120: Scott Rick — Navigating Money and Relationships: Insights from Behavioral Decision Researcher Scott Rick

Scott Rick: [00:00:00] There are some very reasonable people who say that, oh, you should print out everyone’s credit card statements and get a highlighter and say, well, you don’t really need that, do you? And like, oh God, go line by line. Very unpleasant, very invasive. I think a lot of people have been convinced like, oh, if you could just stop buying lattes and avocado toast, you could become rich. And you know, people need to get deprogrammed a little bit from that and realize the math doesn’t add up and we might be fighting over. Very minor things.

Intro: Do you think money takes up more life space than it should? On this show, we discuss with and share stories from artists, authors, entrepreneurs, and advisors about how they mindfully minimize the time and energy spent thinking about money. Join your host, Jonathan DeYoe, and learn how to put money in its place and get more out of life.[00:01:00]

Jonathan DeYoe: Hey, welcome back on this episode of the Mindful Money Podcast. I’m chatting with Scott Rick Scott’s a marketing professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, holds a PhD in behavioral decision research from Carnegie Mellon University. He’s published research in journals spanning marketing, psychology and neuroscience.

Uh, he’s got awards for both research and teaching, and his research is covered extensively. In New York Times was Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, all over the place. I. I wanted to have him on the podcast to discuss the book Tight Wads and spend thrifts navigating the Money Minefield in real relationships because I’m married and, uh, uh, we have these issues.

So, uh, this was published in Ju in January, sorry, of 2024 by St. Martin’s Press. Scott, welcome to the Mindful Money Podcast. Jonathan, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to have the conversation. Uh, I, I, I expect that by the end of this. I will know how to discuss this topic with my wife. What do you think?

We’re [00:02:00] gonna sort it out. We’ll sort it out. You got it. Uh, I, we don’t, we don’t have that many issues with it, but just, just to be clear, so first, where do you call home and where are you connecting from?

Scott Rick: Nowadays I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and that’s where I am now. We are, uh, doing a lot of swimming and baseball with the kids, so we’re around a lot this summer.

It’s nice and hot, right, right now. Oh, very much. Yeah, too, too hot. That’s why the swimming, where’d you grow up? Uh, Houston grew up in Houston and yeah, so this is a big change. You know, I miss the people, but I don’t miss the weather. I, I didn’t love the, you know, the storms and all that. But yeah, I spent some formative months in Vegas.

My grandparents got lived near us in Houston, but they kind of got bored and moved to Vegas and. Um, that was sad, but we got to visit them quite a bit.

Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah. We’re gonna, we’re gonna hear that. I, I’m gonna ask about that story in a second, so don’t, don’t go too deep. I’m curious, while you’re in Houston, h how many years did you live in Houston?

Like all growing up? Yeah. Till I was 22. Okay. What did you learn about money [00:03:00] in, you know, as a kid, even

Scott Rick: through teenage years, I was in a neighborhood where we were certainly less financially well off than. Pretty much everyone around us and uh, luckily my parents kind of were, they were able to move into, to the most affordable part of like really good school districts.

And so that was very nice. But no, it was kind of fascinating to see. I. The variation in how parents spent their money and let their kids spend money contrasting that with mine from a very early age was kind of fascinated in the different approaches people took. And I found it kind of confusing why some people with tons of money and felt very anxious about spending it sometimes, and it didn’t really add up to me.

Yeah. ’cause we were in the opposite situation where we didn’t have that much and, you know, the, the brakes on the car did not work so well, so to speak.

Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah. I think I grew up in a, in a, in a similar circumstance where most of my peer group. My dad [00:04:00] had overalls that were always dirty. Mm-Hmm. My friends at school parents were bankers and real estate agents, and, and so they looked cleaner and that was, I carry that image with me constantly.

Can you name an experience as a kid that becomes part of that money story, whether it’s you comparing what you got to a friend or, or, or something like that, or, or shopping with mom or whatever.

Scott Rick: I forget how old I was, but I remember. Being in someone’s car, they have like a backup camera. And I was like, what on earth?

Because our car, you know, we’d have to sometimes pour fluids in it ’cause it was leaking just to get the start and that kind of thing. But I. No. I mean, yeah, I did a lot of shopping, A lot of, you know, we went to the mall a lot. We went to a lot of garage sales and we never went overboard, but it was just kind of an open joke that the whole family was a little looser with money than we should be and, Mm-Hmm.

