Money Fights in Relationships Aren't About Money

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Episode 243: Why Money Fights Aren’t Really About Money

If money conversations have felt heavier lately – more tense, more charged, or easier to avoid, you’re not alone. This season has a way of amplifying pressure, and that pressure often shows up in tone, defensiveness, or silence rather than clear conversations.

For many people, money fights in relationships aren’t about spending or budgets. They’re about unspoken expectations, different relationships to safety and control, and what happens in our nervous system when money feels unclear. When safety drops, even neutral questions can feel personal.

This episode isn’t about fixing anyone or forcing a hard conversation. It’s about understanding what’s actually underneath the tension so money stops feeling so loaded, so personal, and so emotionally charged.

Let’s unpack why money tension shows up the way it does and what shifts when compassion comes before correction.

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Below is the full transcript of this episode. As you read, notice how often money tension is really about pressure, safety, and unspoken expectations, not the numbers themselves. One simple takeaway woven throughout this conversation is this: you don’t have to fix everything today. Even starting with compassion toward yourself or someone else can soften the pressure and change how money conversations unfold.

Why Money Fights in Relationships Aren’t Really About Money

If money has been coming up more in your relationship lately and not necessarily in a great way, this episode is for you.

The relationship could be your romantic relationship, it could be the relationship with yourself, relationship with your kids. It’s kind of flexible.

We’re going to look at this through the relationship with your partner, but it all applies. It’s all the same principles at its core.

This episode’s for you if money conversations with your partner feel heavier than they should. If one of you carries more of the financial stress, even if no one says it out loud, maybe the other partner is oblivious to the fact that you are carrying more of the financial stress. Or if you’ve been telling yourself, “we’ll deal with this later,” but later just keeps getting louder. So let’s get to it.

What Money Simplified Is Really About

This is Money Simplified, the podcast where I help female entrepreneurs go from stress and struggle to unstoppable with money.

Money is more than just budgeting and P&Ls, and we’re going to take you through all of it.

Here we blend proven financial strategy with mindset work and energetic alignment so you can create unstoppable finances, build an unstoppable business, and truly enjoy your unstoppable life.

It’s time to take my wisdom, my expertise to help you simplify money and go beyond the numbers. I’m your host, Aimee Cerka.

Why This Season Makes Money Stress Feel Heavier

Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.

Welcome back to Money Simplified. I’m your host, Aimee Cerka.

Today we are getting to talk about love and money because guess what? Valentine’s Day is around the corner. But it’s also that time of year that there’s a lot more things that kind of show up.

We’re getting out of January where everyone felt the pressure of doing all the New Year’s resolutions, which we can go off on a whole side tangent about like why so many of those fail, and like January really actually isn’t the time to do it just because it’s the start of the calendar year.

Anyways, this time of year we’ve kind of gotten over that “oh, new year, new us vibe.” Like, it’s not working anymore. Kind of over it.

Tax season is coming, and because of all of those things—winter, we’re kind of done with all of it, right? So things show up, we see more tension, we’ve got shorter fuses, we are avoiding things, we’re snapping over small things.

Just because, like, your cup is overflowing, you are right at the brim, and every little thing just sets you over, it makes your cup overflow, right?

If money has felt heavier in your relationship, whether that’s a relationship with yourself or with your spouse, you are not alone. Okay. That is important. Like, you are not the only one.

How Money Pressure Shows Up in Relationships

Here’s the thing though, the money pressure that we are experiencing doesn’t show up as “let’s talk about our finances.”

It shows up when we get defensive. Again, you can be defensive with yourself and you can be defensive with your spouse.

It’s like, “well, I was entitled to buy that. I earned that.” Or on the other side, it’s, “why did you buy that?” We’re getting defensive with each other, right? Or we’re just avoiding it. Silence.

There’s control. Maybe we’re trying to control how much we’re spending, again, for yourself or your spouse. And we can get to like a tactical strategy that’s a game changer for your marriage there.

There’s resentment, especially if one partner carries all the mental load. If one partner is the primary breadwinner, if one person feels behind. And if also, like, if somebody feels judged and these things, okay, all of them—carrying the mental load, primary breadwinner, maybe a little less so with the primary breadwinner, ’cause that one’s normally like tangible. You can see, but the feeling behind, feeling judged, feeling like you’re carrying all the mental load.

Notice how those are feelings.

Unspoken Expectations and the Emotions Behind Money Fights

The money fights aren’t necessarily about the money. It’s about the pressure and the unspoken expectations and the way that we feel.

We all have our own perspective when it comes to money.

We come into these relationships—again, relationship with yourself, relationship with your spouse, all of those things—with a set of beliefs because you were raised in one way, right? And you have a set of beliefs and you feel like your beliefs are true.

