Whether you’re newlyweds or not, your marriage can only benefit from a better balance that eases the stress on both of you. But be ready to talk — “we” statements only, please.
A year and a half of pandemic living has revealed — or reminded us of — some persistent patterns around money, gender, marriage and families. And they aren’t always pretty.
There is anecdotal evidence of men confiscating their wives’ federal relief checks, and data showing a link between financial stress and domestic violence. And millions of women felt they had no choice but to leave paid employment to provide care for children or other family members.
Matrimony and parenting involve compromise, without question (and sometimes, seemingly, without end). But it need not be disproportionate.
There are plenty of reasons to equalize the financial decision-making in your marriage — and this goes for every couple, heterosexual or not. If you’re among the many getting married now as part of the great pandemic wedding boom, consider adding another promise: that yours will be a financially egalitarian marriage.
Here is what that might mean.
First, understand where the power lies.
When a new household is setting a financial baseline, it is almost impossible to avoid talking about power.
Rachel Sherman, a sociology professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, examined arrangements of authority in the marriages of the affluent in her book “Uneasy Street.”
While gender and the troubling norms that can come with it in heterosexual couples can play a role, she suggested that at least two additional vectors influenced the power dynamic.
The first involves the source of any household resources, including earnings, unpaid labor and inheritance. Who gets or takes credit, and for what? What privileges, if any, come with the answers to those questions?
The other is about spending styles — who has license to do what, and when and who decides? Confusion here can stem from having grown up in a family with a dysfunctional relationship to money.
Conflicting habits can cause real trouble, but understanding them is an important first step. “People are lucky if they have a partner who has the same ideas that they do,” Professor Sherman said.
You’ll have to talk. A lot.
Financial planners get to participate in many conversations with people who have recently married, and they can spot worrying patterns. One frequent issue: Only one partner speaks.
“They’ll often have a meeting with just one half of a couple,” said Marci Bair, a financial planner in San Diego.
More often than not, it’s the man in heterosexual couples who shows up or calls alone (or wants to), several advisers told me this week.
At Fyooz Financial Planning (pronounced “fuse,” as in joining together a couple’s portfolios and peccadilloes), that sort of exclusion or neglect isn’t allowed. Moreover, every couple meets with a couple: Dan and Natalie Slagle, who jointly run the business in Rochester, Minn.
It can feel a bit like a double date, and as on many dates, there are red flags. “They typically have to do with the pronouns that are used,” Mr. Slagle said. “‘You’ as opposed to ‘we.’”
Ms. Slagle picked up the thread. “If they are not seeing themselves as a partnership, it’s going to be very difficult to create a successful financial plan for two people,” she said.
So consider your pronouns, and not just if you’re talking to a professional. Be a united front.
There should be no ‘financial spouse.’
Even if you’re both present and equally engaged in any conversations about your money, many couples have just one person running all of the household’s finances.
“I call it the financial spouse and the nonfinancial spouse,” said Annelise Bretthauer, a financial planner in Hillsboro, Ore.
She’s generally not a fan of that setup or default, in part because of what can happen when a marriage ends, either when one spouse dies or when the relationship goes sour.
Much of Ms. Bretthauer’s pro bono work is with recently divorced women, who may have spent decades as the nonfinancial spouse.
“And then they’re drinking from a fire hose,” she said. “They don’t know how to make the best decisions in the divorce because they haven’t been privy to financial information for years.”
And there’s not one right way to do it.
You may be certain about the wisdom of a joint bank account and rigorous spending accountability. Or perhaps you prefer a trio of virtual piggy banks labeled Yours, Mine and Ours. Both can work.
“Whenever people ask, I say that the right way to organize your money is the way where you don’t fight about it,” said Alexandra Killewald, a sociology professor at Harvard.
Keeping your finances separate doesn’t prevent you or your spouse from inadvertently picking that fight.
“If you have separate accounts, how separate are they really?” asked Lazetta Rainey Braxton, a financial planner in Brooklyn. “Can you spend with no judgment? However you want? Only within your shared value system?”
