Kyle Cooke once said, “Summer should be fun.”

I would have never quoted this Bravolebrity a year ago, but after working very hard to birth a book into the world, I guess times have changed. All I’ve wanted this summer is to find fun ways to nourish my mind, body, and spirit. So far, I’ve been doing a good job, though “nourish” is a term up for loose interpretation given the amount of Sancerre I’ve consumed. We’ve sailed the splendid shallow waters of coastal New Jersey twice, broken bread with tons of friends, danced into the wee hours, put toes in the sand, and even went to the paint and sip place. Saying “yes” is as much a mindset as it is a decision, but make no mistake: even in your fancy-free fun time, decisions still get made.

Let me share with you an example of how saying “yes” doesn’t mean you need to be a “yes person,” and you can still, with a bit of luck, come out on top.

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Live music is one of the great joys of my life. My dad managed radio stations from the time I was young, and my Pop-Pop worked for Pepsi and had lifelong friends who used to sneak us into stadiums for almost any show I wanted. I can’t tell you how many concerts I’ve seen. I can barely list my favorites because there have just been so many.

But growing up and having to pay for tickets was an adjustment. At first, I assessed the value proposition with a bit of a chip on my shoulder. I didn’t fully appreciate what a great seat would cost, because I’d always had great seats. I never had to ask myself whether going to a show was “worth it,” because I got to experience blockbuster concerts and intimate unplugged sets alike, both without the financial risk of buyer’s remorse. A privilege, for sure.

These days, I’m the same as everyone else: just another username sitting 32,547th in the Ticketmaster queue, hoping the little blue dots don’t disappear before it’s my turn. And even with multiple calendar alerts, I almost never remember when the sale is going live and end up at the mercy of the secondary markets. From then on, I’m pretty much a girl lost between two villages on the wrong side of The Great Divide.

This is where I found myself for Noah Kahan’s sold-out worldwide tour.

I missed the initial sale, and all summer, I’d been watching prices for the New York shows refuse to come down from orbit. Floor and 100-level seats were in the thousands of dollars. Even the nosebleeds were going for five hundred plus (in a baseball stadium). Between the ticket prices, the logistics of getting to Citi Field from New Jersey on the same weekend as the World Cup Final, and the childcare planning we’d need to sort out, I started making peace with the fact that this was probably one I’d miss.

Not because I didn’t really—really—want to be there, but because the matrix of joy, cost, effort, and importance playing out in my brain revealed some non-negotiables I couldn’t resolve:

• This could not be a $4,000 night.

• I would not get tangled in the transit mess of the World Cup Final.

• I would not have Ruby miss her Monday at camp because we decided to go to a concert.

“You win this time, Big Concert Capitalism,” I said, shaking my proverbial fist at the sky. I even booked a different show closer to my birthday in a couple weeks to ease the pain.

But behind my shoulder, I heard the faint whisper of a 45-year-old reality TV star speaking to me: “Summer should be funnnn.” That’s when I thought, if Kyle Cooke could DJ himself out of spiked tea financial insolvency one brand activation at a time, then I could at least leave the porch light on until the very last minute for Noah Kahan.

I started combing Reddit and learned that he releases some face-value tickets closer to show dates. So, I signed up for the waitlist on his website, I kept an eye on resale prices without obsessing over them, and I posted on a few platforms to see if friends had an extra seat.

Did I think it would work? Honestly, no, but I felt good knowing I was doing everything reasonably within my control while maintaining the boundaries I set around the whole thing. At least I wouldn’t look back and say I threw in the towel too soon.

Fast forward to last Friday night. As luck would have it, my mom invited Ruby to spend the weekend at her house. Douglas and I were finishing up dinner at a nearby restaurant when I just happened to tap into Gmail for a second. That’s when I saw the subject line:

You’ve been selected from the Noah Kahan waitlist!

Two tickets. Sunday night. A partially obstructed view. $140 each—face value. First come, first serve.

I don’t think I spoke a complete sentence until the tickets were in my wallet. I must have sounded something like: “Tickets…waitlist…side stage…omg…I’m going…I AM GOING!”

And then, I cried for the first of many times, including the time I cried for everyone whose show got cancelled on Saturday night.

It would be very easy to tell this story as one of pure luck. One of “manifest good things and ye shall receive.”

I was lucky, but it wasn’t just that.

Weeks earlier, I’d made the financial decision that I wasn’t willing to spend thousands of dollars on tickets, no matter how badly I wanted to go. I also decided not to let that boundary become the end of the story. I left room for another possibility; however unlikely it seemed.

My loved ones took it from there. My mom kindly drove Ruby back home and stayed over on Sunday night so she could make it to camp the next day. Douglas, the elite ops specialist that he is, immediately figured out our transportation, navigated World Cup traffic, and brought me drinks while I stood in a very long merch line. He also came from a place of “yes,” even though I’m sure he questioned more than once what he was doing at a Noah Kahan concert.

Financial and emotional decisions play into one another. They are the same story told from different angles. But every once in a while, all the things—good financial boundaries, a hopeful attitude, people who show up for you, and a little bit of luck—conspire to give you a night you’ll remember forever.

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Has anyone else seen Noah Kahan on tour?! Can we talk about it?!

When’s the last time luck, fate, and couple of good decisions got you something you really wanted? Let me know.

Want to go deeper? Money Together is everything we’ve learned about love and money, told through real stories with lessons for people who want to build a financial life together without losing themselves in the process. Order your copy on: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, or Audible (narrated by Heather!).

Love it already? A review on Goodreads and wherever you purchased helps other couples find us and means more than you know.

Bring us to your organization! We speak on money, relationships, and what it really takes to build a financial partnership that lasts. Available for corporate events, conferences, and private engagements — virtually and IRL. Reach us here.

Connect with us on social: @averagejoelle + @dougboneparth

The content shared in The Joint Account does not constitute financial, legal, or any other professional advice. Readers should consult with their respective professionals for specific advice tailored to their situation. The information contained in this post is general in nature and for informational purposes only. It should not be considered as investment advice or as a recommendation of any particular strategy or investment product. This post is not a solicitation or an offer to buy or sell any specific security. Bone Fide Wealth cannot guarantee the accuracy of information from third parties.

A big part of my job is investing money for our clients. But before we put a single dollar to work, we identify the goals we’re investing toward.