I’m not saying whether they are or not. But this is your perspective. And from your perspective, maybe you’re the one carrying the mental load. Maybe you’re behind because of the expectation you put on yourself. Maybe you feel judged because that is the narrative that you are believing.

Now, if it’s true or not, if your spouse is actually feeling that way, totally different story. But it’s truth to you, and the pressure and the unspoken expectations, that causes way more fights.

And pressure shows up in several different ways. It’s the, we’ve got to make more money, we got to get out of debt. Societal pressure shows up, the pressure we put on ourselves.

We’ve got to be able to do this, the kids need this, they need extracurricular activities, but so-and-so is going on a vacation. Oh, we need a new car, refrigerator broke, all the different things, right?

All of those things show up in the “we should work harder, we should work harder.” We’re working through this in the Money Magnet Challenge still. Like, we have to reset how we think about money because so many of us have that, “you gotta go, go, go, go, go, I’ve got to be doing something.”

As entrepreneurs especially, we are not trading time for money, and we got to work on the whole, “we’re worthy to receive just because we’re able to receive.” We don’t have to earn that.

You are worthy because you are worthy. And that is hard to swallow for a lot of people because it’s so different.

Why Safe Communication Matters More Than Perfect Money Talks

So that was like a segue there, but it’s all the same thing. It’s our beliefs and the unspoken expectations.

Again, communication is huge, but you have to be able to communicate in a safe way. And I know that not everybody has that experience, so let’s kind of—we’ll start tactical here. Maybe a couple tactical strategies to put in place to help yourself.

And again, this is going to work whether it’s your relationship with yourself, relationship with spouse, or also—if you are married but your spouse isn’t on board, so you’re like working on this by yourself. It all works. Okay, so some common dynamics here that we see.

One person is avoiding the finances and the other person is left to worry about it all by themselves, and they feel alone and they feel like they have to worry about it because the other person’s not.

One person is a spender, they want to go spend, buys things, and the other one’s a saver. That specific dynamic is almost like—it’s not guaranteed, but it’s a high likelihood in every single relationship.

One person’s looking for more security and the other one wants to go have more freedom and go do things.

Again, we’re not putting right and wrong on it, although avoiding your finances is not the solution, and worrying about your finances is not the solution.

But your desire, if your desire is to save everything, nothing wrong with that necessarily. We’ve got to do everything in moderation, right? And if your desire is to go spend more, not necessarily anything wrong with that as well.

The Play Account: A Simple Way to Reduce Money Tension

We should have done the, um, the money love language correlation series here in February. That would have been fun. This is where we’re at right now, and adding blame and pressure—we’re not even trying to diagnose. It’s just what is at the moment.

Just because you have avoided everything up until this point does not mean that you have to continue to avoid it.

Alright, so with the spending versus saving, security versus freedom—those types of strategies. When you implement the play account, which is a subcategory within your budget, your personal budget—so Budgeting Simplified is my budgeting system—your play account, within your play account you have a his money to blow and a her money to blow.

That is money set aside for you to do whatever you want, as long as it’s legal, moral, and ethical, of course.

If you want to save it to feel a little more secure, go for it. If you want to spend it because you enjoy that feeling of spending, you’ve got a safe fund there to go spend in moderation. What your preference is—and notice I didn’t tell you how much to allocate towards your play account.

Again, your budget, your money, you are deciding what to do with it ahead of time, not reactionary, beforehand. This is why we have to designate the money, and it’s not even necessarily like the tracking.

This is setting the intention of where you want your money to go ahead of time, because if you don’t, somebody else is going to do it for you.

Setting Financial Intentions Without Guilt or Pressure

When this goes live, here in the US, we have the Super Bowl coming up this week, and I’ll be honest, it’s not really something that I watch really anymore. But if you look at advertising and marketing, right, like those advertising slots go for an insane amount of money.

I’m not even going to quote it right now because I don’t have the up-to-date statistics, but advertising and marketing as an industry works, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, I advertise, right? I market. All businesses do. Fantastic.

But the thing is, if you aren’t setting the intention of where you want your money to go, you’re going to be under the pressure again, and you’ll end up—you end up spending money.

They say on average, by not having a budget, you overspend by $7,500 every single year. You can go on vacation for that still, even with inflation, right?

You’ve gotta set the intention with your money, but it’s—we can’t do it with the guilt. We can’t do it with the pressure. We can’t do it with all of those things. We have to create the safety. It’s not the math.

