How to Convince Your Spouse That Investing for Retirement Is a High Priority

I do have another one queued up from Leandra. She says, “I’m 30, and my husband is 38, and we only have 16k in retirement!” Exclamation point. “How should I go about convincing my husband, who has a laissez-faire attitude about it, that retirement should be a major priority?” She said in all caps, “This is a spicy one ’cause this is, like, financial, less relational. What do you guys think?”

Yeah, man, this one is hard because one of the really hard things to do about financial wealth-building is when spouses are not on the same page. One spouse takes savings seriously, one spouse doesn’t take savings seriously. One spouse takes spending seriously, one spouse doesn’t take spending and budgeting seriously. So it causes some friction because you have to make sure that if you want to have a cohesive plan in place, you both need to have the same goal.

So here’s the first thing that I would tell Leandra to do. She’s 30, and she’s 38. They’ve got 16,000 saved. The first thing I’d tell them to do is go download the wealth multiplier, right? That’s exactly… You see me over here moving things in position because we are going to be your resource. You probably can even use this video to help you out. This is that if you just understand, yes, y’all don’t have a ton of money saved up yet, but that’s okay because, guess what, you have time in your favor. The die has not been cast, and you’re not locked into not reaching all your financial goals for the future. Because think about this, for a 30-year-old, every dollar still has the potential to turn into $23 by retirement. So that’s a 20-fold increase. Now, think about your husband. You said he’s 38 years old. When I look at the wealth multiplier, and guys, I encourage you to go to money.com resources. We have a brand new wealth multiplier on the website you can download completely for free. But you see that instead of it being a 23 times multiplier, now it’s a nine-time multiplier. That’s just because the older you get, you have less time, and you also make less rate of return because you usually have to dial down the risk in your portfolio.

Y’all are right at that crossroad of trying to figure out the incremental decisions you can make today that’s going to have a tremendous benefit for the long term. And that’s where I get excited for you guys because you’re still young enough. You can course-correct. Go use the free resource of the Wealth Multiplier, but then I’d also encourage you, as y’all go deeper and you feel like you get his interest peaked in this, is how hard your money can work so you don’t have to work so hard with your back, your brain, your hands. You can then go, “What’s my number?” Because if you partner the wealth multiplier with the Know Your Number course and figure out how much you need to be saving, then you can quickly realize that, and by the way, when you’re in the “Know Your Number” course, you could change. But hey, let’s play a game here where we start today, and by the time you’re 62 or 65, whatever the exit point is, let’s see how much we’d have to save. Now, go play with the course and the tool that provided in that course and delay it by 10 years. Let’s just take 10 years off of your saving and investment timeline. I think you’ll see that by a factor of multiple, the workload on your shoulders is going to go up exponentially, and that’s the part that I would use for motivation.

Because I think that you can see it’s such an easy lift. It’s such an easy task if you’ll just start now because if you use the resources, because it’s not even in this day and time, it’s so easy. Because all you have to know is how much you can save, when do you need it, and between index Target retirement funds, between all the content we’re creating on money.com, you can start the journey today and create the best version of your financial self.

Yeah, I think communication is going to be your biggest asset in how you communicate with your husband. So I’d ask him some interesting questions. Husband question number one: Do you want to work forever? “Oh no, no, no, I don’t want to work forever. That doesn’t sound great.” Well, when do you want to stop working? “Oh, I’d love to retire at 60.” Oh, okay, awesome. Great, love that. We’re going to retire at 60. What do we want to do when we retire? “Well, I probably want to travel.” So, okay, great. How much are we going to spend on traveling? “Okay, we’re going to spend this.” What else? “Well, you know, I always wanted to, you know, we’ve got some kids, we’ve got to pay for some weddings.” Okay, great. Let’s mark that. We’re going to write that number down. What else do you want to do? “Well, I’d love to have the mortgage paid.” Okay, well, we owe this much. We know we’ve got to have at least that. And you start just kind of doing these line items of these things that your husband wants to accomplish later in life. Well, as you’re doing that, you’re now defining what the goal is. Then it’s a pretty easy conversation. Okay, here we are at 16,000. We just figured out that with all the stuff we’ve got to pay for, it’s like $500,000 of things that we want to do by the time you’re 60. We’ve got to get busy if we want to actually do those things, then we better start making decisions now to start stepping in that direction. Because when you can get goal alignment, then you can get behavior alignment. But you’ve got to get the goals aligned first.

I think asking those questions and building that dream is a great way to go about that. I love it. I’m a natural optimist, so I always try to lead and motivate through optimism and give you the carrot on how good things could be. And y’all are at that crossroad. It could be good. But I do think it’s important when you’re in a situation like this where y’all are disconnected, I want to help motivate through fear too. Is that one of the saddest things for me is when I see comments from people, and I also see it on content. You know, we cover a lot of Caleb Hammer’s content and stuff. And when he has people who are in their 50s who have nothing to their name, do you realize the course corrections on those things is such a hard decision? I mean, you have to work forever, or you have to basically live off and live such a minimalistic life. That’s the only way you can create success when you lose the element of time. And I hate to be… because it just breaks my heart, but y’all have so much time on your side to course correct. You get to make easy decisions, but if you keep delaying, it’s going to turn into hard decisions. And hard decisions lead to pain, discomfort, and it goes beyond discomfort. It’s just excruciating at that point. And that’s what I’m trying to protect you from. Use that, you know, don’t… and let us be the bad guy because I want you guys. Spouses should have very positive interactions, but show him this video and say, “Let’s do the easy lift now.” You know, ’cause what you’re saying, that we’ve started using that. It came from your old sports terms. Do it right, do it light. Yeah, do it wrong, do it long. And that is kind of what you’re facing. So get to work today. Have you downloaded our free Wealth Multiplier resource yet? This tool shows you exactly how much you need to be investing each month in order to reach $1 million by your target retirement age (and what every single dollar could turn into by retirement).