So it wasn’t stigmatized or anything, it was just kind of, well, why not? Uh Right. That kind of

Jonathan DeYoe: approach. Yeah. How, how was that informed how you, how [00:05:00] you work with your kids in money?

Scott Rick: Yes. Well, I think I was hoping early on with the kids that I could not really change myself and just kind of give them verbal guidance on what to do differently.

Kind of do, as I say, not as I do. Yeah. But as I’ve discovered both at the home and in relevant research, they’re much more likely to mimic what they see than kind of any. Conflicting verbal instructions. And so yeah, it’s, it’s reeled me in a little bit when we do kind of splurge if you will, you know, we’ll talk through it and I’ll let them know like, okay, this is good Okay to do, but it might mean we give up something else later and think about the trade offs.

Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah.

Scott Rick: You know, money doesn’t grow on trees, that kind of thing. And you know, I think that’s helped them kind of think about prices in terms of what we call opportunity costs, what we’re giving up later and. Yeah, it’s, uh, it’s very different than what I had growing up, and I think it’s a good thing.

Jonathan DeYoe: I, I’m, I’m wondering what [00:06:00] age do you introduce the, the word opportunity cost?

Scott Rick: Yeah. No, I don’t think I have it five

Jonathan DeYoe: years old or what

Scott Rick: I, I, I might have tried at some point, but No, we just talk about in very concrete terms, like, okay, we wanna go to a Tigers game and. Get good seats and that’s fine, but put that in terms of, okay, well maybe we don’t go see that movie you wanted to see, and we wait on that until it comes out on streaming or something.

So yeah, just very concrete thing.

Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah. Yeah. I want to talk about Taiwans and Spencer Wrist, but just before that, I. Can you tell us what led to writing the book to begin with? I especially like the story about Grandma Molly and, and, and,

Scott Rick: yes. Well, I mean, that, that was a fascinating thing. So, yeah. I, they moved to Vegas and, you know, in their work lives they were, they used to run like a, a movie house.

Around Detroit and, and they were just used to kind of glitz and glamor and, you know, they were out there talking to people. It was very different than movie theaters nowadays. And they were [00:07:00] in a restaurant, they just needed the action. And I, I got to go out there and we would spend like a good chunk of the summer for several years hanging out and.

In casinos, not like, you know, Hoover Dam, it wasn’t about like the scenery of Vegas. It was, it was the casinos and yeah, I got this upfront view of people kind of pursuing happiness via money and some were going overboard. And you know, I, I don’t think we ever did anything too crazy, but it was kind of very.

Constant. And for whatever reason, uh, I think I looked older than I was, the security guards didn’t give me a hard time. So I kind of got to linger in those spaces. They didn’t like make me go somewhere else. And so I would, uh, sometimes they would go play bingo and I would just hang out in the sports book and watch all the baseball games and that was great actually.

Yeah. So that, that was a really interesting thing. Then go back to Houston and people aren’t spending that way and like, what’s going on here? So they started young, the interest and then [00:08:00] I. I think I just got to a point in my kind of research life where it’s like, okay, I think we know enough now. We don’t know everything, but I think we know enough.

I. Where I’m in a position where I can kind of give some informed advice that might be a little different than what is already out there. Going back to the story, there’s something about, was it your grandpa was hiding spending? Oh yeah. My grandma. Yeah. So she was a little looser with money than grandpa.

So, you know, when we weren’t at the casinos, we might go to the, uh, fashion show mall. In Vegas, I think it had a few slot machines itself, but you know, sometimes she would buy a designer outfit, you know, keep it in the trunk until he was kind of, uh, somewhere else and then kind of get the price tags off and put it in the closet.

And she didn’t like I. Spend to extreme excess. She wasn’t endangering anything. She was just kind of avoiding in her mind, unnecessary arguments. You know, I’m not sure I would prescribe that exact [00:09:00] approach, but I think there is something to kind of knowing in a general sense what everyone’s up to without getting into the details.

I think that’s one of the novel perspectives in the book. But, uh. Yeah, hers was a little more kind of outlawish.

Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah. And approach. And there’s, there’s another story. Jonathan and Aaron, can you tell that? Yeah. Yeah. Iran. Yeah. Tell us that story real quick.

Scott Rick: Well, yeah, my two best friends were very different in their approaches.

Jonathan, uh, was in the USA today in an article where they talked about people who bought TV so big that they kind of endangered their, their marriage. And so he bought like this giant tv. His wife Emily, was really upset, so he bought her like a diamond ring to make up for it, like a very spin thrift way to kind of smooth things over.

He was with me in Vegas for my 21st birthday, and then my other buddy Iran, he was just kind of. Came from a family that was comfortable on paper, but they were just very reluctant to spend, and he was just kind of fascinated [00:10:00] with me and very puzzled. I would do things like, I’m a big fan of Pearl Jam, and at one point they put out a bunch of individual CDs from each of their concerts on a tour, and I would buy several of those, even though the set lists were pretty much the same, and he would be like, why?

Why? How? I’d be like, well, no, they might play the same song in different places, but they would play it at different times. And the vibe was totally different. And I wanted to hear each of those. Like, of course I would buy several versions. So yeah, I, I was a source of puzzlement for him, and that just added to my fascination with the differences that are out

Jonathan DeYoe: there.

Yeah. Yeah. So introduce us to the concepts, like what is a tight wa, what’s a spend thrift?

Scott Rick: Yes, well, a, a classic tight wide is someone who might look good on paper. They might, uh, have all their accounts in order. You might not think by looking at them that they would be very worried or anxious about spending money.

But a true, tight, wide is, is quite anxious about it. And they [00:11:00] might end up. Not buying things that they recognize that they should buy. And certainly the people around them might recognize that they should buy it and this can be a source of frustration and regrets for them. And so it’s, you know, it’s kind of a sometimes uncomfortable thing to be, I.

Contrast that with a spin thrift who does not experience enough distress when thinking about spending money. We are a little more present minded, whereas a Taiwan might be kind of worried about, you know, robbing their future self of enough money to live a spin thrift might be worried about robbing their future self of a life memories experiences.

So they’re both trying to avoid something bad for that later person, but in very different ways and. Spin thrift, do a lot of what I might call just in case purchasing. You know, we might buy something just in case we happen to need it sometime I might be shopping for work clothes and then see this lovely velvet blazer that, oh, that might be cool for like a holiday [00:12:00] party.

I’d love to have that. I’m not invited to such a party. Probably won’t be, but boy, I’d hate to miss out on it. So the, the spin thrift saying is, I’d rather be looking at it than looking for it. That helps us feel kind of safe. And as you can imagine, that can also lead to quite a bit of regret and I. In trouble.

So it’s neither one is like totally ideal, I would say. Are

Jonathan DeYoe: we all one or the other, or is this a, is there a lot of gray area in between? Yes,

Scott Rick: exactly.

Jonathan DeYoe: There’s

Scott Rick: a lot of InBetween gray area. The third group of people who are kind of in the middle, we call them unconflicted consumers, they don’t get a fun name because they’re.

Not as interesting. They’re kind of happy they’re, you know, they have some distress when thinking about spending money, but not too little, not too much. And they’re kind of at peace with how they use money and they are kind of happiest on average. And so, you know, their name implies that both the extremes, the Taiwan and Spint thrifts, they’re [00:13:00] the ones experiencing a lot of conflict.

Jonathan DeYoe: What are some of the, I guess, underlying psychological neurological factors that shape spending personalities?

Scott Rick: I think Taiwans do have a more mathematical mind. They’re more likely to major in mathy things in college. They are just more money minded in general. They’re just kinda more obsessed with money.

Yeah, I think that helps you view prices in terms of opportunity cost. If you have this mathematical lens, I. You know, there are some demographic correlates, like women are a little more likely to be spin thrifts than men. It’s not huge, but it’s always there. You know, there are plenty of male spin thrifts running around and female tight wads.

But there’s a small relationship, uh, small relationship with age tight wads are usually a little older. That could just be a generational thing rather than something that happens as you age. But one interesting thing that it doesn’t correlate with is [00:14:00] your current income. You know, a lot of people when they hear this, they might think tight wise are just people who don’t have money to spend, and it is not about your current income.