Investing without a goal is like charting a course without a destination. You’ll end up somewhere, but maybe not the place you had in mind.

Short-term goals are clear to solve for. If you need money for something within the next four years, that money belongs in a high-yield savings account or in cash equivalents like T-bills. Risk is off the table, because you need the money soon.

Long-term goals are straightforward, too. The more time you have on your side, the more risk you can afford to take. For example, a 28-year-old individual saving for retirement can load up on stocks and ride out whatever the market throws at them. Meanwhile, a 60-year-old person on the cusp of retirement should want to find calmer waters with less risk and more certainty. They also might want fewer boating analogies in this newsletter. Yar!

Some goals don’t fit neatly into either category. They’re too far off to leave sitting in cash, where years of potential growth could be wasted, but they’re too close to go all-in on the stock market and worry that a 20-percent decline could derail everything.

I call this the in-between goal, and it’s more complex than the others. In this scenario, you might be certain you want the goal but are fuzzy about the details. How much will it cost? You don’t exactly know. When will it happen? Sometime soon-ish. The conviction is real, but nothing else really is.

Let’s look at some goals that live in the gray area.

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Buying a new house. You know you want one someday, but you may not know the town, the year, or whether the down payment is going to be $100,000 or $200,000. On top of that, rates could move, your job could change, and the housing market you’re buying into could flip from a buyer’s to a seller’s. Who knows.

Taking a W-2 career pause. You’ve been working 20 years straight since college and you’re starting to burn out. You’d love the opportunity to step away, maybe raise your kids during their pivotal years or start a new business of your own. But you’re not doing it next year—you need time to build runway first. Your account balance is your timeline. Every dollar of growth moves your exit date closer, and every drawdown pushes it farther away. Losing 20 percent of this money won’t just hurt; it could cost you an extra year at a job you’re trying to escape.

Helping your parents. Their health is becoming more uncertain, and you want to be able to help when the time comes. But you don’t exactly know how much financial assistance you want to give. Maybe you want to cover their in-home care or help them move them somewhere closer to you. This goal carries a weight the other two don’t, because the deadline isn’t yours to set. All you can do is be ready enough when the call comes to step up. Not easy.

In Money Together, we write about the difference between risk capacity and risk tolerance. Capacity is math. It’s what your finances can absorb. Tolerance, however, is emotional. It’s what lets you sleep at night and stick to the plan. When you operate as a financial team, your capacity is usually shared, but your tolerance isn’t. Same balance sheet with two different stomachs.

You can manage your differences easier for long-term goals, because time can smooth them over. For example, if one of you wants 90 percent stocks and the other wants something closer to 70 percent over a 20-year period, you’ll both probably be fine, and you have decades to adjust if things change.

The in-between goal doesn’t offer that cushion. You’re living in the gray area of your differences, and one partner’s risk tolerance should constrain you. For example, if a 15-percent drop in the market would cause your spouse to spiral, it doesn’t matter what your financial plan says you can afford—your financial plan doesn’t sleep next to you at night.

So, how do you choose an allocation for a blurry goal? Try these three steps.

Step One: Focus on the drawdown instead of your return.

Don’t start by asking, “What kind of return do we want?” Everyone wants the highest return possible.

Instead, start with “What loss would make one of us panic and blow up the plan?”

Each of you should answer independently. Compare them and use the more conservative number. That’s your household risk tolerance for this goal. The partner with less tolerance sets the tone, because the plan only works if both people will stay in it.

Step Two: Check your drawdown number against real data.

Most couples lack some context for their number, so let’s fix that with data.

Since 1980, the S&P 500’s average dip is about 14 percent, according to JPMorgan’s Guide to the Markets. That means that in a typical year, the market falls 14 percent from its high at some point. And yet, the index still finishes positive 75 percent of the time. So, scary drawdowns and positive annual returns usually show up together.

Understanding drawdown frequency really matters for this type of goal window. Per LPL Research, 10-percent corrections happen about once a year on average, while bear markets of 20 percent or more arrive roughly every 6-to-7 years (67! 67! 67!). So, while trying to accomplish a in-between goal, you’ll almost certainly catch at least one 10-percent market correction, and there’s a good chance you catch a full-blown bear market.

Mixing in some bonds may soften the blow of stock market drawdowns. Morningstar’s 150-year study found that historically, a 60/40 portfolio of stock and bonds experienced 45 percent less volatility than an all-stock portfolio across every major market crash.^[1]

The main takeaway is that diversification is a highly effective seatbelt, but any time you’ve got money in the markets, you’re still taking on risk.

Step Three: Match your allocation to your tolerance.

Now, let’s match your drawdown number to a reasonable portfolio. Please keep in mind that I am painting with broad strokes, and that you should do your own research or consult with a financial professional about what’s right for your individual circumstances. Cool. Cool.

If you both think you could emotionally survive a temporary 20-percent drop, a 50/50 or 60/40 portfolio is defensible. But if 10 percent is all you can stomach, you should be moving closer to 30 percent stocks and 70 percent bonds and cash.

Why? Stocks drive both growth and drawdowns. The less downside you can stomach, the less stock you should own. It’s really that simple. If a 5-percent dip would have you breaking out in a cold sweat, most of your money belongs in cash and short-term bonds. And that’s fine— just own it, because missing some upside is a real cost, but it’s a cheaper cost than abandoning the plan at the bottom. Abandoning the plan at the bottom is one of the costliest investing mistakes people can make. So don’t do it.

Here’s one more idea for the blurriest of goals.

Split the money into two buckets. Think of it like this: even a fuzzy goal has one part you’re sure about. You know you’ll need a down payment, but you don’t know if it’s for a starter home or a forever home. You know you’ll need at least one year of financial runway to leave your job, but you don’t know if you’ll need two years.

So, consider funding a first bucket—the minimum floor—conservatively. You can then invest the second bucket—the stretch portion—with more risk. If markets cooperate, you’re able to reach for the higher end of your goal. If they don’t, you’re still protecting the floor.

Lastly, you can begin to de-risk on a schedule instead of a gut feeling. When the goal gets closer or clearer—like when you pick the town you want to live in or are ready to draft your resignation letter—shift more toward cash. Be sure to calendar it and stick to it. Feelings are the worst portfolio managers. Trust me.

