Making Money Conversations Easier

When people think of personal finance, they typically think of making money, saving, and investing. This is all true, but it misses a crucial component: conversations.

For most of us, decisions with money mean working together with a partner or getting advice from people we trust, and doing this smoothly requires conversations. However, doing this well is not as easy as it sounds.

In this post, we provide an intro to why WorthIQ was founded. We'll talk about how conversations are a core part of personal finance, why they’re hard, and why current apps don’t help us at all.

Conversations Matter

First, why conversations?

For most of us, life is a team sport. Over 60% of adult Americans are in a committed relationship, and when you have a long-term partner, your life decisions are no longer entirely your own. Where to live, what to buy, what milestones you want to reach, all require couples to be on the same page. And when life is a team sport, so goes our personal finances. Personal finance can't be fully personal if you have other people who get a vote.

It goes beyond our partner. We may have people in our lives that we ask for financial advice. In fact, we may be that person for the people we know. When you ask them what stock to buy or how to save money, it’s often hard to provide straightforward advice without having a longer conversation.

To make matters worse, the biggest life decisions are also often the biggest financial decisions. Deciding where to live, who to marry, whether to have kids, these decisions all have massive implications on your finances. Therefore, talking about these milestones also means talking about money.

As such, while talking about money can be uncomfortable, it’s also unavoidable. Take conflicts with partners. A recent Fidelity study found that more than a quarter of people under 44 saw money as their biggest challenge as a couple. 45% report fighting about money at least occasionally. Without conversations, even small misalignments can slowly build into conflicts if left unchecked.

Feelings about finance is an opinion, not an objective fact, meaning that two people in the same financial situation can feel two different ways. The only way to untangle this as a couple is to talk. Talk more about money with your partner, and you'll fight less. Talk less about money, and you'll fight more.

Conversations Aren’t Easy

If conversations are the solution, why don’t couples talk about money more often? In interviews with couples, they usually report wanting to have more conversations, but they find that it's not as easy as they expect. The challenges can be summarized into three areas: emotions, knowledge differences, and time.

First, money conversations are inherently emotional, but we don’t know how to weigh these emotions against the hard numbers of money. In extreme cases, we completely discount these emotions in favor of maximizing every dollar and cent. While this approach can work on our own, it quickly becomes problematic when we need to work with someone else who has different views of money, especially when we don’t have the language to balance emotions with numbers.

Second, navigating knowledge gaps is hard. Many parts of personal finance can get incredibly complex, which some find interesting and others avoid like the plague. This may not matter on our own, but when we add a conversation partner into the equation, suddenly we have to explain ourselves. Worse yet, getting these explanations right is a high-stakes affair. We’re often talking about some of our biggest life decisions like where to live, where we’ll work, and so on. Most of us muddle our way through eventually, but not without dealing with misunderstandings and hurt feelings along the way.

Finally, finding time is hard. More specifically, finding time to go over finances with someone else is hard. People track their finances in different ways, and finding a common standard takes a lot of time and effort. Unless you manage your money together (which is getting rarer these days), you’ll often run into areas where one person goes into unnecessary detail or the other person gives too little detail. Again, any miscommunication can be resolved with enough time, but this barrier to entry makes people talk about money less than they want, even if they both value personal finance separately.

Put together, talking about money can become a minefield. While a few of us can afford to pay a financial advisor or therapist thousands of dollars to help them work through these problems, most of us are on our own with navigating these conversations. On this count, personal finance apps haven’t been pulling their weight. In fact, they often make these conversations harder by encouraging exactly the wrong mindset.

Today’s Apps Don’t Help

People use all kinds of apps today for personal finance. You have banks, credit card companies, and stock brokers all with their own apps. You have dedicated budgeting apps that help you track every cent. You have robo-advisor apps that let you deposit and invest your money with minimal hassle. These apps all help you manage your own money, but they don’t help with conversations.

Conversations you do on your own. If you do try to finagle these apps into a conversation tool, then they end up hurting rather than helping. This happens for a few reasons.

First, they’re not emotionally intelligent, pushing you to increase your net worth at the expense of everything else. Second, they’re not tactful, saying you’re wasting money on X or losing money on Y without giving broader context against your finances. Finally and worst of all, they’re designed to keep pushing you for more. Buy more of their services, upgrade your subscription, and so on. All businesses are incentivized to do this, but it’s a bit shadier for personal finance products because being neurotic about money often harms you more than it helps.

Fortunately, many people intuitively know these things. When we surveyed couples who have experience in personal finance, we found that the majority of them relied on spreadsheets or an ad hoc collection of tools for conversations. And it’s not just the folks we interviewed. When people ask for financial advice on Reddit, they almost never post screenshots from apps. It’s not for privacy since these people often share real numbers anyway. The real reason is that none of these apps can capture the full picture of their finances, at least not in a way that makes it easy for someone else to weigh in.

Ironically, this lack of focus on conversations hurts apps as well. To date, not a single personal finance product has achieved the all-encompassing success like Google or even ChatGPT despite personal finance being such an important part of our lives. Many popular apps have actually gone in the opposite direction. Mint, for example, got bought and then absorbed by CreditKarma. Other apps have languished, either as forgotten side projects of bigger financial services or as small businesses dutifully serving their niche.

In our view, this is because these apps miss a crucial point: we may pay extra close attention to our finances in short bursts, but we have conversations about money our whole lives, whether it’s with our partner, with people we trust, or even random strangers on the internet. These conversations aren’t easy, so having an app to help us could go a long way. This is where WorthIQ comes in.

Personal Finance Reimagined

WorthiQ is the first app designed to make money conversations easier. It’s built to help you share your finances in an emotionally intelligent, tactful, and time-saving way. While it’s mainly targeted to couples who want to make conversations easier, it’s also helpful for anyone who could want to get advice on their finances, whether from a professional, a friend, or a stranger. Most importantly, it’s priced lower than standalone personal finance apps.

This app won’t do everything for you or save your marriage. That’s what professionals who charge hundreds of dollars per hour for their time are for. But it will make things easier. It will tell you what to focus on in conversations, how to balance the emotional and rational sides of finance, and help you get back to living your life.

Ready to start the journey with us? Start here.