Entrepreneur Magazine's Jason Feifer and Author Nicole Lapin on Taboo Money Topics
Money: It’s a stressful and often taboo topic that makes many people uncomfortable to even talk about.But New York Times bestselling author Nicole Lapin and Entrepreneur Magazine editor-in-chief Jason Feifer say that’s the very problem, and one of the biggest reasons why so many people are in debt and suffer from money anxiety.In this interview, no topic is off limits. Jason and Nicole debate the touchiest finance topics from their brand new podcast “Hush Money.” Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
I think that the reason why people are afraid to talk about money is because we equate money with self-worth.
And so when we are seeing ourselves struggle financially, we feel like we are failures.
And we compare ourselves and how we do financially to other people.
And we think that the people who are making more money are simply better than us.
Hi, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. and this is the Dr. Oz podcast.
Next.
Money.
It's stressful.
It's often a taboo topic that makes many people uncomfortable.
They don't even talk about it, but my next guests say that's the very problem and one of the biggest reasons why so many people are in debt and suffer from money anxiety.
So today, no topic's going to be off limits.
We'll take them all on.
New York Times bestselling author and a good friend, Nicole.
I've been making it happen.
And Entrepreneur Magazine Editor-in-Chief, Jason Pfeiffer, who just honored Michelle Pfeiffer, your cousin or sister?
Who is she?
No, we have no relation as far as we know.
I'm trying to help you.
You don't have to answer all the questions, Jason.
Anyway, Jason did put Michelle Pfeiffer on the cover of his magazine.
That's right.
Pfeiffer making it happen.
Ah, he's making it happen.
And they're here to debate the touchiest finance topics from the brand new podcast, Hush Money.
It's a very intriguing title.
What's the problem with money?
Why is it such a sensitive topic?
I think we will talk about everything at the dinner table before we talk about money.
You know, if you go to dinner with girlfriends or your friends, you know, we'll talk about bikini waxes and sexy time and everything.
And then all of a sudden I say to my friends, so what's in your bank account?
Or how much are you making this year?
And it's crickets.
And I'm like, hey, lady, you just told me about your hoo-ha.
Why are we so now thinking money is off limits?
And so I think it's the language that keeps a lot of people out of the conversation.
It sounds That is intimidating.
Do you, like, in that same circle of girls, would you say, by the way, I just made the X number of dollars on this book and I got this investment?
You do?
Yeah, I go first.
So I play the game of I'll show you mine if you show me yours, and I do that in my books.
I actually talk about what I made for my book in my books because I put my money where my mouth is, quite literally.
I knew people would ask reading the book, like, this girl talks about money in the book.
How much did she make?
So I was like, I didn't even ask the publisher.
I was like, okay, well.
Here was my advance.
Here's how much I made at CNBC. Here's how much I made at CNN. Yeah, I read that and I thought, I need to get in the television business.
Being in both businesses, I can assure you, you're right.
So, Jason, the difference between debt stress and money anxiety, what's the root of each?
Oh my gosh.
Boy, you're like really just cutting to, I feel like suddenly we walked into class here.
I stole those from you, but I didn't think there was a huge difference.
Yeah.
Debt stress and money anxiety.
Well, let me back into that if I can.
I think that the reason why people are afraid to talk about money is because we equate money with self-worth.
And so when we are seeing ourselves struggle financially, we feel like we are failures.
And we compare ourselves and how we do financially to other people.
And we think that the people who are making more money are simply better than us.
That's something that's been drilled into us, and I think that that drives a lot of people crazy, especially if you're not making a lot of money and if you're in a mixed financial group, which is the reason why I always have trouble talking about money with friends, is because I feel like I either don't want to reveal that I am making more than you or less than you.
I don't want to either make you feel bad or make myself feel bad.
Mm-hmm.
And I think that that drives a lot of the anxiety that people have because then you look at your own home and you wonder, am I supporting my family properly?