There are plenty of tight wines with a fabulous income and vice versa, but it’s not about that. It’s, I think it’s about, it’s more about how you and your family kind of felt about money in your formative years rather than as an adult, whatever your current income happens to be. So talk about that. How, how does, how does your financial personality develop?

It can take shape early on, and it’s hard to update when your circumstances change. And I, I like to quote this character from the story love in the time of cholera, uncle Leo, he grew up poor and you know, somehow worked himself up and became like this wealthy industrialist. At that point in his later years, people would say, well, you’re rich.

Said, no, I’m not rich. I’m a poor man with money. That’s a very different thing. There are a lot of tight wives who have that approach, like I’m a poor [00:15:00] person who happens to have money. And if you grew up struggling, sometimes you’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like you might be comfortable now, but you know, disaster can strike at any moment so you don’t feel comfortable in your own skin.

And so. Yeah, it can take holds pretty early, but I will say it’s really interesting. Some people who struggle early, that stays with them and they’re afraid of going broke again. Other people are afraid of, you know, missing out on a life and if they come into money, they want to like, they go all out. And so there’s different paths people can take.

And I will say that as a parent, you might think your kid is like very different from you. When they kind of leave the nest and like go off to college or whatever they do as an adult. But I think eventually people kind of come back home, so to speak. It’s hard to mimic everything your parents do when you’re a young person.

You can’t mimic like a bad mortgage when you’re a teenager, but you can mimic it when it’s your turn to get a [00:16:00] house. Hmm. And so I think that’s when you start seeing people kind of fall back into what they saw. Early

Jonathan DeYoe: on, I definitely tilt towards tight one. I also totally identify with, I’m a, a poor person that has money, grew up poor, you know, still have that, that mindset.

Are these changeable? Like how do I, how do I alter this?

Scott Rick: Yeah. You know, there are things you can do just on your own. Like when I was in grad school, the money dried up. It wasn’t there. I couldn’t like work a side job and. I had to devote everything to school and I had to train myself to be a tight wi just to get through that rough time, and I was able to do that to survive.

Like I would either pay with cash or a debit card, and I. I would collect receipts and even though the transaction would just kind of pop up on my account, I would go home and put it in Excel. I wanted to feel it, you know, reducing my balance and I would feel pain at the ATM taking the money out and feel pain when [00:17:00] spending the cash at the store.

And so just putting up all these speed bumps to slow me down, I shook that off once I got like a decent income and got back to my normal self. But you know, there are these emergency measures you can take. I think the best way to kind of adjust. Because I don’t think people can really like flip flop, but you can adjust through talking with other people with different perspectives, whether that’s a spouse, a friend, a therapist, a planner.

You need someone else. ’cause you can really talk yourself into some weird, wrong perspective. So you need someone else to say what? You can afford that, or no, you can’t afford that. You need another view. Hmm. That’s why we say in psychology, like that’s the joke in academic psychology departments. Oh, you’re fine.

How am I? Instead of like, oh, how you doing? Like, we need someone else to kind of, yeah.

Jonathan DeYoe: Give us feedback. In a minute we’ll get into like. Relationships. But yeah. Outside of relationships in business, you know, at the office and friendships, how do the different behaviors or or [00:18:00] spending styles affect those areas of life?

Scott Rick: It’s sticky. You might think that, for example, in business, I might be tight with my money, but when I’m on the corporate card, I’m very loose. You, you, you might expect that, but no, there are what? What has been called like expense account, tight wides. Like even it’s hard to turn off this tenancy when you’re just like using a different credit card, like, oh, this company money.

And that can actually be bad. Like if I’m trying to wow a client, I don’t know, do I want to take ’em to Olive Garden or do I want to take him to like somewhere, you know, fancy and sometimes you gotta spend money to make money and I think you want. As in marriage as we’ll discuss, you want like different perspectives.

Like I want, you need a, a spin thrift orientation to like invest and do new ventures and grow, but you also want to make sure you don’t do like a WeWork situation where you just like, just totally recklessly. You want a balance of perspectives, a team of rivals. So yeah, that can be good in, [00:19:00] in friendship.