But you can budget wrong.
Be wary about how you talk — or even think — about whose income is for what.
Viviana A. Zelizer, a sociology professor at Princeton, spent years examining how couples would assign labels to the money that came in. Often, women’s earnings fell into particular patterns of allocation — for child care, vacations or summer camps and not for, say, the mortgage.
“Somehow they were a bit different, and maybe more secondary, than the big money items,” she said. “I would tell couples to notice how powerful this is.”
If you have at least one joint account — to pay for all shared expenses — perhaps no one will feel that their income is less relevant.
Consider the influences outside your front door.
For all your efforts to have a financially equal marriage, inequality in the outside world may come through the door each night and hover over the dinner table.
Ms. Braxton, the financial planner in Brooklyn, encourages clients to consider the following set of possibilities and the sensitivity that is necessary to manage them in a marriage.
Perhaps you earn less, on average, because you are Black. Perhaps you earn less, on average, because you are female. And perhaps you feel more vulnerable to job loss.
A couple of things could happen at home. You might save and invest more conservatively out of fear. Or you might spend with abandon on occasion, just to cut loose.
“People in that situation need planning to rise above what they are experiencing,” Ms. Braxton said. For instance, you might build savings backstops as a “cushion” fund for softer landings or as a kind of “go to hell” account.
Giving up authority can give you something more.
If any of the above sounds familiar, it doesn’t make you retrograde. After all, there’s a decent chance that you’ve never done marriage before. Change, however, may actually put you at ease.
Husbands who have taken on traditional financial gender roles can feel a palpable sense of relief when they are not operating solo, especially if the household finances grow more complicated over time, said Ms. Bair, the financial planner in San Diego.
“It’s all on their shoulders,” she said. “And they know that they’re probably not fully equipped for it, either.”
Hiring professional help may bring some comfort, too, but it doesn’t obviate the need for deep conversation with your spouse. Ms. Bretthauer said the best financial planners were in the behavior-change business, not the stock-twirling one.
“Are you looking for someone who will tell you what to do?” she said. “Then don’t hire me.”
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Evangelicals Unmasked
The King of Trump TV Thinks You’re Dumb Enough to Buy It
Chris Ruddy, the C.E.O. of Newsmax, has found a business opportunity in feeding Trump supporters the fantasy that the president could still win the election.
In 2004, Hillary Clinton was in the Senate and Christopher Ruddy had some making up to do. He was, back then, best known as “the Inspector Clouseau” of the Vince Foster case — a New York Post reporter who had popularized the baseless theory that Mrs. Clinton’s friend, who committed suicide in 1993, had been murdered.
But it now seemed possible that Mrs. Clinton might run for president, and Mr. Ruddy laid it on pretty thick. Mrs. Clinton was doing “a remarkably and surprising good job for NY as Senator,” he wrote to a mutual friend, former Mayor Ed Koch of New York. “I might not like Hillary’s liberalism, but I don’t dislike her on a personal level — as I do Rudy. Rudy Giuliani is a bad person.”
I asked an amused former Clinton aide to dredge this correspondence out of an old box because Mr. Ruddy, a Long Island-born 55-year-old, has emerged as the most audacious media entrepreneur of the Trump election fantasy. The chief executive of Newsmax and part of President Trump’s South Florida social circle, Mr. Ruddy has capitalized on the anger of Mr. Trump’s supporters at Fox News for delivering the unwelcome news, first in Arizona and then nationally, that Mr. Trump had lost his re-election campaign. On Newsmax, however, the fight is still on, the imaginary election-altering Kraken is yet to be released, Mr. Trump is striving valiantly for four more years and the ratings are incredible.
Newsmax’s prime-time ratings, which averaged 58,000 before Election Day, soared to 1.1 million afterward for its top shows, with one host, Greg Kelly, cheerleading on Twitter and on the air for “the QUEST TO COUNT all the LEGAL VOTES.” The ratings even drew a congratulatory call from Mr. Trump himself, my colleagues Michael Grynbaum and John Koblin reported last week.