Am I a good enough mother, father, wife, husband?
And you look at the money that you have or that you don't have and you start to worry that you are that money.
But we telegraph it anyway, especially in today's society.
We're all lying.
Everybody's walking around, you know, with a car they can't afford, wearing clothes that they bought on discount, pretending that, you know, they're designers, whatever.
We are all putting out there in the public eye what we want people to think how much money we have.
Yes.
Yeah, so it's not like we're all keeping it private.
Well, in our country, especially in America.
In other countries, they give titles, maybe a lord or, you know.
You can buy one of those online.
You can buy one of those online.
You can buy my team Duchess titles for the holidays.
Yes, exactly.
Buy them all Duchess titles.
But in America, we give people money.
So the titles don't seem to matter.
So obviously the nation, we seem to value it.
And you really can't get around the reality that you are sort of valued by others, by how much money you make.
It does come up.
It's a barometer.
It's unfair.
But it's a barometer that people use to...
It's a quick scale.
It's like a FICO score, right?
There's a quick idea.
But not just about how much money you make, but how...
I don't know.
Are you talking about our family?
Well, our kids aren't old enough yet to have that much debt.
But we have family members that have issues.
And so we see it.
And again, I'm not making value judgments.
I don't see them as lesser than.
I know that they feel lesser than because they couldn't organize themselves.
But that's your own issues, right?
So Jason and I disagree.
Shocking.
That's what makes us such great co-hosts.
That's Hush Money.
Hush Money.
Nothing is hush-hush for me, but Jason doesn't want to talk about his salary or what he got for his book advance or anything like that.
But you equate it with self-worth.
I don't.
I've met many very, very wealthy people who are not happy.
So we know that money doesn't equate happiness or self-worth.
You have to look inward for that.
that.
So I know my self-worth doesn't equate to money, but that's from my own journey.
That's the own work I've done.
So why do you want to talk about the ...
Because I think it's important to demystify it.
I think that if we put so much emphasis on it being taboo, I think when you talk about it and address it, it takes away some of that power.
Just like anything else.
I mean, I have more issues than Vogue or entrepreneur.
Thank you.
But when you talk about your problems, if you talk about your issues, it takes away some of the power over you, don't you think?
I don't know.
I think I'm more in the Jason camp.
Not a topic I like to talk about.
I understand why you would want to.
I think it's more binary.
I think if you have enough money that it should not be causing you a problem, then your issues are separate.
People always say, oh, it's not about the money.
Well, that's true after a certain point.
But there is definitely a place where money makes a difference.
We've had a couple of guests on the show who have grown up in abject poverty and it absolutely affects how they see the rest of the world.
In fact, let's talk about how people manage money.
Nicole, in your experience as you try to get people to manage money more wisely, there's some common pitfalls you probably witness that take them in the wrong direction.
Of course, I think that when people say they blew their budget, the first question I say is, did you even have a budget to blow?
You know, I came up with the money school because I felt like there was such a void in financial literacy.
And so I asked people to first write down their goals.
It's really important to reverse engineer your goals, you know, figure out the life you want and then figure out how to get the money to live the life you want.
So like you said, Mehmet, you know, it's not about all the money, all about the money, and it's not about not about the money.
There's somewhere in between.
You know, people sat down with me a couple weeks ago and we did a boot camp around this and people said, you know, I just don't work for the money.
I was like, I don't know what I can say here.
B.S. You have to pay the bills.
You can't be so self-righteous about it.
The answer is somewhere in between.
But I think coming up with a plan and figuring out how to get the money to live the life you want is the first step.
Because people will say, hey, I just want a million dollars.
If I just had a million dollars, life would be great.
What do you want to do with that million dollars?
Maybe you need more than a million dollars.
Maybe you need less.
I have no idea.
Some of that seems...
So obvious almost, but there's financial advice floating around that I know you disagree with that sometimes is inadvertently undermining people.
Give me an example of something that you would not do.
