Making FIRE Possible When You And Your Spouse Disagree

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Not only are Scott and I working on achieving FIRE together, but we are also in business together. In fact, we are currently developing a new course called Making FIRE Possible, which covers the main strategies we have used to exit the traditional corporate grind and achieve our first stage of FIRE in Costa Rica. It will also expand your thinking about FIRE and explain why FIRE is relevant to you, even if you have no plans to retire early.

As part of the preparation for the course, we surveyed our readers on their FIRE questions, and several of the responses revolved around getting the family onboard with pursuing FIRE. I have written before about balancing FIRE and college goals, and I will write a future post on pursuing FIRE when you have lots of kids (several of our readers asked about that one!). But this post is specifically about getting your better half onboard.

What can you do if FIRE is a priority for you, but not at all for your life partner?

We didn’t always agree on how to manage our money

I wouldn’t say that Scott and I were far apart financially. We at least share a similar financial temperament – we don’t spend much, we prioritize saving. That said, I am definitely the financial planner of the family — following financial news, reading how-to books and designing our investment strategies. Scott generally goes along, but I have had to explain my ideas and plead my case, especially in the beginning.

FIRE was a bigger leap for Scott than for me. I got serious eight years ago, when I hit an inflection point in my business. Scott came around years later. He is more risk-averse than me and takes longer to deliberate. (Exhibit A: It took Scott over two years to decide which bike to purchase.)

However, we’re now on the same page and definitely moving faster now that both of us are driving in the same direction. Here are four strategies that worked for us:

1 – Leave your partner alone, and get your own financial house in order

I have been working for myself for 11 years and counting, and my only regret is not getting to entrepreneurship sooner. Flexibility in work (both how much you work and how much you can earn) is critical in reaching FIRE. I had been selling Scott on making the same leap when I was considering it. However, he was not at all interested, so I focused on building up my own business.

For our paper assets, I did the experimentation – private placement, self-directed retirement account, new fintech platform. Scott was always onboard with maxing out his employer retirement accounts (thankfully, since I can’t do that in his place), but otherwise had no interest or appetite to do anything more. So I pushed the envelope where I could, but left his individual accounts untouched.

2 – Play to the other person’s interests

While Scott wasn’t excited about reading up on personal finance, he did like tracking our money. I’m a long-term investor, so I don’t review our accounts, except to check for errors and to rebalance annually (less when we were younger). Scott tracked our account value each week. While we never made decisions based on short-term price fluctuations, seeing the account grow (even if it did dip from time-to-time) got Scott hooked.

Similarly, when we decided to expand into real estate investing, I did all of the legwork on prices, financing, insurance, and taxes, but Scott loved location scouting and the engineering aspects so that’s what he did. I could have used some help on the numbers, and he is very involved now with all aspects of our real estate deals, but in the beginning, I was just happy that he got started where he was interested.

3 – Inspire the other person with results, not words

The more Scott tracked our paper and real estate portfolios and saw my business income over time, the more interested, knowledgeable, and comfortable he became with finance decisions. I didn’t have to convince him or argue that he should be more involved – he gradually became more involved with increased exposure.

His interest in FIRE came around in the same way. I always talked about the different strategies I was looking into. If I read a book or took a class, I always shared the key takeaways. He still doesn’t read finance books or follow market news, but we go to real estate events together, and we’re both taking a year-long business course as we work to build out our online business.

4 – Customize to your relationship – know when to deviate from popular advice

Of course, this stuff worked for us, and I have no idea if it will work for the reader who mentioned her husband wasn’t onboard with FIRE. You have to customize your planning to your relationship.

There was also mainstream financial advice I just never followed:

• Scott worked at companies that had much more generous retirement plans, so when we had extra money to put into retirement savings, we always prioritized his accounts over splitting equally between both of our accounts (I would NEVER let my own daughters do this. Read The Feminine Mistake if you want to know why, and if you want to raise financially savvy daughters).

• Since I was pushing on the real estate and business-building fronts earlier than Scott, our loans are primarily in my name only, though real estate title is held jointly. Again, I would NEVER let our daughters do this with their partners, but it made sense for the deals we put together.

Two engines are better than one

Since opening the very traditional 401(k) right out of college, Scott has now come around to having a self-directed retirement account, partnering on over 15 real estate deals, leaving his corporate job for full-time entrepreneurship, and aggressively pursuing FIRE. Our early maxing out his his retirement saving enabled us to buy our best-performing Costa Rica investment and one of our strongest US rentals.

We own three properties in our solo 401(k) account. If you are interested in purchasing real estate with your own retirement funds, you may be able to use a self directed IRA or solo 401(k). Check out Checkbook IRA.

I would not have taken this year-long business course without him because it’s heavy on the tech, which is neither my interest nor a strength. Yet, an online business is a linchpin for our extensive travel plans, so it’s perfect timing that we are now both 100% into FIRE.

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How about you? Did you have to convince your life partner to get onboard? What worked for you?

If you’re interested in our Making FIRE Possible course, sign up for the waiting list, and you’ll be the first to know when we offer it next.

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Check out more of our Making FIRE Possible series:

• Making FIRE Possible When You And Your Spouse Disagree (current post)
• Making FIRE Possible When You Don’t Want To Pinch Pennies
• Making FIRE Possible When You Haven’t Saved Enough For Retirement
• Making FIRE Possible With The High Cost Of Elder Care

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