If money conversations with your partner (or yourself) have felt heavier lately - more defensive, more tense, more avoided, you're not alone.

This episode is for those navigating money stress in relationships, whether that's with a spouse, with yourself, or both. We're exploring why money fights aren't really about the money, what's actually underneath the tension, and how to create more clarity and compassion around finances without the pressure or shame.

Money Mindset Playbook: https://aimeecerka.com/mindset

For the full transcript and all links mentioned, see the blog post: https://aimeecerka.com/243

Ready To Take Action: https://aimeecerka.com/podcastlinks

If money has been coming up more in your relationship lately, and not

necessarily in a great way, this episode is gonna be for you and 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 gonna look at this through the relationship with your

partner, but it all applies.

It's all the same principles at its core.

So this episode's gonna be 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.

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 and Ls, and we're gonna

take you through all of it here.

We blend proven financial strategy with mindset work and energetic

alignment, so you can create unstop.

Finances, build an unstoppable business and truly enjoy your unstoppable life.

It's time to take my wisdom and my expertise to help you simplify

money and go beyond the numbers.

I'm your host, Aimee Cerka.

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 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.

So this time of year we've kind of gotten over that like, 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.

Uh, we've got shorter fu fuses.

We are avoiding things.

We're snapping over small things just because like your cup is like overflowing,

you are right at the brim, and every little thing just sets you over.

It makes your cup overflow, right?

So if money has felt heavier in your relationship, whether that's a

relationship with yourself, relationship with your spouse, you are not alone.

Okay.

That is important.

Like you were not the only one.

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.

And 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, I earned that.

Or on the other side, it's a, why did you buy that?

We're getting defensive with each other, right?

Or we're just avoiding it.

Silence, okay, 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 of 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 premier 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.

Okay.

The money fights aren't necessarily about the money, it's about the pressure.

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.

A 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 gotta make more money.

We gotta get outta debt.

Like societal pressure shows up.

The pressure we put on ourselves, we gotta be able to do this.

The kids need this, they need the extracurricular activities, but

so-and-so's going on a vacation.

Oh, we need a new car.

Refrigerator broke.

All the different things, right?

All of those things show up and the, we should work harder, we should work harder.

We're working through this.

And the money magnet challenge still, like it's.

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 gotta be doing something.

And as entrepreneurs especially, we are not trading time for money and we

gotta 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.

Seg.

That was like a seg 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.

We give you a couple tactical strategies to put in place to help

yourself, and again, this is gonna work, whether it's your relationship

with yourself, relationship with spouse, or also, and also, there we go.

If you were 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 okay.

One person is a spender, they wanna go spend buys things,

and the other one's a saver.

That like 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, the we're not putting right and wrong on it.

Although avoiding your finances is not the solution and worry about

worrying about your finances is not the solution, but your desire, if

your desire is to save everything.

Nothing wrong with that necessarily.

We gotta do everything in moderation, right?

And if your desire is to go spend more, not necessarily

anything wrong with that as well.

We should have done the, um, the money, love language correlation,

, series here in February.

That would've been fun.

This is where we're at right now and adding blame and pressure and it's not

even, we're not even trying to like diagnose, it's just what is at the moment.

Okay.

Just because you have avoided everything.

Up until this point does not mean that you have to continue to avoid it.

All right, so with the spending versus saving security versus freedom.

Those type 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.

So if you wanna save it to feel a little more secure, go for it.

If you wanna 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 gonna do it for you when this goes live.

Um, 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 gonna quote it right now 'cause 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 gonna 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.

Right.

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.

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 like your significant other might not feel safe for this conversation,

our brain, your nervous system fills 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.

So 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.

They want, 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, 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 some, 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 like 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 guarantee 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 am okay.

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 mouthing 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.

Like, we'll take the personal responsibility for our

choices and our actions.

We're not blaming anybody else and understanding where

others are coming from.

Those two things, like 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.

All right.

That's what I'm gonna 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 at Aimee Cerka to catch all the behind the scenes of my stories.

Send me a message to share your biggest takeaway or just to say hi.

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Your next step is waiting for you, Aimee Cerka.com/podcast links has all the

information, and of course, that link is hanging out in the show notes for you.

We'll see you next time.