I would not cut out the morning latte.
You know, you hear financial experts say this time and again, just cut out the coffee and you'll save $2,500 a year.
And I say, a financial diet is a lot like a regular diet.
You talk about this all the time on the show.
If you allow yourself small indulgences, you won't end up binging later on.
So when people say to me at the first of the year, hey, I cut out that latte, lap and making it happen, I'm making it happen too, I'm Come April, come June, you know, but then I bought this Gucci purse because I was so starved and so deprived, but I cut out that morning latte.
I'm like, well, if you just allowed for that small indulgence, the equivalent of a financial Hershey's kiss, in a diet, so you don't end up binging on a big old hunk of chocolate cake in the middle of the night because you're so hungry and so deprived.
You know, though, I mean, I do agree.
I like what you say there.
However...
I like that morning latte thing because I think that what it's really saying is think about how you're spending your money because then people often don't.
They just spend.
They spend and they don't break it down to the small expenses and the way that money just disappears because I think for a lot of people, money just disappears.
They don't know where it went.
And the thing is that sometimes it went to the latte and sometimes you can't afford the latte.
And sometimes you can afford the latte if you're not spending in other ways.
But when you start getting really granular about it, you start to recognize the habits that you have and how changing some of those habits can make you more financially responsible.
So I like pointing out to people that they are spending their money in ways that they might not even be thinking about.
So would you keep a financial journal, so to speak, so that you know every penny that goes out of your hands?
No, Jason's smart.
Just no more lattes.
Yeah.
Well, no, maybe you want a latte once a week, not every day, but you need to know how much you're spending.
This is really just because caffeine really gives me problems.
No, I do.
I mean, I think that if you are having that kind of challenge where you really do not know where your money is going, then yes, creating a journal just to see it It's really valuable.
It's not like you have to do this for the rest of your life, but just to track it and understand where it's going.
I think about this.
I'm fortunate enough to be able to afford the latte every day if I wanted it, though I don't.
But I do think about it in terms of time, because I think that we spend time and money recklessly, both of them.
And I found that blocking out my time in my calendar in really, really specific ways, it allowed me to manage my day and manage my time so much more effectively.
And I think that you could easily translate that to money as well, that if you're just being very conscious of how you're spending it, you will have more control of it.
More questions after the break.
Thank you.
So what's the best financial advice you've ever gotten, excluding what Nicole Lappin making it happen might approach you?
The best financial...
You know what?
The best financial advice...
I mean, this is...
It sounds like a recipe for spending, but this is the line that always rings in my head.
So my dad came from a poor family.
He was a dentist.
He's retired now.
And made good money and supported the family.
And I am very grateful for that.
And, uh, he, he always said he has this line, which he has said to me so many times throughout my childhood, which is, what's money for?
What's money for?
Right?
Like, don't deprive yourself.
I mean, this kind of goes back to the latte, I guess, in a way, but, like, he spent...
Your dad's on my team.
Papa Pfeiffer loves me, by the way.
Yes, yes.
Papa Pfeiffer has been on the show.
Um, he...
He talks about it where save and then spend for that great vacation.
Save and then support your family in ways where your family is happy and feels cared for.
What's money for?
Money is for spending so long as you're spending it responsibly.
I bring that up a lot with my wife because my wife is more concerned than I am about the way that we spend money.
Like, I feel like we're making enough.
We can go and enjoy the expensive dinner.
We can go and enjoy this vacation.
She'll be like, I don't know.
Should we?
And I always say, what's money for?
Why are we working this hard to make this money if not to spend it?
Nicole, you've taught me over the years that there are things we can negotiate for that I did not think were negotiatable.
Yeah.
Everything is negotiable.
In Turkey, if you walk into a store, the bazaar, and you pay what they say, they're insulted.
Yeah.
No, they're insulted, not you.
Yeah, but Mehmet thinks you can do that at Saks, too.
Well, we've done that for a while.
You go to a hotel.
