I will be featured again in February’s Balanced Life. This time we are talking about couples and finances.

‘Couples are often not very honest with each other about their income and expenses, which creates mistrust and conflict,’ says Sonja Linde, certified financial planner at InSync Financial Services. ‘It also makes financial planning difficult, as you are not working with accurate information,’ she adds.
One of the most common examples of this is impulsive spending or pre-existing debt being kept secret by a partner, which then lowers the opportunity for transparency in the relationship, as Lloyd Ellis, an independent financial planner at Solutions2Wealth notes: ‘If one person is a saver and the other is a spender, this could cause issues in a partnership due to lack of trust and agreement to a common purpose,’ he says. ‘Overall transparency into each other’s finances builds a trustworthy relationship.’