You hear a lot of people saying, well, if I’m single. It’s good to have like accountability to friends and may we talk once a week or months and check in with each other and that can be a a very helpful thing also.

Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah. So let’s talk about till death to us part. The opposites attract or do people find themselves attracted to similarities or is that not part of the research?

Scott Rick: Yeah, no, it’s very much part and the normal pattern just in life is like birds of a feather flock together. Yeah,

Jonathan DeYoe: okay.

Scott Rick: Republicans, very Republicans, Democrats, very Democrats, but. It had been speculated that if there’s something you don’t like about yourself and then you see that in someone else, it’s like a really uncomfortable mirror up to your own problem and it can make you kinda shy away from that person.

And so we think that’s what’s happening when a tight encounters another tight wa, it’s like, Ugh, is that what I look like? Is that, that’s terrible. So we think there’s something fun and fascinating and just novel about being with someone who approaches money [00:20:00] very differently. And indeed we find that like a mismatched marriage, a tight one and a spin thrift is more common than two tight wads or two spendthrifts.

So this is one case where opposites attract. Now the question is like, should they attract, right? Like is it good for the marriage? Uh, it’s mixed left to their own devices if they don’t think about things carefully, what was once kind of charming and kind of silly and dating once there’s like kids and houses and cars and bigger stakes things.

It can start to get kind of irritating. So there is a pattern of fatal attraction that’s out there. Sometimes the very thing that kind of interests you or draws you in is the same thing that kind of repels you later. And so if you’re not careful about this stuff, a mismatched marriage could be kind of rough.

Yeah.

Jonathan DeYoe: What advice do you have for couples that are struggling with this mismatch?

Scott Rick: Yes. Well, I, I actually think so. I’m in a mismatch marriage and it’s great and I think a mismatch marriage does provide the greatest [00:21:00] potential for happiness because you, if you can take the best of both perspectives, that’s the way to do it.

And so, you know, one thing that helps my wife and I function, we try to talk about things that we should talk about and not talk about things that we don’t need to talk about. For example, we have very different hobbies and she is a wonderful needle pointer. She’s turning that into a business.

Occasionally I have seen invoices and receipts, and I’ve always been surprised, like I would assume, like, oh, it’s just like thread, right? You can get that for like five bucks At Michael’s. Like, no, no, this is like specialty. I think they call it floss, like it’s, it’s a different thing altogether, but she doesn’t need me kind of looking over her shoulder.

And like saying, did you really have to spend that squashing her enjoyment of her thing? Just the opposite with me. I, I, I’m like a baseball card person. I do it with the kids and you know, you can imagine someone saying, you spent that on a piece of cardboard. Like, no, not exactly. There’s a market for it.[00:22:00]

So the way we do it is we have a joint account, but we have separate accounts attached to it. We know what’s going from the joint to the separate. We know that number, but the details beyond that are just kind of. Available upon requests and hopefully the requests are kind of infrequent, huh? So there’s, you know, it takes trust, but you hide the details and just keep things at a high level what everyone knows.

And I think it helps you avoid unnecessary friction over things that don’t matter so much to the overall bottom line. So I think that approach, that mixed account approach can be quite good, especially. For mismatched

Jonathan DeYoe: couples, how do you set the amount that Yeah, you know, you allow each other to spend without oversight?

Well, that’s tricky

Scott Rick: it, some people ask like, oh, should it be equal? And I think not necessarily. Like what if there’s kids involved? Usually one spouse does more of this spending for kids, oh, I gotta register all three kids for baseball. And [00:23:00] you know, that’s a thousand bucks. Like it doesn’t need to be equal.

But I ideally, the kind of amount that if you’re factoring in kind of what each person gets to spend on kind of their own individual pursuits, like the lunch they buy during their workday or like lattes they buy, or their hobbies or side projects. Ideally that amount is roughly similar. So yeah, there, there’s some important discussions there, but once that number is kind of roughly agreed upon, then.

We’re off to the races. Yeah, yeah. But you can always say, Hey, it seems like we’re both spinning a little too much. Can we do like a self-audit? Just see kind of everyone looks over their own stuff. Is there places we can cut? Start there. And you know, if you want a second pair of eyes you can say, oh, could you look at this?

That’s fine. But start by. Looking through your

Jonathan DeYoe: own stuff.