I don't think you can.
No, you go to a hotel.
It's 10 at night.
You're going to check in.
You say, what rooms do you have?
Who's in the suite?
Nobody.
So you have personal inventory there because no one's coming in at 10 o'clock tonight.
So I'll pay you half what you normally charge, which is more money from me than you would have gotten from the room you're going to put me in.
And everyone's happy.
There's no hurt feelings.
And in Turkey, again, if you negotiate, you make friends with people when you negotiate.
You don't call them an idiot and insult them.
So what should we be negotiating and how do we do it?
Lessons from the bizarre.
Yes, from the bizarre.
Turks are real negotiators.
Yeah.
You know, it's your hard-earned money you might as well fight for.
Get that latte or the equivalent of a latte.
It's not about the latte.
It's whatever does it for you.
Jason's opening a coffee shop.
Jason's so literal.
Isn't he driving you crazy?
He's like the hardcore.
I have kids.
I am, you know, more conservative.
The normal family guy.
She talks about it like some foreign thing.
Blind dates in Chile and having all sorts of crazy...
Is it called hush money because you say, Jason, hush.
Frequently.
All the time.
Do you guys have that at home, too?
You have your own version of Hush, Mike?
Mehmet, Hush.
Yes, I get that quite a lot.
There were eyebrows raised there.
No, she calls me the meddler.
She bought me a meddler cape.
Like a superhero villain.
Oh my god, I love that.
Someone came to me and said, just said that you wanted the downstairs cleaned, all the boots are gone, all the coats are gone.
Amazingly, at the atrium of our home...
And I said to her, I can't wait for him to go back to work, frankly.
Amazingly, this is going to catch you, but the winter boots and the winter parkas are all hanging at the atrium as they walk by it every day.
It's a mudroom.
That's what it's for.
These are called nagging unfinished tasks or nuts.
No, there's no task there.
It was never a task.
The task is, I don't want to walk by winter clothes.
Raincoats and mud boots.
Anyway, yes.
So, he's a meddler and Hush comes in.
I told myself on eBay.
They're all sold, by the way.
I know.
This is what happens in our house.
Yeah, I feel like we're witnessing stuff in here.
I love your house, by the way.
And there's great Turkish food there, too.
Turkish people.
Turkish people, Turkish food, all the best things.
You know, what you learn, you know, in Turkey and in a lot of the Middle East, I mean, my family's first-generation American, too.
And, you know, my family grew up in Israel and immigrated here, and that's sort of the culture.
But if you don't ask, the answer is always no, right?
So just while you should allow yourself whatever that small indulgence is for you because that's why you work.
I mean there's a middle ground between thinking you're going to live forever and thinking you're going to die tomorrow.
There is that sweet spot, right?
And that's where your money philosophy I think should live.
So when you're negotiating, you know, you miss 100 percent of chances you don't take.
I don't know if that was, Wayne Gretzky or Marilyn Monroe or whoever that's been associated with.
But just like you can negotiate for that hotel suite because you had a lot of leverage in that situation.
It was Michael Jordan, actually.
Wayne Gresge was, don't be where the puck is, be where it's going to be.
He told me that in a urinal once, by the way.
True story, true story.
But that was, Jordan was, wasn't it what Jordan said?
Yeah, I missed every shot I didn't take.
That's right.
And, you know, when I was on the show, I negotiated a woman's APR. I was in her ear as like a Cyrano de Bergerac type character, negotiating her cell phone bill at the store, telling her what to say, being like a dog on a bone, trying to get more and more.
Are there services that do that?
Because some of us are just wretched.
Like, I will go to the bazaar, and then I'll ask them, tell me the price, and then I'll say, is there tax with that?
So the opposite of a negotiator.
Most of you, I'm sure.
There's so many reasons.
The worst negotiator.
That's actually a really good business opportunity.
Well, I'm just wondering, is there someone who could help you get your debt down?
Call me.