The in-between goal isn’t a portfolio problem that gets more complicated because you’re in a relationship. It’s a couples’ problem with a portfolio attached to it. Allocating becomes the easy part once you’ve agreed on the losses you can both handle.

You won’t nail this perfectly. Nobody ever does, including me and Heather. What matters is having an answer you both chose, one that’s sized to the losses you can both stomach, and revisited at least once a year. That’s how an opaque, moving target can become a plan you’ll actually follow.

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Have you thought about planning for your in-between goals? What are you doing to meet them? Let us know!

Welcome back to one of our favorite mini-series, where we take to social to ask how you’d spend money handed to you with no strings attached. This time, we’ve upped the ante by adding some zeroes. Let’s see what people said:

Want to go deeper? Money Together is everything we’ve learned about love and money, told through real stories with lessons for people who want to build a financial life together without losing themselves in the process. Order your copy on: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, or Audible (narrated by Heather!).

Love it already? A review on Goodreads and wherever you purchased helps other couples find us and means more than you know.

Bring us to your organization! We speak on money, relationships, and what it really takes to build a financial partnership that lasts. Available for corporate events, conferences, and private engagements — virtually and IRL. Reach us here.

Connect with us on social: @averagejoelle + @dougboneparth

The content shared in The Joint Account does not constitute financial, legal, or any other professional advice. Readers should consult with their respective professionals for specific advice tailored to their situation. The information contained in this post is general in nature and for informational purposes only. It should not be considered as investment advice or as a recommendation of any particular strategy or investment product. This post is not a solicitation or an offer to buy or sell any specific security. Bone Fide Wealth cannot guarantee the accuracy of information from third parties.

^[1] But not always! In 2022, stocks and bonds fell together, causing a typical 60/40 portfolio to drop more than 20 percent peak-to-trough before finishing the year down about 16 percent. But that was the only time in 150 years that bonds provided no cushion during a significant stock decline.

Right away, I could tell this had nothing to do with etiquette. It was about what happens when someone you love starts to change.

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I spoke with Rachel Goldman, PhD, clinical psychologist and author of When Life Happens, about what’s really going on here. She told me that “relationships exist within a system, so when one person changes, the dynamic often changes, too.”

Now, your gut reaction might be the same as mine. I thought, even in the case of close friends, someone else’s body and lifestyle choices are not really our business, so beyond an acute bill-splitting issue, there’s nothing more for us to say or feel. And yet, we all know that’s not really the end of the story. We whisper. We vent to the wrong people. Frankly, we project. Even when someone’s evolution is objectively good for them, you still might not know how to feel. This is the side of human behavior that’s not only difficult to talk about but makes relationships hard to sustain.

Don’t worry about over-moralizing. Just consider it all data.

“You can feel happy for someone AND simultaneously feel sad, left behind, uncertain, or even jealous,” Dr. Rachel said.

To some extent, we are all creatures of comparison. We cannot help but view the decisions and happenings of our loved ones as a mirror back onto the decisions and happenings in our own lives. We wrestle with why we have not, or could not, or would not. Maybe we would. Maybe we had never thought about it, until we saw them go first.

We also begin to worry that someone who held a certain place in our lives may no longer fit there. “Our brains generally prefer predictability, so any shift, even a positive one, can trigger these feelings,” Dr. Rachel said. “All situations are neutral until we interpret them.”

No, we are no longer talking about a restaurant bill.

Behind all the hissing in my DMs, I understood there to be a deeper outcry. It felt painfully familiar to me as someone who regrets casting negativity upon people I cared about AND as someone who intimately knows what it feels like to have friends drift away. They are really saying:

How dare you change without my permission? How dare you leave me behind?

Many people experience this the hardest as young adults. For the first time, you’re no longer tracking milestones alongside your peers. You don’t just graduate onto the next phase of life together. You’re moving forward, sideways, and standing still . . . sometimes all alone. I moved to New York City with tons of good friends from college, but I went to law school while many of them started their first jobs. For a while, we didn’t see eye to eye—I was phantom human working around the clock for the chance to find work, while they navigated adult pressures, workplace politics, and low starting salaries. Looking back, I know I took it out on everyone, but I don’t think I was angry with them. I think I was scared for myself. But I also can think of times when a friend took change out on me: when I got a better job; when I moved into a great apartment with Doug; when I got pregnant with our first child.

We’ve all lost people moving through big transitions. Especially when you’re young, it can be hard to access the emotional maturity to untether a friendship from the shared experience of it. Not at a time when you might need those shared moments to confirm you’re doing things right.

It made sense then, but what about now?

As of this summer, I’ve been living in the suburbs for a decade. My husband and I have built a life around our children, our profession, our culture, and our individual interests. Most of those stereotypical adult milestones are far in our rearview mirror, so I thought we’d reached cruising altitude and could float through the season without falling out of orbit from people we care about.

I should have known that midlife has its own set of transformations.

Here you are, thinking you’ve arrived. You know who your people are and what you’re all about. And then, a friend gets sober. Someone loses 100 pounds. Someone leaves a 15-year marriage. Someone sells their business and gets rich.

The big things never stop coming. Because of that, life will keep introducing us to new versions of the people we thought we already knew.

The key is recognizing that the personal meaning we assign these changes is ours. Not theirs. Dr. Rachel suggests that “instead of assuming the other person has done something wrong, ask yourself, ‘What is this emotion trying to tell me?’”

You might realize you’ve got something to process on your own rather than a problem with someone else.

But if you sense the distance between you is real, you might want to address it. Just proceed with caution and be sure you’re clear on the reasons why you’re doing it. Dr. Rachel says you don’t want to make someone feel guilty or responsible for your emotions. But if you need that reassurance or want them to really understand your experience, there’s a way to approach it. She gave me three examples of what to say:

Statements like these welcome connection rather than pushing someone you care about back on their heels.

The reality is that friendships, like all relationships, change. They evolve with whatever else we have going on in our lives, and that might mean growing apart. But that does not mean you need to put a period at the end of your sentence together.

In fact, maybe this is what friendship really asks of us in adulthood. Not that we stay the same or occupy the same space in each other’s lives with stellar consistency, but that we are supportive enough to leave the door open for someone to walk back through it with a new look, new perspective, even a new life, and for us say, “I can’t wait to know you now.”

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Have you ever felt confused about a friend’s life changing in some way? What happened next? We want to hear about it.