Scott Rick: First

Jonathan DeYoe: is, is there any advice for people in the midst of direct conflict? Like right now,

Scott Rick: if it’s kind of a [00:24:00] low trust, high conflict environment, that is when you need transparency, that is when it might help to kind of get everything out there. If you can afford to do so, maybe don’t go it alone.

Maybe try to get an outside planner or therapist perspective. It’s a different set of recommendations. If it’s like an actively a negative situation, it’s hot. If it’s hot,

Jonathan DeYoe: then you, it’s hot. You find it may help, maybe help. Is it possible? I mean I, the way you set up the bank account sort of avoids the deep conversations or, or it sidesteps.

’cause it’s not necessary. You have yours. I mine we take, but is there a way for a spendthrift to understand a tight wad or a tight wad to understand a spendthrift?

Scott Rick: Well, I mean hopefully that comes with the discussions about the big picture things. What are we, you know, putting aside in savings, what are we putting aside in the separate accounts?

You know, hopefully there are useful. Overarching discussions there. If, if [00:25:00] there is good communication, you can educate each other and talk each other into, you know, adjusting their kind of gut response and, yeah, I’d, I’d like to think I’ve helped Julie, my wife, loosen up a little on like shared family experiences and like, you know, investing in those stories and memories and.

Kind of things. And, and you know, I, I definitely have seen her point of view just by hearing her talk about her own shopping experience. Like when we were younger, she would come home and say she would like, go to the mall or go shopping and then tell me about all the things she wished she would’ve bought.

Like, oh, okay, I, I see how you’re thinking here. So those discussions provided some useful insights.

Jonathan DeYoe: Huh. Maybe. Maybe this is something you could talk about if in your own relationship, but in the research, a couple’s been together for quite a while, you know, maybe there’s resentment that builds up. Is there any way to deal [00:26:00] with that sort of long, longstanding underlying resentment?

I. It is

Scott Rick: true that, you know, a lot of this an ounce of prevention versus a pound of cure, like it’s better to kind of, yeah, get off on the right foot. But now I think when you’re in like a rut, you do need an outside perspective and there are just things that couples cannot get through on their own. But I will say that, you know, one place where resentment can come up is.

When there’s like obviously unequal income and there’s feelings about what’s fair and whose money is whose and, and so that’s why I say like with the joint accounts, I think the best thing to do with it is to have all incoming money routed through that joint account. So it’s our money as soon as it comes in, right?

There is no yours and mine. And even with the separate account, it’s still our money, but we each get dis spends of our money without the other person monitoring us. What I don’t like is situations where, oh, I chip in like 65%. You chip in [00:27:00] 35%. ’cause score keeping is really bad for. Yeah, a close relationship that can really eat away at a lot of good things.

Jonathan DeYoe: I work with clients and, and one of the things they’ll often tell us is, you know, as financial planners, it’s good to get those big picture things discussed. Yeah, we’re planning for this, we’re saving for this. There’s the time payment of the house, retirement income, all that stuff. And then there’s excess, there’s extra stuff.

And that’s the stuff where you, you can actually, this is what you can spend and you get some choices in, in that. And, and that’s really, as long as we’re covering the big things and some of the little things, right? Yes, of course. There’s a, there’s an enormous amount of noise out there. And so I’m gonna ask the impossible, like can you simplify this for us?

There’s a married couple or a couple about to get married. What’s one thing that you would suggest to them that they should do today that would lead to more satisfaction in their joint financial lives?

Scott Rick: If it’s just one thing, I would say, look at your account structure, go to the bank and adjust it so that it’s all our money.

And you can have some [00:28:00] discretion on some of the individual uses of our money. Things like, you know, this tight, wide spin thrift scale. You can take that, you can guess what your partner would say. You can have them take it, you can compare and that can help you learn about each other and spark conversations because yeah, uh, not all couples will have like.

Someone who comes home and say, oh, I wish I would’ve bought this. Like she just phrased it like so perfectly and so, so yeah, that can help spark greater understanding. But those are both things that can be done pretty quickly. I. And just, and just for

Jonathan DeYoe: clarity, that all the inflowing money goes into the joint account and then, you know, then there’s two separate accounts, you know, his and hers or hers and hers or his and his whatever, and they separate those out.