Start up a business.
No, there should be someone who could...
Because a lot of people don't know how to negotiate.
They're bad at it.
They're uncomfortable.
I've done that for people that we know.
I've called up...
The five credit cards they've got debt on.
And I say, this person's going to default, or I'll pay you half what you got.
I'll pay you what they actually borrowed, not the usury interest rates that you've been charging when they bought their textbooks for $400, which is now $9,000 of debt.
And they negotiate.
So what you're saying is you do not have time to open this business.
What you're saying is this business does not exist at the moment.
I don't know about the just pure negotiation, but certainly, I mean, there's a million types of financial advisors.
And also, there's a lot of technology entering this field now where there are apps that are intelligently analyzing your spending and identifying ways that you can improve, that'll budget for you.
So there's a lot that you can bring in.
But they won't negotiate your debt.
But they won't get on the phone and negotiate.
So how do you do that?
But that is a great tactic.
You know, you'll say, I have a certain amount of money, take it or leave it, basically.
And this happens for medical debt, too.
In a lot of cases, you can say, like, hey, I have half, like, smelly later.
You want money or you don't want money?
And so, and a lot of times, they'll throw you a bone versus losing you as a customer, or they'll throw you a bone versus getting nada.
And how do you know how much to ask for?
Just based on what you got in your pocket?
Start high.
Yeah, and I think that, you know, you can also get other features.
So you can call your bill collectors, your cell phone provider, your cable provider, you know, once a quarter, twice a year, whatever it is.
And you can get better features if it's not actually money off.
So you can get higher speeds.
You can get an iPod.
I just talked to someone who got an iPad and, you know, whatever.
If you don't ask, then you don't get an iPad.
Yeah, that's true.
You know, that was the very first thing that I ever did to just experiment with this to see if you can just go out into the world and say, actually, I would like to pay you less money and that they will say yes.
I called my cable TV provider and I said I would like to spend less money.
I mean, I was just like – Or I'm going to a competitor.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's what I did.
I was like, I think that I'm spending too much on you and I know that I can go elsewhere and get less.
Or I could just live with less because I don't really need this service.
So what can you do for me?
And what they always do is they, like, disappear for a few minutes and they come back with some special that they happen to be running and they offer you that.
Or the manager does.
Yeah, the manager does.
And you could just keep doing that.
I do it, like, once a year now.
It's amazing.
Yeah.
Stanford Business School, I believe.
And I'm all about the MBA of the School of Hard Knocks.
But they actually had a class where you would have to go into a store wherever.
I don't know if it was Saks, but you had to leave with something for free.
And I think that's just a great life lesson, right?
Because you have to get something, whether it's you talk your way into that.
And that's what so much business and so much life is.
Could you buy something and get a free gift with it?
Or did you actually have to come first?
This is bad financial advice.
Buy something you don't need.
A free receipt.
A piece of paper with a bill in it.
All right.
So, Jason, there's a nice survey from Forbes recently.
Yeah.
That looked at...
I don't discuss my competitors.
That's why I'm asking.
There's another business magazine.
And arguing that millennials do worse than any other age group in managing their finances.
I think we're talking to two millennials right now.
Yes, that's what I'm asking.
I'm a little older, I think, than a millennial.
I'm 38. Yeah, you're right in there.
An elder millennial.
But what is the deal?
What is the problem with late mortgage payments and not paying the credit cards and overdrawing accounts?
What's a disconnect amongst the millennials and finances?
So, I have to mount a vigorous defense for millennials here.
I absolutely despise any...
Any articulation of millennials as some kind of different weird species that acts and thinks unlike any previous generation.
In fact, if you go back throughout history, I have a podcast called Pessimist's Archive, another one where I dig into repetitive...
Pessimist's Archive?
Pessimist's Archive, right?
You guys love it.
Where I dig into repetitive fears throughout history.
We look at why people resisted things that today we think of as commonplace.