But Mr. Ruddy, as those Clinton messages show, is not the sort of true-believing ideologue his viewers may imagine in the foxhole alongside them. He is, rather, perhaps the purest embodiment of another classic television type, the revenue-minded cynic for whom the substance of programming is just a path to money and power.
All successful TV programmers have some mercenary in them, of course, but even by those standards, Mr. Ruddy is extreme. He has turned Newsmax into a pure vehicle for Trumpism, attacking Fox News from the right for including occasional dissenting voices. And when Trumpism turned this month from an electoral strategy into a hallucinatory attempt to overturn the election, Mr. Ruddy saw opportunity: Newsmax, available on cable in most American households and streaming online, became the home of alternate reality.
“In this day and age, people want something that tends to affirm their views and opinions,” Mr. Ruddy told me in an interview.
He wasn’t hard to reach. Like many people who get generally, even inexplicably, friendly media coverage, the genial Mr. Ruddy is always willing to talk to the press. He is, in fact, a rare and valuable commodity: someone with real access to Mr. Trump who will tell the truth on the record. His insights — 62 quotes in The New York Times in the last four years, 61 in The Washington Post and 51 appearances on CNN — deliver what journalists crave: up-close insights about the president. He has even invited reporters to tag along to Mar-a-Lago as his guest at the president’s private club, which has been a minor irritant for President Trump’s staff, two former Trump aides told me. Not that he’s made any secret of his strategy. The fake crisis of the U.S. electoral system is “great for news,” he told The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner last week.
Mr. Ruddy is hardly alone in the sudden scramble to convert Mr. Trump’s political profile into cash.
“There are a lot of well-capitalized people circling,” said Michael Clemente, a former executive at ABC News and Fox News and former chief executive of Newsmax, who has been part of conversations as a potential leader of a new venture. He describes the proposition as a question of math, and the dominance of liberal-leaning cable channels: “Fifty percent of the country has 90 percent of the news media speaking to them.”
The noisiest effort is led by Hicks Equity Partners, the family business of a Republican National Committee co-chairman and friend of Donald Trump Jr., Thomas Hicks Jr. The Hicks group has sought to lead buyouts of both Newsmax and its smaller and stranger rival, the One America News Network. The group is also pursuing a third strategy, according to a confidential investment proposal I obtained, which would focus on culture rather than news: building “a family-friendly programming destination of broad appeal based on traditional values” by buying and merging a small “equestrian sports and lifestyle” channel and a larger one, which a person briefed on the talks identified as the small, independent Ride-TV and Great American Country, which is owned by the cable behemoth Discovery. (A spokesman for Hicks Equity Partners didn’t respond to an inquiry about a potential deal.)
Other possibilities for the president to cash in on his stature include creating a new Trump TV network from scratch, either as a television broadcast channel, a package of online video or even a way to direct cash into the Trump family political operation.
Mr. Ruddy has a head start. His main commercial advantage is the network’s distribution, which the company says puts it in 70 million of the roughly 90 million American homes that have cable, thanks to deals with the largest distributors, Comcast and AT&T. It’s a laborious, and expensive, process to get onto the cable package — even if you are, as Newsmax currently is, way up the dial. The programming is also available through a livestream on its app and on a range of newer “over-the-top” TV platforms like Roku. (OAN claims to be available in about half as many cable homes.) The process of establishing a cable network is also deeply political, as things often are in monopolistic industries: Newsmax was dropped from AT&T’s DirectTV in 2016, and restored the next year after Senator Charles E. Grassley called the move “unfair” during hearings about AT&T’s attempt to acquire Time Warner. You could imagine executives at Comcast and AT&T taking their time to make a deal with Trump TV.
But Mr. Ruddy also has a problem. His TV business, a speculative bet that could be worth billions if it can cut deeply into Fox’s audience, currently loses money. The company invested $70 million from 2014 to 2017, according to a confidential overview produced for potential investors in 2018 that one of them shared with me. And Mr. Ruddy told me Newsmax is still investing.