Thank you to Dr. Rachel Goldman for sharing her wonderful insights with us! Please order her fabulous book, When Life Happens: The Mindset Shift You Need to Manage Stress, Build Confidence, and Break Free.

You up? Good, because we’ve got a question for you. This mini-series mixes prompts from Money Together with fresh ones we’ve been thinking about, all designed to spark real, honest money conversations with your partner. Here’s one:

• For CNBC Make It, we explained why Gen Z is rethinking the role of marriage in their American Dream. Our take? Treating your finances as a team still matters, regardless of when (or whether) you get married.

• Doug broke town Trump Accounts for CNBC, and how families can weigh their options on where to invest for their children. (More on them here).

• I appeared in The Purse’s mid-year check-in, offering my thoughts on the accounts and systems that are worth a quick peek now that we’re halfway through the year.

Want to go deeper? Money Together is everything we’ve learned about love and money, told through real stories with lessons for people who want to build a financial life together without losing themselves in the process. Order your copy on: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, or Audible (narrated by Heather!).

Love it already? A review on Goodreads and wherever you purchased helps other couples find us and means more than you know.

Bring us to your organization! We speak on money, relationships, and what it really takes to build a financial partnership that lasts. Available for corporate events, conferences, and private engagements — virtually and IRL. Reach us here.

Connect with us on social: @averagejoelle + @dougboneparth

The content shared in The Joint Account does not constitute financial, legal, or any other professional advice. Readers should consult with their respective professionals for specific advice tailored to their situation. The information contained in this post is general in nature and for informational purposes only. It should not be considered as investment advice or as a recommendation of any particular strategy or investment product. This post is not a solicitation or an offer to buy or sell any specific security. Bone Fide Wealth cannot guarantee the accuracy of information from third parties.

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Been married forever? Don’t worry, they’ll be something for you in this series, too. Also, scroll to the bottom …

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Speaking of renovations, we’re going to be soft launching some design changes in the newsletter. See anything new? Keep your eyes peeled!

Heather and I have decided to take the first steps in a major home renovation. We don’t have any permits yet, but we’ve hired an architect, aligned our visions, and made enough big decisions that I think it’s worth sharing more with you today.

First, I want to tell you how we got here.

Heather, Baby Hazel, and I left New York City for the suburbs in 2016. She writes about this in Money Together, and she does it more honestly than I ever could, but the TL;DR version is that we stretched ourselves financially and took on more risk than we were comfortable with to get into our current house. We were never going to get everything we wanted, but after countless weekends in bumper-to-bumper traffic with a newborn, dragging ourselves through open houses until we were ready to give up, we found a pretty decent home in a town we loved. We were honest with each other about going to the edge of our budget, and we agreed it was worth it. We also agreed that if we kept investing in our careers, and in each other, we’d be able to upgrade someday. We hoped.

Let me be clear: we don’t need a bigger house. We just wanted one. We set a joint goal, and we’ve been working towards it for ten years.

In a sense, we’re just a couple finding new ways to reach our goal when the landscape around us has changed. This is different than solving a problem when your back’s up against a wall, and it’s an important distinction in our thought process.

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As our careers grew, so did our savings and our shot at the next house. But then, the pandemic hit. Rates went to zero (we refinanced under 3%, thank you very much), and home prices skyrocketed. Demand surged, supply collapsed, and people were buying houses all-cash, sight unseen, waiving inspection, and engaging in bidding wars that made little financial sense for us.

What surprised me is how little of that has unwound in the years since. In fact, we sat down with a realtor in March, and he told us that historically, for that time of year, there should be around 130 homes on the market in our town. That day, however, there were a whopping total of nine. On top of that, he had five families sitting in luxury rentals waiting to pounce on the next listing, mostly with cash.

Yeah, no thanks.

This situation isn’t special to us. All around the country, the U.S. housing supply gap widened to an estimated 4.03 million homes in 2025, according to Realtor.com’s 2026 Housing Supply Gap Report, and housing supply growth has slowed significantly in low-density areas, particularly where home prices are higher. Even with mortgage rates well off their lows, demand has stuck around.

Translation: popular towns where families want to live have the least amount of inventory.

The lock-in effect is very real. A survey from This Old House found that 91% of homeowners said they didn’t plan to sell in 2025, with many citing rising home prices and mortgage rates as their top reasons for staying put. So, people with 3% mortgages aren’t going anywhere, which keeps supply tight, which keeps prices high, and fewer buyers can afford to play the game. Even the ones who can are realizing it looks a whole less attractive.

Speaking with our realtor and mortgage lender, the math did not math. We would be those sellers giving up a sub-3% mortgage to take on a new one two-to-three times the size and rate, while also competing against buyers doing desperate things like waiving their rights to an inspection.

Assuming we could afford the move, would we even get what we wanted? The larger homes with good bones in our neighborhood need a mortgage’s amount of work, and they still cost the amount that a new build did six years ago. And the ship has all but sailed on new builds unless we wanted to move neighborhoods or to the town next door, which we no longer want to do.

We’re not alone in our thinking, because if you drive around town, you’ll see dumpsters in driveways and construction fences on just about every street. Two of our friends are in the middle of whole-home renovations right now. All this is not anecdotal. About 48% of homeowners planned to make renovations in 2025, with a meaningful chunk doing it specifically because they don’t want to sell into this market.

The lock-in effect isn’t just freezing inventory; it’s clearly redirecting capital from “dream house” budgets into “current house” budgets.

In anticipation of moving someday, we’d long sworn off doing any substantial work on our home. We’ve done smaller stuff over the years like painting, adding a dining bench in our kitchen, refinishing the fireplace, and moving some trees around out back, but never anything close to a real renovation. We haven’t even touched our beat-up floors, because we figured the kids would just destroy them. Spoiler alert: they did.

All this prompted Heather and I to make a list of what our current home would need to give us to satisfy what we’d been looking for in a new home. In case you’re curious: we love to cook and wish we had a better space to entertain, so a new kitchen is top of the list. We also need a mudroom, because everyone enters through the back, which spills directly into the kitchen. We want to squeeze a couple more feet into our living room, if possible, and bring the laundry from the basement to the main floor. Then, there’s the attic, which has always been a candidate for a finished office.