Two plus two is four. We can do that. We’ve got calculators. Even if you’re not a numbers person, that’s like part of the tagline, right? Like we make money simple, even if, or I make money simple for you, even if you’re not a numbers person, because the math portion of it isn’t that difficult.

And I’ve got the tools in place, so you don’t even have to do it for you. You don’t even have to do it, but you have to feel clear and stop the “we’re gonna deal with this later,” because “we’ll deal with this later” just keeps piling the snowball. It’s just getting bigger and bigger, and it’s gonna take you out at some point.

Why Compassion Changes Money Conversations

So having conversations with your significant other, having conversations with yourself even—but we don’t feel safe. That’s where tone gets misread. People take questions—like, if you ask a question and it feels like it’s criticism, that’s where we’re not in a safe place.

When money feels unclear, when money doesn’t feel safe, right? Even your significant other might not feel safe for this conversation. Our brain and your nervous system fill in the gaps for you, and we usually go to the worst-case scenario.

That’s just kind of what we do. We have to be intentional about not doing that.

Here’s the thing though, you don’t have to solve it all today. You don’t have to agree on everything, but what if you could see their perspective?

I know you want them to see where you’re coming from. You want them to see where you’re at.

But what if you started with, “I can see why you feel that way, I can see why you think that way?” Doing it with yourself as well, this is like really powerful.

How Grace and Gratitude Shift Financial Dynamics

Giving yourself compassion, giving yourself grace, like understanding where the other person is coming from—if we could do this like as a society, we would be so much better off because there’s not judgment, there’s not the guilt, there’s not the shame.

We’re not putting all of that on there. We’re not trying to fix it. And it’s not even the “see me, see me, see me,” like, “you don’t understand, this is what I’m going through.”

And I know, I know you’re going through hard things. I know that you desire to feel seen.

But what if you could do that for somebody else? If you could do that for somebody else, the way that you desire to be seen, what if you could see somebody in that same way? And not in a give-to-get energy, but just to put that vibration out there, to see them and to truly see them.

You will be amazed at what shows up.

And maybe they don’t do it in return. I’m not guaranteeing that. I can’t guarantee that.

But that effort in seeing somebody else, it’s not being done in a vacuum. You’re putting that out there. You’re reducing the pressure. You’re building clarity and that energy, that vibration, that like, I’m okay.

When Money Stops Feeling Personal, It Gets Simpler

When you can look at this person, and again, it can be yourself or your significant other. When you can look at them with compassion and understand where they’re coming from, it’s gonna change so much because it stops being personal.

And when it’s not personal and there’s not pressure and there’s not shame, it gets to be simpler. The money is just math and we can do the math.

And even if the math isn’t mathing well right now, like we can still make that happen.

But we have to get to that place of that calm certainty without making everything feel personal and angry.

We’ll take the personal responsibility for our choices and our actions. We’re not blaming anybody else. Understanding where others are coming from.

Those two things—put the tactical steps in place with the play account. We can talk about, like, why I don’t love the idea of money dates.

But take the step to understand where someone else is coming from. Give them a little grace and see what shows up.

You might be surprised because when you can give them grace and you can understand, it’s less about the give me, give me, give me, and it’s more about the gratitude.

And I say it all the time, when you can anchor into gratitude for what you already have, and then ask for the next thing.

It’s not like when you give—let’s say you give your child $50 and they’re like, “thanks, but I wanted $75.” Like, do you want to do more for them? No, not really.

The energetic alignment isn’t there. But when you can be thankful and understand and do those things with a genuine heart and then still be open to more, truly appreciate what you have, right?

Everything changes.

Connect with Aimee Cerka and Next Steps

All right, that’s what I’m going to leave you with for now.

Make sure to stay tuned for next week. You know, just hit subscribe. But I have several things coming forward that I’m really excited to bring to you because it’s a lot about this pressure and the pressure we put on ourselves and how to shift it and what pressure actually exists and what pressure doesn’t.

So that’s what I’ve got for now. We’ll see you next time.

Thank you so much for listening to Money Simplified. My favorite place to hang out is on Instagram. You can find me @AimeeCerka to catch all the behind the scenes in my stories. Send me a message to share your biggest takeaway or just to say hi. I love hearing from podcast listeners.

When you’re ready to take action on your mindset, your money, or the systems behind it all, I’m here for you.

Whether you’re snagging a free resource, exploring a mini course, diving into the fundamentals with Money Mastery Academy, getting in-depth support inside the Unstoppable Experience, or scheduling a complimentary bookkeeping consult to finally get hands-on help with your books, your next step is waiting for you.

AimeeCerka.com/podcastlinks has all the information, and of course that link is hanging out in the show notes for you.

We’ll see you next time.

Money Fights in Relationships Aren’t About Money