Walking in on the love of your life in the act with someone else, or catching your better half making a major purchase without telling you about it first.
For many Americans, one is just as bad as the other.
The survey results also show that 27% say their relationship would be better if their partner would change something about the way they handle money, and 21% wish they had known more about their partner's financial attitudes before committing to the relationship.
Despite the strong opinions toward financial dishonesty, people continue to spend in secret. A quarter of the survey respondents have kept a purchase secret from their partners while nearly 1 in 10 (9%) have debts they're keeping from their partner.
Orion's results closely
And because the role of the advisor has already grown to be more life coach than money manager, Orion is rolling out a
"It allows sort of a non-threatening way to get into this — this important topic of conversation. Another big thing that we see is that it helps engage the non CFO spouse. This appeals to people who are maybe not going to want to talk about asset allocation but care deeply about their relationship and want to strengthen it or improve it or continue to keep it strong," Crosby said. "And we think it has application in sort of the intergenerational wealth transfer conversation, too, because this doesn't have to be used with romantic partners. This could be a grandparent and grandchild who might one day inherit some money.
"So some of the thorniest issues in our industry … advisors getting fired in record numbers when the most dominant spouse dies. We know that there's this huge intergenerational wealth transfer happening, and we think this sort of greases the wheels of that conversation."
Crosby said the genesis of the tool that uses technology and personality assessment to uncover financial bias, fears and needs was simply seeing what a problem money could become in an otherwise healthy relationship.
He added that when digging into how advisors and tech could help, he was shocked at the level of secrecy exhibited in the survey results.
"It's like widespread disdain for this kind of behavior, but widespread sort of commitment of this sort of misbehavior, too," Crosby said.
The way BiFi20 works is through a 20-question financial personality assessment that can be taken by an individual client or separately by both partners in a relationship. The assessment covers five categories of questions, including communication, worry, purpose, use and need.
Assessment topics include what money means to you, how prone you are to worry about money, comfort level asking others for money, willingness to spend some of your savings, how your mood is impacted by the markets and more.
When the assessment is done, the advisor receives a unique BeFi20 persona for each participant that can be overlaid with the results of a partner in real time to show how their money views and attitudes align — or don't — in each category.
The tool then gives advisors discussion tips to drive conversations with actionable insights, including a view into the client's financial values, preferences and behaviors and how those either converge or diverge with their partner.
It can be a raw, difficult experience for a couple to experience. But Crosby, psychologist and behavioral finance expert by trade, said the pain of illustrated divergence can give way to deeper understanding of one another and a deeper bond going forward.
"All of us grow up in these environments and these families of origin that have rules that are largely unwritten and unexamined about money. And a lot of the time, a romantic relationship is the first time we're brought into close contact with someone who may have grown up with different money values and different money scripts," Crosby said. "And I think the tendency is to be judgmental of those things if they're different, whether or not they're good or bad. If it deviates from our money script or the values that we grew up with, we're judgmental."
Knowing that, Crosby said the intent of BiFi20 was for the tool and the process to be non-pejorative. The goal is moderation, not determining who is right and who is wrong.
Beyond the good it can do in relationships, Crosby believes tools like BiFi20 can be good for the industry at large as clients seek financial professionals who put the human aspect of the profession first.
He then cited a recent Accenture survey that found 51% of clients already view their current advisor as a life coach, and 91% of respondents cited the importance of an advisor who 'gets' them as a person.
"And what's completely absent from this conversation is anything technical or analytical. Not that those things don't matter. But our ability to vet that is pretty strong," Crosby said. "If I'm looking to hire an advisor, I can go see if they have letters after their name. I can see where they went to school. I can see how many years they've been in business, and I can get referrals to vet the technical chops as table stakes. And once that's been vetted, we want to click with that person. I'm a therapist by education, and the No. 1 predictor of behavior change in psychotherapy is the level of rapport between an individual and their psychotherapist. It's not the years of education.
"And that's what people are looking for," he continued. "There's 300,000 advisors in the country, and 99% of them are ethical and above board and lovely. And they almost all do the same kind of thing. So your personality is one of the most powerful things you can highlight."
Other results from Orion Couples and Money Survey were that 28% of the surveyed investors have money-related disagreements with their partner at least monthly. The data shows disagreements are related to fears about market risk and the economy more often than personal spending philosophies. Nearly 3 in 10 respondents (29%) disagree about whether to spend for today or save for tomorrow.
To gather the data, TRUE Global Intelligence fielded a seven-minute survey in late August of 500 U.S. residents with annual household incomes of at least $150,000. Of the 500 respondents who completed the survey, 453 respondents who reported being in a relationship completed the questions related to attitudes about relationships and money. Respondents must also have investments in, at a minimum, stocks, bonds or mutual funds.
Crosby said that sample size is important to keep in mind as it may provide insight into the difficulties of Americans who don't meet those thresholds.
"If you look at a more representative and more normal, in the statistical sense, sample of the country, it's so much worse. Because what you see in our study is that the numbers are made better by people's relatively high levels of wealth," he said. "You're not going to fight about money as much when you have money. So if you think our numbers are bad, I think it's actually a lot worse sort of nationally."
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