Those costs are partly because new channels often pay cable companies to get on TV. Mr. Ruddy declined to describe his specific arrangements with the cable providers, but said, “It’s not unusual for companies to do that when they start out.” And it’s partly because big advertisers have fled right-wing talk shows, leaving even the widely viewed prime-time shows on Fox News with less lucrative “direct response” ads for pillows and medical devices.
Newsmax has inverted the usual media business dynamic. The company is losing money on television, and making it on the internet, though Mr. Ruddy told me he expects that “revenues on cable and OTT television will be more robust and consistent than the online business for the next 10 years.”
Newsmax has built a solid, and unusual, business by catering to the 50-and-older demographic it described in the document shared with investors as “Boomers and Beyond.” The website’s voice, its big and lucrative email lists, and its products, from books to magazines to vitamin supplements, have the tone of conservative direct mail. And it’s working: The company projected its 2018 revenues at more than $59 million, divided among advertising, subscriptions and e-commerce. (One sponsor on the app last week was selling health advice, asking “Is the ‘Pandemic’ a Lie?”)
Newsmax has been raising money to finance its TV ambitions. Private equity from “a couple of investors,” Mr. Ruddy said, has paid to upgrade studios and hire figures like Mr. Kelly and the former White House press secretary Sean Spicer as the hosts of shows that replaced hours of World War II documentaries, and carry conservative radio talkers including Howie Carr from Boston. The investors, he said, are domestic, despite a Politico report (picked up on Breitbart) indicating he was in talks to raise money from Qatar. Mr. Ruddy said he sent proposals to many sovereign wealth funds, among others, but has not taken foreign investment. He blames his former rival, Stephen Bannon, for pushing the Qatar story, but such grudges are fleeting in the often-shifting alliances of the new right: Mr. Bannon’s podcast, “War Room,” is now also broadcast on Newsmax late at night on weekdays.
Newsmax now needs to raise more money, or sell fast, if it’s going to keep upgrading its talent and production quality to press its advantage with Fox News — which has begun nervously trying to block guests from appearing on the network.
When I pressed Mr. Ruddy on why he was stringing along his audience with a story he can’t, really, himself believe — that Mr. Trump won the election — he didn’t really defend it. Instead, he countered that he wasn’t the only one. “For two years, the liberal media pushed this Russian hoax theory, and there didn’t seem to be any substantiation at the end of the day and it was a pretty compelling, gripping story — controversial personalities, things happened, sparks were flying,” he said.
Newsmax continues to tell a gripping story. On Friday night, Mr. Kelly referred to Joe Biden’s “alleged victory,” hosted a long interview with Rudy Giuliani and later turned to an analyst who gave Mr. Trump a “35 to 40 percent chance that he wins this.” The 8 p.m. host, Grant Stinchfield, announced that “the momentum seems to be shifting back to the president’s favor,” and interviewed a lawyer for Mr. Trump, Jenna Ellis, and a Pennsylvania state senator trying to take back the state’s election certification.
Mr. Ruddy’s cynicism brings me back to the most trenchant attack from conservative media on the mainstream media: that journalists think conservatives are stupid. Tucker Carlson regularly tells his audience that the college-educated snobs in New York who preside over the major outlets view conservatives as unsophisticated rubes, misled by misinformation, not as people who actually believe in the ideas pushed by Mr. Trump, like immigration should be sharply curtailed. Those attacks on the media are often false, but the coastal media sometimes does fail to understand people who aren’t like them, left and right, and sometimes they patronize their audiences.
But nobody I’ve ever covered treats an audience with the blithe disdain of Mr. Ruddy. He has them watching a great story — a thriller, a whodunit — about a stolen election. He thinks they’re stupid enough to fall for it, dumb enough to keep watching even after the fantasy inevitably dissolves, buying the supplements and the books and, crucially, tuning in to channel 1115 in large enough numbers that, eventually, the cable companies will pay him.
Perhaps he actually thinks his viewers are that dumb. Or maybe he just needs them to stick around long enough for him to find someone just as cynical, but with more cash on hand, to buy him out.