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My parents and I recently had an awkward conversation.
I’m getting married next year, and it’s shaping up to be quite a shindig. Both sets of parents sent extensive guest lists, and my fiancé and I are doing our best to keep the total headcount under 250.
Things have gotten expensive quickly. And while the bride’s family traditionally bears the bigger financial responsibility for these sorts of things, our wedding is bride-free. So even though my fiancé and I are saving diligently to have the wedding we want, we nevertheless each asked our parents for a contribution.
My parents love the partner I’ve chosen and have been supportive of the engagement. But that didn’t make me any less queasy approaching the conversation. Growing up, money was considered rude to talk about in my household, a setup that’s all too common, says Christina Wing, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of “Unspeakable: The Taboo Topics We Avoid and How to Talk About Them.”
“We were taught at a young age that money is a taboo subject, something that’s impolite to discuss with others,” she writes in her book.
Why?
“Money has always had strings attached to it, and so many people use that as a weapon that it’s made us all not want to talk about it,” Wing tells CNBC Make It. “People with a lot of money are fearful they’ll be judged for the decisions they make. People without money don’t want others to know they don’t have it because their self-worth is tied up in it.”
The result, she says, is that people often avoid these conversations altogether. But the consequences of this avoidance are often both emotional and material, she says.
“The cost of silence is that decisions get made without people’s input and without people knowing,” she says, adding that, in the case of money decisions, meaningful sums can be on the line. “Not talking about these things doesn’t make them go away.”
The importance of having tough money talks
It’s not hard to see how avoiding financial conversations can put you in emotional or financial hot water. Wing cites numerous potential examples:
- A failure to discuss estate planning can mean that your parent dies without you knowing their wishes.
- Silence on the subject of succession can result in one sibling, rather than another, inheriting a family business.
- Not setting financial expectations for college and hoping your child gets a scholarship can end in disappointment for your kid if they get into a school your family can’t afford.
The list goes on and on.
To avoid these scenarios, Wing says you’ll likely have to have that difficult financial conversation, one that can be made easier by focusing on one key thing: “You have to identify a common goal with the person,” she says.
By identifying a shared objective at the beginning of the conversation, you can help ward off many of the biases and fears that come into play when talking about money, Wing says.
One goal you may have is to make sure your aging parents are comfortable, especially in the case that they become incapacitated or need long-term care. Even if your parents bristle at a potential money talk, you might say, “I don’t need to know what you and mom have. I don’t need to know if I’m getting anything. But I do need to know what my responsibilities would be if something happened to you,” Wing says.
To use a lower-stakes example, imagine a scenario in which you and your friends seemingly have different budgets for outings and group vacations. Waffling on or opting out of these get-togethers because you can’t afford them is likely to cause resentment if the financial aspect goes unaddressed, Wing says. So be upfront about your common goal.
Wing suggests a possible script:
“I love hanging out with you, and I love when you pick restaurants, and we should do those sometimes. But we’d also like to have you over to watch the new Spider-Man movie, and we’re going to cook pizza. Or let’s go for a walk, because my goal is to see you, but I can’t keep spending this much money.”
As it turns out, that’s more or less the tack I took with my parents. I told them what I thought the whole thing would cost and explained that it was important to me that they had all of their people there, that this was a celebration of them and our family as much as it was my marriage. I almost threw up, but they said the number I quoted made sense.
Would it have been easier if we had been talking about money freely as a family since I was a kid? Of course. But it’s better late than never, says Wing — and certainly better than if I had just started planning a wedding assuming that my parents would offer to chip in.
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