By the end of our brainstorm, we realized we might be able to get most of the house we’d been chasing without leaving the house we’re in. We’d keep our mortgage, our schools, our neighbors, and our sanity. We realized, this is worth a hard look, even knowing that a project this size is realistically a two-year affair.

Renovating will let us keep our sub-3% mortgage in place, which is the single biggest financial reason we’re considering it. We can fund the project with a lot of flexibility using a combination of a HELOC and the cash we’ve saved. This would allow us to move at our own pace rather than the market’s. We don’t need to feel the way we felt when we bought this house in 2016, betting on ourselves and praying the math eventually would work out.

This is a great example of what flexibility looks like in real life. It’s not about making the obvious move but about embracing options to make a better one when the planned move stops making sense.

I want to be mindful about how this comes off, because I don’t want you reading it as Heather and I giving up on a goal. We’re not. A renovation doesn’t take that goal off the table; it just changes when and how we might get there. We’re still investing in ourselves, still growing the business, still pushing toward the kind of life that gives us choices later down the road. If anything, putting money into this house builds some equity we can deploy later, but it also gives us a place we love living in while we keep building.

In our book, Heather writes that there are a million ways home.

None of us really know what will happen next in our lives. We try to convince ourselves that we do, but we just don’t. When you embrace that fact, you can be easier on each other when the plan changes.

And this is exactly what’s happening to us now. The version of this home goal we’d been carrying for a decade was one thing, and the version we’re starting to explore now is another. Both can get us where we want to be.

However, I have to give Heather a ton of credit. This goal mattered to both of us, but it mattered more to her. I’m both a simple creature and a creature of habit—the kids are happy, and I like my neighbors. We each took a step off our pedestals of comfort to come up with a new solution, and that, right there, is our hard work paying off.

So, this is our One Big Thing for this quarter. Interestingly enough, between drafting this newsletter and publishing it, our architect gave us a first look at what he’s coming up with. We’re excited, and who knows, maybe we’ll enter our HGTV era soon…

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Are you in the middle of a reno, or have you lived to tell the tale? Share with us your words of wisdom! I’m sure this will all become an ongoing discussion here.

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Want to go deeper? Money Together is everything we’ve learned about love and money, told through real stories with lessons for couples who want to build a financial life together without losing themselves in the process. Order your copy on: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, or Audible (narrated by Heather!).

Love it already? A review on Goodreads and wherever you purchased helps other couples find us and means more than you know.

Bring us to your organization! We speak on money, relationships, and what it really takes to build a financial partnership that lasts. Available for corporate events, conferences, and private engagements — virtually and IRL. Reach us here.

Connect with us on social: @averagejoelle + @dougboneparth

The content shared in The Joint Account does not constitute financial, legal, or any other professional advice. Readers should consult with their respective professionals for specific advice tailored to their situation. The information contained in this post is general in nature and for informational purposes only. It should not be considered as investment advice or as a recommendation of any particular strategy or investment product. This post is not a solicitation or an offer to buy or sell any specific security. Bone Fide Wealth cannot guarantee the accuracy of information from third parties.

There are things you need t…

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We’ve traveled to some beautiful places, but I’ve never been immersed in such natural beauty as Alaska. I was stunned by the enormity of it: the snow-capped mounta…

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I’ll wait.

If you’re anything like the couples I work with, you’ve got a whole lot of those charges, and they tell you almost nothing. They’re an incomplete story.

What “AMAZON.COM: $263.47” doesn’t tell you is t…

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She said, “It’s okay, Mama. Amazon Prime can bring us another one tomorrow.”

I’m sure some of you think this was an adorable thing for her to say. But given what we do for a living, coupled with my millennial agita to raise good humans, I felt a sense of existential dread over what our girls were learning from us.

April is Financial Literacy Month for adults and kids alike. The moment our children are old enough to observe our behaviors, they are picking up messages that form the foundation of their beliefs about money. I know this, because I spent nearly two years asking people about their earliest memories of money for our book. You didn’t have to stretch to see the throughlines between their childhood and what they believe now. Almost everyone had something to say about when they were young.

As parents, we are part of their origin story—for better or worse.

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Before I got into this work, I had a very limiting view of what it meant to become “literate” with money. I thought it just meant learning basic financial concepts like budgeting, understanding your cash flow…the kind of things you should be learning in a foundational classroom setting. According to Next Gen Personal Finance, 30 states now require coursework in financial concepts to finish high school, which is awesome. But I would caution any parent of young children against kicking this can down the road until then.

We can help our kids establish strong foundational beliefs long before they can grasp advanced math concepts. We can help them create good habits, build confidence, and learn how to be critical about decisions that impact their futures. You don’t need a lesson plan for this work. It’s rooted in how we’re speaking to our kids at Target, and how we talk to each other around the dinner table. It’s holding the line when giving in feels easier, and creating friction in a world designed to make spending as easy as possible.

Douglas and I have written about money and parenting before (like, many times before). But in honor of Financial Literacy Month, I want to offer you some big-picture ways to think about leveling up your kids’ understanding of money from a young age through early adulthood.

If they’re old enough to speak, you’re old enough to start.

Let me show you.

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When it comes to your kids’ earliest understanding of money, focus on instilling values. The financials and vocabulary will come later. You want to show them through simple, real-world examples that we make choices every day, and we put careful thought into what they are.

Life is not one big trip to the all-inclusive Amazon Prime resort.[1] Three-year-old Ruby once believed it was, but she now knows that things do not just “appear.” We choose to buy them, either because we need them or because we want them and have decided it’s an appropriate time to purchase. Waiting is normal. You can get your kids comfortable with the fact that you’re making decisions based on what something costs, even before they have the context for what “expensive” means.

The grocery store is a great place to practice. I used to read Ruby the prices of produce, like avocados or apples. Then, I’d have her physically hand them to me while counting. Once we got close to how many we needed, I’d ask her, “Do you think we need another? Do we need five or is four enough?” I’d suggest to her that if we got three, we could get strawberries, too. We were making choices around spending in a way that didn’t make money feel threatening or scarce.

One of the earliest connections we drew for our girls was between money and work. When I was a mega-commuter, Douglas would drop me off at the train station before taking Hazel to preschool. She asked him why they always had to do that. He’d explain to her that the reason we got to enjoy many of the things she really likes—Presents! Disney World! Trips to the ice cream place!—is because we earn money that pays for these things at our jobs. And even though Mom would much rather be driving you to preschool, she has to take the train to work.

