes was specially designed to get people to discuss money in a good way, here are a few low-risk money conversation starters that you can also use:

• Remember the first time you bought something with your own money? What did you buy? How did you get the money?
• What was your first job and what did you do with your money?
• What did you learn from your religion about money?
• Growing up, how was money talked about in your home? Who paid the bills? How were big financial decisions made?
• How would you know when your parents disagreed about money?

Even with low-risk money conversation starters and a good environment, it’s still good to start a money discussion by acknowledging to your partner that talking about money can feel awkward, but it builds trust and lays a stronger foundation for your relationship.
Finally, it’s good to get into a practice where you discuss money on a regular basis. It doesn’t have to be weekly. Think about having a check-in every quarter or every six months.

How understanding your money personality helps you discuss money

It can be hard for someone to discuss money because you bring your own biases, values and attitudes to the discussion. For example:

• If you grew up in a family that was very generous, you may have a strong belief that one should use money to help others. If you are discussing money with someone who doesn’t feel the same way, it can cause problems. You may think that your friend, partner, spouse, etc. is cheap or uncaring about others. That person may think you are irresponsible and unrealistic when it comes to providing for yourself and your family. Those feelings can easily boil over into offensive and hurtful words that make it hard to have a productive conversation about money. Imagine how hard it is to recover from a money conversation that starts with, “You’re so irresponsible! All you ever do with your money is give it to your brother who never seems to be bale to hold a job! And you’re always pending our money on gifts for other people and then we have to do without!”
• If you are very good at not spending money it can be hard to discuss money with someone who finds it easy – too easy, you might think – to part with money. It’s easy for people to label money behaviors different than their own as being “cheap” or a “spendthrift” and having a money discussion devolve into a money fight.

How Money Habitudes helps you discuss money

Money Habitudes was designed to help people discuss money. It looks and feels like a money game but offers serious results. It is one part money conversation starter and one part money personality test.

• First, as an activity, it gives people an excuse and a framework to talk about money. It is easier to say, “let’s do this conversation starter game” versus a more open-ended, “let’s sit down and just discuss money.”
• Second, it helps start conversations around money. Each of the 54 statement sorting cards acts as its own non-threatening ice breaker statement.
• Third, it helps people understand their own money personality – and that of the person with whom you want to discuss money. If you know where you’re coming from, it makes it easier to listen, be less judgmental and understand your own tendencies, attitudes, and financial biases.
• Fourth, it gives people non-threatening, non-judgmental language to use when they discuss money. It’s easier to talk in terms of, “Oh, I see how us spending that money would affect your need for security,” versus, “Why are you always so cheap whenever we need to spend any money?”

Resources for professionals to discuss money better

Even professionals who discuss money all the time can still have trouble with the conversation. For example, it’s not uncommon for a financial planner or financial educator to jump right to discussing dollars as soon as someone steps into their office or classroom. No doubt you’ll have to talk about money and you’ll even probably do a budget. But left-brained, “numbers people” can forget the basic step of getting to know a client or student and get to know him or her. It’s harder to get to know people in a group or class, but it’s still an important step to let people work up to the numbers part.
Think about how socially off-putting it would be if you met someone at a party and the first thing you asked was “How much money do you make and what are your expenses?” Just because you’re in a financial office or classroom only soften that blow a little. And handing someone a budget worksheet when he or she walks in is basically asking that same question in a different form. Ease into the money discussion.
Also, we recommend three resources to help people discuss money:

• The Guide for Couples offers some more guidance and structure for couples doing the Money Habitudes activity on their own.
• The Guide for Professionals is a companion to using the Money Habitudes cards in professional settings.
• Bringing Money Into the Conversation is a guide about how to talk about money that only briefly mentions Money Habitudes. It is an aggregation of tips, conversation starters, activities and methodologies for professionals to have good money discussions. It’s geared for therapists and counselors.