All Aboard?

I recently read a blog where one of the readers was asking if it was possible to get into investing without his partner finding out.

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I couldn’t relate to the reader’s thinking at all. Why wouldn’t you want to tell your partner that you were investing? Why would you want to hide it? How could you even think they wouldn’t find out?

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Regardless, the query made me think about my own beginnings.

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Back in about 2015, I finally decided to take the plunge and put some of my money in the stock market. My parents had suggested I get my money working for me about two years before that, but I didn’t know where to start so I put it off. The next time I went to visit them, they asked me if I had started investing yet. I hadn’t, but I made up my mind at that point to read a few books about the subject and take some action. In 2015, I decided to open my first account.

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Opening the account should have been easy, but when I mentioned to my wife what I was planning to do, I got some flak. My wife was not so sure she wanted me gambling away our retirement funds.

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I wasn’t so sure I wanted that either, but that was not how I was seeing things.

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Well, we had quite a few discussions about whether we should invest or not. In the end, she agreed that we should, but it definitely took some convincing on my part.

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Looking back, I realize I had taken my wife for granted. I assumed she would be on board with investing. I mean, who wouldn’t be interested in earning more money by buying a ‘product’ that increased in value over time. Well, she wasn’t, not at first anyway.

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She didn’t see it as the risk-free adventure I was seeing it as, but that was probably a good thing. Her perspective grounded me a bit more.

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To some degree, I was seeing investing as a smart plan for our future, but I was also seeing it, in part, as a magical garden where money grew on trees.

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What I was reminded of was that we were a family and ‘my decisions’ were really ‘our decisions,’ and ‘my money’ was really ‘our money.’

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Since first starting out, I’ve made some money and lost some money, but I can tell you, it wouldn’t have been as tolerable, or as much fun, if I didn’t have my wife on board.

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You can’t, and shouldn’t, keep your money and what you do with it a secret. If you are married, it’s your money – plural. Share the adventure.