In other words, we earn money by working, even when it’s not the most fun thing to do, and then we use that money to live and enjoy our lives. It’s not a hard concept for them to grasp but an important one.

One more point on values: having kids is a great time to revisit yours.

Giving is very important to me, but to be honest, it wasn’t a priority in the early and expensive years of our careers in New York City. Once the girls’ preschool introduced the concept of tzedakah (charity) to them, I knew it was time to find new ways to begin to embody the generosity that always lived in my heart. So, we volunteer. We donate money. We’ve held board seats and pro bono positions for non-profit organizations. Many of the activities centered around our values involve our kids, so they really do begin to form not only the connections between what you believe and what you choose to do about it, but they start to gain context. More on that later.

By the time kids arrive to grade school, they’re starting to learn basic math. They can listen and comprehend more complex ideas. They’re also expected to begin taking some personal responsibility for themselves. But what’s hard about this phase is that kids don’t really grow in a straight line. Recently, a friend said to me that she feels like one day she’s parenting a teenager, and the next, she’s parenting a little boy. I’m right there with her.

As our kids mature, certain concepts might kind of make sense to them, but that doesn’t mean they’re emotionally or developmentally ready to execute on them all the time. So, don’t be discouraged if you read this and think, there’s no way we’re ready for that. All good.

We’re also putting allowances aside for today, because the question of whether your kids should have them (and if so, how much) is complicated. My close friends tie the money they give their kids to expectations around personal responsibility rather than a list of chores, which I really like. But because this topic requires a longer discussion, let’s just hold true the fact that our kids may start to acquire money around this time, whether it’s from an allowance, the tooth fairy, birthday presents, or their grandparents giving them a dollar for no apparent reason.

The core lessons at this phase are still about choices, but they’re much more meaningful to them than a trip to the grocery store. There are things with price tags that school-aged kids really want.

This is the time to show them how to:

• earn,

• save, and

• spend money with purpose.

They can learn about prioritizing when there’s several things they’d really like to have or do. And they can begin to understand real value—what’s worth it and what’s not.

Elementary school is a great time to encourage your kids to save for their first financial goal. Hazel, for example, really wanted an iPad that wasn’t whatever first-generation brick she inherited from us. At the start of the year, we showed her how much it cost, and we counted how much money she had. We discussed her paths to get there and offered for her birthday to match whatever dollars she could save that year. When it came time for her to hand over her roll of cash to us, she was proud, and we were impressed. She really had her eyes on the prize.

Budgeting can also become a powerful tool. For special outings to the toy store or Sephora (eek), I like to set budgets and give them the freedom to make decisions for themselves. Sometimes, they have to make hard choices, but they’re less upset when it’s their choice to make. My only caveat to an exercise like this is to be careful you’re not imparting fear or stress on your kids by telling them they only have X, because we can’t afford more. Parentifying your children by infusing your money worries into their special moments is something they’ll remember for a long time. Again, I’ve seen some things. Just do your best to avoid it.

Welcome to tweenhood, a brief pitstop when everyone’s growing, smelling, yelling, and crying.

I kid, but there’s a whole lot of truth to how challenging these couple of years can be. Between the hormones and the added sense of self-awareness, tweens have a lot to be emotional about. Small things feel like big things. Minor problems feel like the world is ending. Without belittling their very real feelings, this may be the perfect time to introduce some more context into their lives.

I think most young people tend to fixate on what they don’t have before they consider what they do have. It comes with the territory. Some of the people we interviewed said that their earliest money memories came by comparison—by realizing they have less than someone else. It’s okay to acknowledge how frustrating that might feel and not gaslight them into believing we all just operate in our own financial silos, immune to the weight of how unfair the world is.

Privilege shows up in visible and invisible ways. You can, and should, begin to talk about it. Your tweens are old enough to hold two truths: they can wish something was different, and they can be grateful for what they have. But they’ll need your example to begin to see it that way.

In terms of hard dollars, this could be a great time to advance the concept of budgeting into the early stages of cash management. As they socialize and spend more independently, consider letting them manage a small monthly budget for things you used to just give them, like clothes or after-school snacks in town. You’re obviously not going to hand the reins over to them entirely, but you’ll all learn a lot from giving them a bit more agency.

I would also consider opening a debit card for them, not only to simulate how money realistically changes hands in the real world but to give them visibility into banking systems. There are so many cash management tools out there to help them begin to understand their spending habits even at this stage. Don’t sleep on the chance to start them out before you really need to.

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This is the main event. It’s where you pair the values, attitudes, and behaviors you’ve been working on with hands-on lessons from the real world so your kids can become independent and financially literate members of society. No pressure, though!

Bearing in mind how long this manifesto already is, I will touch on all the important concepts but keep it high level. This is work to be done over years; not months, and certainly not in one sitting from reading our newsletter.

1. Taxes, withholdings, and how money flows

Part-time employment during high school or college is the perfect time for teens and young adults to familiarize themselves with how paychecks work, and how money flows in and out of their financial lives.

How much you make is not how much you take home. Teach them how to read their pay stub and learn the difference between gross and net pay. Have them see how much money is withheld for taxes and other types of deductions. They need to learn that the take-home amount is how much they are left to work with, and only then can they begin to understand what they truly can and cannot afford.

On cost of living, most young adults can easily find out how much rent would cost in a place they want to live, but rent is just the first expense. Utilities, internet, and transportation costs are musts. Then, there’s the more invisible costs, like insurance (including maybe renter’s insurance), deductibles to even use that insurance, and memberships and subscriptions that feel critical to their lifestyles but really add up. This is not including food and groceries, which will eat up more of their “adult” paychecks than they probably realize.

You may not be able to simulate the true feeling of “leaving the nest” for them. They may just need to see for themselves. But if you need to start showing them what your life as a family costs to make this all seem realer to them, don’t shy away from it.

2. Credit and consumer debt

While credit itself is not a complex topic, teaching teens the correct way to use it might be. On one hand, you want to build credit as a young adult—your credit score can make or break your ability to rent an apartment, buy a car, or even start a business down the road. You build credit by using credit and then paying off your monthly amounts owed in a timely fashion. I’ll never forget my first American Express Blue for Students card. In fact, I still have it!

