Written By Travis Hornsby, CFA®, CFP®
Updated on July 26, 2025
Estimates put money-related arguments as the root cause of a very large percentage of divorces overall.
If you’re experiencing conflict, a lack of connection, or goals misalignment in your relationship, the ROI of financial planning could be enormous.
Let’s examine how financial planning could help add peace to romantic relationships that are experiencing stress.
How fiduciary financial planning tries to get you both to where you want to be
From a technical perspective, financial planning uses math and tools to calculate how you go from point A (where you are now) to point B (where you want to be).
Sometimes couples aren’t on the same page about where they want to end up.
For example, one spouse might want to buy an enormous telescope, and another might want to buy an apartment in Paris.
This bizarre example may or may not be personally relevant to yours truly (I have a pretty intense amateur astronomy habit, and my wife loves the City of Lights).
When you have conflicting goals (Paris isn’t great for astronomy with all the light pollution, and dark sky sites in the middle of nowhere are not renowned for their cuisine and culture), it creates an opportunity for conflict that doesn’t bring you closer together.
But what if, mathematically, you could both get some of what you want?
Financial planning might find that both of your wildest dreams can be met
Using this telescope vs. Paris apartment example, what if both of these goals are achievable?
Yes, it might not be possible to observe the stars under the Paris sky, but what if stocks and bonds could be sold from your brokerage account using the most effective cost basis, which would minimize your tax liability, thus enabling you to purchase the Paris apartment and have a big telescope for when you’re not there?
Maybe you store your giant telescope in your primary house, and the trips to Paris are for non-astronomy-related hobbies like reading nice books at cafés and sipping coffee.
Pick whatever your and your spouse’s top goals are, and substitute them for the examples I used above. The key is maybe it’s not an either/or conversation you need to be having, but a both/and conversation.
Related: Financial Planning for Physicians: Your Roadmap to Mastering Cash Flow, Taxes and Retirement
Financial planning can help by adding a neutral party to tough marriage conversations
Couples counseling can be helpful just to know there’s someone that can listen impartially.
In a similar vein, a financial planner wants both of you to be happy and achieve your goals.
When potentially charged money conversations come up (should we renovate or not? Can we afford to buy this dream vacation home?), it’s often useful to have a professional who can facilitate these conversations instead of having them turn into a negative cycle.
A marriage split can have significant financial consequences that might be avoidable
Just to state an obvious point, in a split, it's typical to see your net worth go down by 50% as assets are split.
Sometimes the consequences are even more significant, as assets need to be sold to be divisible, resulting in capital gains taxes on the assets sold if there are gains to be reported.
So that means a marriage not working out might result in as much as a 60% to 70% drop in wealth.
And when you have to maintain a household without splitting expenses, you lose economies of scale that hinder your ability to save.
This is not to say that you should stay in a marriage just because it saves you money or keeps your net worth higher than it would be if you were not married.
It’s simply pointing out a fact that if a marriage could be saved, and the conflict you’re experiencing is the quiet erosion and lack of connection type of fading, it could save you a lot of money and allow you to reach your financial goals more quickly if you are able to reconnect with your spouse and remember why you married them in the first place.
However, that said, sometimes the smartest thing to do financially is to split up. Let’s address that next.
When divorce is the smarter financial option
I’ll never forget a client I spoke with that we’ll call “Sue.”
She had a husband who would go out and buy a new car regularly using her credit without her permission — sometimes even when she asked him to not do it because they couldn’t afford it. I’m not sure how he accomplished car buying like this repeatedly, but he did.
She was avoidant. She didn’t want to confront him about it because of the children they shared.
But she was in debt, not of her making, and the pressure of the payments she owed each month was intense. She was incredibly stressed out, and she broke down crying while talking to me after disclosing the pain she was going through.
In this situation, I advised her to seek help and/or counseling from a trusted resource because what her husband was doing was unacceptable behavior and that she needed to hear that from a professional who could name the behavior for what it was.
There is such a thing as marital financial abuse, such as in the case above.
That financial abuse can go both ways, of course. A spouse could withhold spending money from the other, or limit their access to credit, or any number of other controlling or damaging behaviors.
Another example is online sports gambling. It’s far more common these days than most folks realize that a spouse can lose a huge amount of money in a hurry due to the addictive nature of gambling apps.
If you want to try to work through one of these situations with counseling, it’s your choice.
But it’s true that some marriages are beyond saving, and in some cases, you’d be financially better off divorced than remaining married.
But the goal is your happiness. And knowing your financial options and investing in your marriage usually reduces stress and gives you more peace about the paths forward you have available.
Financial planning is about helping you optimize your joy
Life is short. Relationships are hard. I had an aunt who once said, “It's a lot harder to stay married than it is to not stay married.”
That’s because we’re all imperfect human beings, and we all have unique wants and dreams, and unless we’re ultra-rich, we have to recognize trade-offs financially in the things we want to buy and the experiences we want to enjoy.
Marriage counseling can help you address a lack of connection and improve communication, but your marriage counselor usually is not also a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER®. There could be benefits to engaging both a counselor and a financial planner if you’re experiencing stress in your relationship over money.
The good news is that financial planning can help both spouses get more of what they want, and the third party helping both spouses be heard can reduce conflict, which can bring a couple closer together.
In the 2025 movie The Materialists, one of the main characters is a matchmaker for a high-end dating service in New York. She talks about how in romantic relationships, most people want to find a “grave buddy” we will share life with throughout all of the stages, including death.
It’s a beautiful concept, and the probability that you stay married, grow wealth faster, and find and keep your “grave buddy” is much higher with long-term financial advice.
And if you know you need to extricate yourself from a relationship, advice can help you handle that decision, too.
It’s up to you how you live your story. Financial planners are just supposed to help give you the tools to write it even better.