And, and then some of the spending, personal spending comes outta those. And that’s like, there’s not a lot of oversight on that, which is good.

Scott Rick: Exactly. You know, the, the things like mortgage and utilities, that comes out of joints. Right. But like, yeah. Yeah. My spending, that’s my

Jonathan DeYoe: separate account. Yeah. [00:29:00] Right, right, right.

And then so that’s, that’s something to do. Set. Set up the accounts. Yeah. What’s one thing that they might be doing together that they should stop doing?

Scott Rick: I mean, it’s just the flip side of this. Like there are some very reasonable people who say that, oh. You should print out everyone’s credit card statements and get a highlighter and say, well, you don’t really need that, do you like go line by line?

The very, very, that’s yes, yes. Very unpleasant, very invasive. So I think that is a bad thing. I think a lot of people have been convinced, like. Oh, if you could just stop buying lattes and avocado toast, you could become rich. And you know, people need to get deprogrammed a little bit from that and realize the math doesn’t add up and we might be fighting over very minor things.

And so yeah, I would avoid that kind of invasiveness if at all possible.

Jonathan DeYoe: It just belies little trust if you’re, if you’re having this lifetime, really you got, you gotta trust at least a little bit, unless someone’s like shown really bad [00:30:00] decision making. You gotta. Develop that trust.

Scott Rick: No, I, I, I need transparency with my contractor on my house who I may or may not trust, and it’s a temporary relationship and I need to see the receipts for those materials that you said cost $5,000.

So that’s where you need it. But like if you’re in it for presumably a long

Jonathan DeYoe: time, trust is important. Trust. Uh, so just, just for a wrap up, I’d like to come back to the personal. So is there anything that people don’t know about you or maybe you’ve told ’em you don’t remember that you want them to know?

Scott Rick: Yeah, I, I, I think I, I lay myself bare a little bit in the book in some new ways, but, uh, yeah, I’ll just share a fun story. Like, I, I have, uh, three kids, an older boy, and then 11, and then 8-year-old twins. And the, the twins came on the day that I was, uh, supposed to go to my dean and find out if I made tenure.

I had that meeting, like circle on the calendar for months, and then Julie went into labor like a couple weeks early and I was [00:31:00] like. Uh, this is a, I’m conflicted here, but, um, yeah, they called me at the hospital and gave me the good news and then a couple hours later, the twins were born. And it’s just one of those days where life could have gone in really different directions, but luckily, like the coin landed on heads both times and everything worked out.

But it was, uh, it was a big day and, uh, yeah, I think things have been. Yeah, pretty good since then. That’s a good

Jonathan DeYoe: trajectory. That’s good. It’s a good launching pad. Yeah. What’s, uh, what’s the last thing you changed your mind about?

Scott Rick: Yeah. The, the kids are constantly pushing boundaries and wanting to try new things and things where I, my my gut say, no, no, you can’t handle that, or, that’s too dangerous, and.

So, yeah, I can’t name something specific, but it’s, I’m often like convinced like, okay, try it, go for it. Try that.

Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah. Uhhuh, yes. That’s actually really, really important. I, my kids are 19 and 60 and I wish, I wish I would’ve done more of that. Okay, go for it. You know? Yeah. Because people would’ve fallen down and skin their knees more [00:32:00] and they’d be much more resilient now.

Right. That’s the trade off, right? Yes. How, how do people connect with you, Scott?

Scott Rick: Yeah, I’m around them on all the socials and, uh, happy to, uh, answer emails or messages on anything. And I. Great. Yeah, please do reach out if you’re interested.

Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah, Scott, I very much appreciate you, uh, having you on. That was a great conversation.

I hope people learn something about setting up accounts and think that was the most concrete sort of, you know, thing that people can do to make it simpler. But I appreciate your time,

Scott Rick: Jonathan. Thank you so much.

Outro: Thanks for listening. Full show notes for each episode, which includes a summary key takeaways, quotes, and any resources mentioned are available at Mindful.Money. Be sure to follow and subscribe wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts, and if you’re enjoying the content and getting value from these episodes, please leave us a rating and review at ratethispodcast.com/mindfulmoney. We’ll be sure to read those. Out on future [00:33:00] episodes.