Unfortunately, Buy Now Pay Later options are being marketed directly to young adults to finance everything from groceries to clothing. It’s a dangerous game to believe you can make minimum payments on a burrito, because financing small expenses is a slippery slope into losing control over your consumer debt and destroying your credit. While you can, teach your kids that these are not viable options for financing your lifestyle.

3. Investing and building wealth

Investing early can give young adults an enormous head start, but our concept of what it means to invest is likely not the same as theirs. Young adults are being taught via social media and tech-forward investment platforms that investing is more like gambling—that it’s a risky, short-term game with winners and losers. For most, the gamification of investing works against building long-term wealth.

Teens should be learning about compound interest, appreciating assets, employer matches, and setting automatic transfers into investment accounts. They should be learning about having their money work for them through patience and discipline, not doing “the most” work while risking too much.

4. ROI (return on investment) in higher education…and everything else

It’s true that higher education is an investment in yourself, but how do you measure the return on that investment? You would think that because so many millennials are still saddled in student loan debt, higher education would be dramatically different by now. But striving culture still exists. Encourage your teens not to chase clout but to critically understand whether the career they want warrants the cost of the degree.

Teens need to learn about interest and how it compounds on top of principal amounts borrowed. They need to learn the difference between federal subsidized, unsubsidized, and private loans. And in my opinion, they need to understand just how opaque and impossible it is to deal with student loan servicers after they graduate. There is virtually no safety net in that system, and they will need to know how to advocate for themselves to get anything done.

You can show them how this concept will continue to apply throughout their lives. When you invest in something—whether it’s your own advanced degree, an idea, a publicly traded company, or even another person—you should be doing your own research to determine whether you believe you’ll get what you want out of it. Things don’t always work out, of course, but due diligence lessens the chances of making ill-informed choices they’ll come to regret.

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Lessons about money are lessons about life. The conversations you have now will compound over time, shaping how your kids think, feel, and act long after they leave home. Let Financial Literacy Month be your starting point, because the way we talk about money today becomes the voice our kids hear in their heads tomorrow.

Parents, let’s support each other. What’s worked for your kids? What hasn’t?

Comment below or reach us here.

TJA’s Couple of the Week

Speaking of Mother and Father, my Couple of the Week goes to the Biebers, the prom king and queen of Coachella this past weekend. JB set the internet ablaze with his headline set that gave us the classics, while Hailey turned the desert into a Rhode playground with brand activations that flooded my social feeds. They even had Kylie acting basic—an outstanding circus to obsess over from my Couchella. -Heather

Friendly reminder to our free subscribers: all new posts arrive in your inbox. After 14 days, they will be placed behind a paywall on our site. If you love The Joint Account and want complete access to our archives, a monthly AMA with us, bonus video content, and more, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Money Together is here. If you find value in our newsletter and want to support our work, please order a copy today: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, or Audible (narrated by Heather!).

Love it already? PLEASE, PRETTY PLEASE leave us a review on Goodreads and wherever you purchased.

Want more Heather and Doug? Have us come talk about love and money with your organization—virtually or IRL. Reach us here.

Connect with us on social: @averagejoelle + @dougboneparth

The content shared in The Joint Account does not constitute financial, legal, or any other professional advice. Readers should consult with their respective professionals for specific advice tailored to their situation. The information contained in this post is general in nature and for informational purposes only. It should not be considered as investment advice or as a recommendation of any particular strategy or investment product. This post is not a solicitation or an offer to buy or sell any specific security. Bone Fide Wealth cannot guarantee the accuracy of information from third parties.

[1] BTW, we just went to an all-inclusive resort with the girls, and I was very proud to hear Hazel correct Ruby after she said, “Everything here is free.” Hazel told her, “Everything here is not free. Mom and Dad paid for it before we came.” We love to see it!

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage is Belle Burden’s deeply personal account of the unraveling of her two-decade marriage. Set in the early days of the pandemic, her memoir begins with the jarring revelation that her hedge fund husband is having an affair and leaving her. What follows is a painful autopsy of her family history, her relationship, and her willingness to be subsumed financially and emotionally by someone else.

The book became an instant bestseller, and supposedly, Gwneyth Paltrow will star in and executive produce the film adaptation. But it’s also drawn mixed attention online. The writer circles I float in seem angry that a debut author of incredible privilege gets the chance to have her story told (one writer I follow refers to Burden as part of the “Epstein class”). My lawyer friends are hyper-fixated on the prenuptial agreement that should have never been changed. Others have expressed grievances ranging from anger at her family’s behaviors in the early days of the pandemic, to disdain for how a corporate lawyer could allow this to happen to herself, to disbelief that she was really that blind to her ex-husband’s true colors. I don’t know. I noticed some of these things, too, but they weren’t what I came away with.

What struck me most about Strangers wasn’t the unraveling of a marriage but how so many of the dynamics we wrote about in Money Together could happen to one person. It’s an example of how financial betrayal can happen at every income level, and even someone with the utmost privilege can make costly mistakes that are incredibly painful to recover from.

To accept what I am offering as the evergreen lessons from Burden’s life, you do need to possess a certain kind of empathy. Our book begins with the concept that “your story is your story,” meaning that not a single human on the planet—not even your sibling or your spouse—has lived your life. The way you perceive what has happened to you drives the way you feel and the decisions you make.

You may not like that Burden’s version of pain seems less painful than your version of pain, but we could play that game forever. We interviewed couples with an eight-figure net worth and couples who have needed government assistance, and you’d be shocked by the parallel themes underlying their conflicts over money: identity, legacy, trust, and freedom. But when you—as a reader, friend, or spouse—hold yourself out as the arbiter of who is allowed to feel what, you’re stripping yourself of an opportunity to view life through another lens and gain context for an experience or relationship you may not fully understand.

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To me, Belle’s decisions were clearly influenced by where she came from. The granddaughter of Babe and William Paley, the daughter of Carter Burden, and a descendant of the Vanderbilts, Belle is New York royalty. It’s true. In her early days with James (as she calls him in the book), she pondered the long shadows of these famous names and the type of family structure she wanted to build for herself; but ironically, she built something similar to what she observed. So did James. I’ve been told by family therapists that people either run in the opposite direction from their parents’ dynamics, or they repeat them. Sometimes, they think they’re running, and they end up becoming.

