Pre-marital financial conversations for couples – beyond the wedding

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DUDUZILE RAMELA: If you are planning or thinking of tying the knot, this is for you. It is not unusual for couples to spend anything from half a million to well over R2 million on their wedding day or weekend. This excludes the engagement, the wedding ring, the gathering of two families to hopefully guide the couple on how to survive trying times. Widely referred to as ‘Isincoko zama lobola’ or dowry talks, those carry a financial price tag of their own.

Then you have the ‘traditional’ versus ‘church’ weddings. For some that can be four weekends and totally another price tag. When the champagne has been flushed out of the system and the honeymoon is over, oftentimes the arguments over finances manifest.

Shaun Chennells is a financial planner at BDO wealth, and he joins us now for more. Sean, thank you very much for your time this morning. So, before getting married, what are the most important financial conversations couples should be having beyond the wedding budget?

Read: Money before marriage: Navigating finances as an unmarried couple

SHAUN CHENNELLS: Thanks very much for having me today, Dudu. The most important things that couples should be talking about before the wedding revolve far more around their values and financial habits together than about the wedding budget.

I think a lot of couples who start taking on this journey of marriage immediately think okay, we need to start planning the wedding budget, how many people are coming – all of those exciting things.

What I think is more important is starting to plan for their lives after. What couples need to be doing is having these conversations early and having these conversations often.

These conversations need to revolve around more than the budget, and they need to start tapping into financial values, how you were raised and your money stories, because at the end of the day a marriage is two financial lives coming together. These can have very different meanings and what money means for each person is going to affect how your shared finances look at the end of the day.

Read: Real families, real wealth: Lessons from clients who’ve lived it – Story 1

DUDUZILE RAMELA: We often hear about premarital counselling. It would be good to hear about premarital financial counselling. When you speak of two lives coming together, how can couples combine their finances while maintaining their individual financial independence and identity?

SHAUN CHENNELLS: I think I’ll bring in an example here – a couple that we worked with at BDO Wealth. We’ll call them James and Emily for this purpose. Emily was a long-standing client of ours, and quite a savvy investor. She does her budget every month and she makes sure that all the boxes are ticked.

She was getting married to a guy, James, who had a little less financial discipline. He was more spontaneous with his money and wanted to spend it and enjoy life. This led to a big stress point in their relationship.

I think what really helped them is when we sat down and we asked Emily to please bring James in for a conversation. We sat down with them together and didn’t make the conversation about ‘it’s your fault that you think this way’, or anything like that. It was more about how to guide them through this process, and for them to understand how they needed to be thinking about finances and their values as a couple.

So we spoke about things like the legal structure, things like the values, their income – and why he was feeling more spontaneous and why she felt savvy.

That’s the thing with money, it can bring in a lot of underlying emotions, and it can mean different things for people. For Emily it meant having safety and structure and for James it meant enjoying life. How could we bring those two things together to make sure that their shared finances actually worked well?

One of the key things that we did was talk to them about doing a ‘Yours, Mine, Ours’ account structure. What that means is that whatever Emily brought into the marriage was hers – that was more about the legal structure. But they took the combined incomes and put them into an account together, and that was for the monthly expenses and the budgeting. Those were the essentials. That led them to have the security that Emily needed.

There were two separate accounts. The one was for Emily and the other one for James. They were able to spend whatever they wanted from those accounts. It just created a lot more financial independence and helped them make their own money decisions, which led to a lot more structure in their shared finances.

Read:
Money before marriage: Navigating finances as an unmarried couple
Joint financial planning: Conversations couples should be having
Before getting married: Financial conversations to be had
The honeymoon is over: Money management advice for newlyweds

DUDUZILE RAMELA: What I am hearing ultimately is that you, Shaun, are a pre-marital financial advisor, and this process also helps couples. It’s a stress test, if you will, to see how safe I guess you can be with each other when you speak more of values, how aligned you are.

Does it necessarily – let’s say you are not aligned – need to be a deal-breaker? Have you seen or have you sat in front of couples where they just said, ‘That is it’, and the wedding is off?

SHAUN CHENNELLS: I haven’t personally sat in front of couples where that has happened, but I’m sure it has happened before. We know the stats around divorces. A lot of them revolve around money. That’s because we do have these different money beliefs.

The thing is that people come into the marriage and share these finances. So, if you don’t get talking about it you can easily start casting blame. In the case of James and Emily, it could have been a story of James saying, ‘Why do you always want to save money? We can go on holiday’ and Emily could have been saying, ‘You shouldn’t be taking on debt because we need to have security’. And that could have been a deal breaker.

Read:
The money talks that build resilient marriages
Going beyond the behavioural divide
Going to the chapel … but are you financially compatible with your partner?

These conversations are a lot more complicated than just the spreadsheet or the budget, because there’s emotion attached to money for all of those reasons. I suppose it can be a deal breaker, and that’s why getting a guide, pre-marital counsel, as you say, makes sense.

DUDUZILE RAMELA: Thank you so much for your time this morning. Shaun Chennells is a financial planner at BDO Wealth.

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