After years of learning lessons the hard way, I can say confidently that with the help of three simple principles, my husband and I have learned how to keep the peace and build our wealth as a team.

The 3 rules we follow to keep the peace

1. Honesty
   Yes, honesty is the foundation of good relationships in general, but when it comes to money, it becomes more nuanced than choosing not to message an ex behind your partner's back. When two people are trying to share money, the struggle usually stems from good, but opposing, best intentions. //

2. Mutual respect
   Once, in the heat of a nasty battle over whether we should buy a mattress secondhand, I called my husband "Scrooge McDuck." While it was a spiteful and silly dig, it also summarizes how I felt about his frugal tendencies. He, on the other hand, felt I had the financial acumen of a 7-year-old in a candy shop with $100 to burn. //

This is why the most important change we made in our approach to sharing finances was recognizing that our spender/saver dynamic didn't need to be a battle of opposites, but could instead be a balance of strengths.

Being a saver means my husband is always wary of potential financial hardships. //

But being a spender means I am open to taking financial risks that on his own, my husband would have been too scared to take. By pushing him to sell our house at the top of the market, I made us $120,000 //

3. Humility
   But mutual respect requires more than recognizing what the other person has to offer. It also means recognizing that one financial style isn't necessarily superior to another.