I just did an episode called Kids These Days in which I tracked back things that people say today about millennials to at least ancient Rome.
Yeah.
So, it is that repetitive.
So listen, there is – but if you are going to look at some hard data and there is an actual data set, which I haven't seen here, saying that millennials are more in debt than previous generations, well, let's not think about this as being some kind of flaw in the brains of people who happen to be born in a certain let's not think about this as being some kind of flaw But instead, let's look at the economy that they happen to come into because millennials entered the workforce in a recession, in a terrible recession.
And that changed not only, I think, the way that they had to think about money and the access that they had to money, but also the way that they approached their careers.
The reason – I mean I'm at Entrepreneur Magazine and I see an unbelievable boom in entrepreneurship and that spirit, that spirit of self-reliance in young people.
And I think that's because they graduated into a time in which that world of getting a job at one company and they're just rising to the top for an entire career just didn't exist anymore.
You have to go out and build things yourself.
But you know what?
When you build things yourself, as everyone at this table knows, it's rocky and it's hard for a while.
And you're not going to get it right.
And you're going to end up in debt.
A lot of you are going to end up in debt.
And that is what explains it.
It is not the people.
It is the economy.
Social media.
That could be part of it as well, Nicole.
Yeah, certainly there's a lot of envy on social media, and we've done a ton of stories around that.
But I also go to the defense of millennials.
Shockingly, Jason and I agree on this one.
You know, going through that rocky time, I think investing in yourself ultimately will pay more dividends later on.
And sometimes you have to...
Get into the, you know, the red, so to speak, to get into the black.
And I think that millennials are actually given a bad rap.
And I think growing up through the recession or seeing, you know, our parents' generation having less equity in their house than 50 years ago, going through joblessness and unemployment and underemployment, I think that instilled the fear of God in a lot of millennials.
And I think that there is more caution, actually, of not getting into that situation and repeating their parents' history.
There's lots more when we come back.
All right, so talking about money is often an uncomfortable conversation.
You guys are going there.
We're not going to hush up now.
Let's get uncomfortable.
We're going to get uncomfortable.
So the biggest money question is from our viewers.
Are we ready?
Yeah.
Ready.
Should married couples really combine their finances?
And if you're going to do it, is there a good way of doing it?
Yes, I think yours, mine, and ours.
And then having the ours account be weighted.
So if somebody makes, you know, $100,000 and somebody makes $10,000, you're putting, you know, 10% or whatever, and that's a different actual dollar amount.
So it feels though the same.
Alright, what about expenses, though?
Because if you're married and you have a home, I don't know what your wife does for a living, but...
She's a freelance writer.
I make more money than her.
Okay, so are you going to divvy up the housing expenses accordingly?
No, I mean, I'll tell you what we do.
We came up with this crazy system that just happens to work for us.
We maintained our own individual bank accounts, but we put each other on those bank accounts so we could have access to it if we needed to, but we don't.
Like, I don't go into her bank account, she doesn't come into mine.
And so we treat those checking accounts as functionally separate, but we don't itemize.
So I will buy things, she'll buy things for the house, whatever it is, we don't like track it.
So we have what are really separate finances in a way, except that we're treating them sort of like It doesn't really make sense, but it just makes us feel good.
Who writes the check for the mortgage or the rent?
That one comes out of the mortgage.
That one comes out of me.
We discussed ahead of time that I'm going to pick up the house.
I'm going to pick up this.
She's going to pick up child care.
She often gets the groceries.
I often get the utilities.
Yeah, we just sort of split it up like that.
And then we opened up a Fidelity investment account where we put our excess money and then that's our growth.
That's ours in Nicole's parlance.
No, I was just going to say, what do you do with kids?
Because that's a whole other expense.
The trust accounts for the kids that they've created.
I think what's Lisa's is Lisa's and what's Mehmet's is Lisa's.
Yes.
A hundred percent.
I'm old school.
Actually, I'm going to say this.
