Grace and Chris look fine on paper. They're 30 and 29, married six months, earn a combined $112,000 a year, and — unusually for their age — they own their home outright, purchased in cash with help from Grace's grandmother. Their total net worth is nearly $500,000.
And yet, on the financial questionnaire for Ramit Sethi's Money for Couples podcast, Grace wrote she was "unable to make big life decisions like starting a family" because Chris refused to engage in money management. When Sethi read that back on the show, Grace said she felt like "I'm crying for help on a sinking ship, and no one is coming to help me."
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The number behind that feeling: 108%. Their fixed costs — before a single discretionary dollar — consume more than their entire monthly income.
"You spend more than you make every single month," Sethi told them. "It is simply a matter of time until you are broke beyond broke, until you lose it all."
The baseball game that exposed the pattern
The couple's financial dynamic crystallized in a single story Grace told on the show. They had family visiting and everyone wanted to go to a baseball game. Grace told Chris they had $100 left for the entire weekend.
At the game, she watched him order beer after beer and buy drinks for others. When she raised it with him, his response was: "My family's in town and we're just having fun, so we'll figure it out later."
When Sethi asked who "we" was in "we'll figure it out later," Grace gestured at herself — and then acknowledged she covered the dinner that followed by dipping into money she'd been setting aside to pay their property taxes.
Chris handles spending. Grace handles the spreadsheets, the transfers, the problem-solving — and, crucially, the anxiety. "I would try and sit down and have conversations about it and he wouldn't engage in it," Grace told Sethi. "So, okay, if someone needs to figure out how to manage it, I'm going to."
Chris, who makes less than Grace and has always deferred to her on finances, admitted: "I just kind of curl into a little shell and don't talk about it because I'm just avoiding it."
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