The wealth disparity between Belle and James plays an unspoken role in their relationship. She all but admits that using her trust funds to purchase their communal properties felt like a demonstration of her commitment to their shared future. Perhaps she carried a layer of guilt around how they each respectively came into having what they had. Perhaps he carried a sense of distrust around marrying into generational wealth, and that’s why he insisted they keep their marital earnings separate. In the end, there is a sense that he believed, rather callously, that she’d be just fine no matter what.

The reader doesn’t know what he was thinking, and I’m not sure she knows, either. Discussions around money, privilege, and family wealth are hard to put words to, because in some ways, they are larger than us. They are the whispers of loved ones we can’t speak to anymore. They are voices that tell us what—and who—will be enough.

When it came to work, Belle’s decision to step away from her law career felt eerily relatable to me. As she wove through details of her demanding job, I recalled my own experience as a young woman in private practice, feeling like I’d lost agency over my own life in service of something I never intended my career to become. When the tide pulls you under, you fantasize about getting away however you can, even if it means becoming financially dependent on someone else. Foregoing a paycheck wasn’t an option for me, but I can’t tell you that I didn’t dream of it. It’s quite ironic, considering how hard I fought to keep my career as a young mother. But these competing feelings are tragically normal for women left unsure of whether the unsustainable conditions we face are conditions of our own making—as we are often told—or symptoms of systems meant to push women out of important conversations in every area of their lives.

Stepping away from the workforce for a season of caregiving is nothing to look down on. But ceding control to your high-earning spouse with no visibility into your finances is a risk too many women are willing to take.

“I guess I just trust him,” they would say to me in interviews, as if one person’s trust of another could answer for every what if. Trust is not why women disengage from their finances. They disengage because they are either made to feel like it isn’t their place, or because they are responsible for so much more of the physical, mental, and emotional load of carrying their family that money feels like the only thing they don’t need to do. In Burden’s case, it seemed to be both.

The cadence she fell into is common for any household with enough financial stability. People can fall into a “things are good” trap. They don’t think they need to know the details, because they believe they know enough to know that things are good. We live in a nice home. We go on vacations. Our kids can participate in all the camps and activities they want. My partner and I will keep doing everything the same, and everything will stay the same—or get better.

There’s comfort in that lie.

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Burden enjoyed the comfort of operating within the echo chamber of her life as it stood. She cared for their children, their homes, their social plans, and their oversized dog. She didn’t ask questions about the money or how James spent his time, because things were good. In falling into the trap, she stepped back from her most important role of all: being her own person.

When people ask which chapter in Money Together makes me the most emotional, I tell them about the first in our section on power: Our Tiny Rebellions. Coming out of the pandemic, I had realized that my desire to magnify joy in little nothings was to cope with the fact that I was too afraid to ask for what I wanted. I wasn’t appreciating the small things—I had actively made myself small.

Before you try to address the power dynamics in your relationship, ask yourself this: how empowered are you? How much time, attention, and effort have you put into identifying your values and goals as an individual? You cannot just view power as mine or yours. The whole of two empowered partners is greater than what one person could do alone.

Burden deferred to how James liked their homes to look. She adopted his tastes. She got lost in the sauce of her husband and kids. For many women, the easiest thing to do is to live a life in service of everyone but yourself. Sticking your neck out feels like too great a risk. Not when “things are good.” This is how you end up making a sandwich for the man who just asked you for a divorce: because you truly don’t know what else to do.

To me, the most heartbreaking moment in Strangers came with Burden’s use of a word that Douglas and I are so adamantly trying to redefine. She said, “It is what he made clear within weeks of leaving, that he believed my contributions to his career, to our family, over twenty years, amounted to nothing.”

What does it mean to contribute? Our society has viewed this word with too tight a lens, focusing too much on who produces and not enough on how we provide. We contribute in more ways than earning money. We contribute with our care. With our time. With our love. When your partner doesn’t see that, it can feel like the most devastating blow of all.

Following the low of this realization, Burden unwinds her financial affairs from James and begins looking for footing to stand on her own. This honest and vulnerable story was hers, and I think there’s much to gain from reading it. In the end, she starts see what we hope our readers, and all of you, will see. She wrote:

“Slowly, over many months, as my head came out of the sand, a form of joy set in—joy born of replacing the not knowing with knowing, the nub of worry with clarity, the lack of control with control. All made easier, of course, by the fact that I had enough to feel secure, to make my children secure. I thought, This is better than everything I lost. This is better than the life I thought I wanted.”

Knowing will always feel better than not knowing. When it’s all said and done, facts are always better than selling ourselves fiction.

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I need to know if you’ve read Strangers. What did you think? Let’s chat.

You Up?

You up? Good, because we’ve got a question for you. This new mini-series mixes prompts from Money Together with fresh ones we’ve been thinking about, all designed to spark real, honest money conversations with your partner. Here’s a doozy:

Do you feel free to spend?

Money Together x Wyndham Hotels!

We such a great time hosting a virtual session on Money Together with the incredible team at Wyndham Hotels & Resorts this week. Doug I brought our no-filter conversation about how couples can communicate better, align on values, and build a stronger financial life together. These are the kinds of discussions that galvanize the power of your voice at home and at work. Thank you to everyone at Wyndham for making this happen and showing up in numbers!

If you’re part of an organization looking to bring meaningful financial wellness to your employees, we’d love to chat.

Reach out here

Friendly reminder to our free subscribers: all new posts arrive in your inbox. After 14 days, they will be placed behind a paywall on our site. If you love The Joint Account and want complete access to our archives, a monthly AMA with us, bonus video content, and more, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Money Together is here. If you find value in our newsletter and want to support our work, please order a copy today: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, or Audible (narrated by Heather!).

Love it already? PLEASE, PRETTY PLEASE leave us a review on Goodreads and wherever you purchased.

Want more Heather and Doug? Have us come talk about love and money with your organization—virtually or IRL. Reach us here.

Connect with us on social: @averagejoelle + @dougboneparth

The content shared in The Joint Account does not constitute financial, legal, or any other professional advice. Readers should consult with their respective professionals for specific advice tailored to their situation. The information contained in this post is general in nature and for informational purposes only. It should not be considered as investment advice or as a recommendation of any particular strategy or investment product. This post is not a solicitation or an offer to buy or sell any specific security. Bone Fide Wealth cannot guarantee the accuracy of information from third parties.

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