We haven't talked about this in the air.
So a couple of years ago, I was giving Lisa a hard time because she never actually deposited money I sent into the account.
And I asked her, I was trying to query her about if she knew how to deposit a check.
So she's not so happy now.
And then all of her daughters jumped on me and said, you have no idea how to withdraw money from the account.
You don't even know how to deposit.
Your secretary knows how to deposit.
But actually, they're true.
No, they're not.
Neither of those are true.
My checks and your checks are both deposited by Donna.
Yes.
So, come on.
But the upshot was, I didn't know the codes.
I couldn't, you know, some of the things I didn't know how to do.
He begs me for money.
He's like, too many cash.
I said, do you not know how to use an ATM machine?
The answer is no, apparently.
But in our generation, we've married 34 years now.
It...
It comes to this next question, so I'll get to it in a second.
But the money was always together.
I never tracked it, never thought about it.
And because it was only one account, it didn't matter what checks.
Lisa would almost always write the checks.
Well, because he had no money when we got married.
Negative money.
He was still in school.
But she would always write the checks, even today.
But it was a different culture.
That's why the mindsets are...
And my own kids, who are millennials...
Some of them are old enough to be millennials.
They're all millennials except Oliver.
Oliver's not.
Yeah, but I think that the other person, regardless of who's actually writing the checks, needs to have some transparency into the passwords and knowing where accounts are because, God forbid, if something happens to your spouse, regardless, you just want to know where the...
Where the bodies are buried.
The best time to talk to your partner, your upcoming partner, about finances is when?
After sex.
After sex.
Oh, really?
Right.
I would think before sex because the guy's distracted.
Oh, interesting.
You control all the...
You hold all the cards.
Yeah.
Okay.
You call laugh and making it happen?
Come on now.
Yeah, that's how I make it happen.
When to talk about?
I think that having the talk is something that makes a lot of couples uncomfortable.
I think you frame it around what your goals are.
So it's not an interrogation around like, what's your credit score?
By the way, I've had first dates in my life where men think that I'm somehow attracted to this, and so they'll ask me my credit score.
That's like not, that's too much.
But if you say, hey, babe, you know, grab a glass of wine, what are your goals?
They don't need to be the same.
They just need to be compatible.
Do you want a vacation every winter?
Do you want a housekeeper?
Do you want these types of things out of your life?
Because those things cost money.
So, alcohol.
Alcohol.
Yeah, I think it's a rolling conversation.
I like what Nicole's saying.
You don't want to raise the temperature.
You don't want to say, okay, now this is the moment where we're going to have this serious conversation because then everyone gets tense and you feel like there's cards that you have to put on the table.
I think that this is something where...
I mean, listen, there are times where people will have a piece of information that they're very nervous to share with their significant other.
Like, for example, on our show, we talked to this woman who had like $100,000 in student loan debt.
And when she revealed that to her boyfriend and now husband...
She was very, very nervous, like in tears nervous to tell him that.
And so at that point, you have to find a moment in which I think both of you are feeling comfortable and close.
And it's like you know that time when it's time to – you feel like you've built trust.
There's an opening in this conversation where I can tell you something.
I think that's that moment.
It's quiet.
It's at home.
Or Marvin Gaye is on maybe.
That's right.
Throw some of that on.
But if you don't say it, it's financial infidelity.
I mean that's infidelity.
Right.
Right.
Yeah, if you're not disclosing that or if you owe somebody money and you're getting into a relationship, that's like cheating.
I think that you need to do it in a way in which you don't feel to yourself that you are holding something or hiding something.
You know, we all know when we've reached the time where something should be released.
And if you have that internal feeling like, you know what, I'm holding onto this too long, it's getting to the red zone here, say it.
Find the time to say it.
Just text it and turn your phone off.
Thank you very, very much.
Hush Money, the name of their popular podcast.
We're joining it ourselves.
Lisa and I will be there sharing our intimate secrets.
