Budget plan essential for couples

Cheryl and Stephen Wiley's life together began to tumble downhill -- financially and emotionally -- after the birth of their first child in 1990.

"We were young and dumb and had no medical insurance," Cheryl recalled.

Their daughter's birth and health complications produced nearly $30,000 in medical bills. Impulsive spending piled on credit-card debt.

Meanwhile, Stephen worked from 6 in the morning to 7 at night as a landscaper, while Cheryl stayed home with newborn daughter Kelly.

"There were plenty of weeks when there was $20 left after paying our bills to go to the next payday," Stephen said.

The Wileys began to discover that as financial difficulties piled up at their door, love was heading out the window.

Couples new and old often find financial compatibility one of the biggest hurdles to marital bliss, but financial counselors say couples can increase their chances for happiness by talking candidly with each other about money and how they want to use it.

"When they start on the marriage road, they have a pie-in-the-sky view" of finances, said debt counselor Eric Graetzer with Catholic Charities' Counseling Center here. "They try to make it great and keep up with the Joneses, their friends, and they overextend themselves with credit-card debt."

For the Wileys, arguments raged, their bank balance shriveled and their relationship problems mounted up. "We had some good screaming matches," the Hanover County man said.

"The checking account was constantly overdrawn, and we couldn't figure out what we were doing wrong," Cheryl said. "It was all about money."

The Wileys' story is that of many couples, particularly those under financial pressure from recent economic turmoil.

Signs of debt-related stresses abound across Virginia and the country:

•In 2008, Americans charged $2.1 trillion on credit cards, a 50 percent increase from 2003, according to the Nilson Report in December. •Last year, 15 percent of American adults were late making a credit-card payment and 8 percent missed a payment entirely, according to the 2009 Financial Literacy Survey from the National Foundation for Credit Counseling. •The average unsecured debt of a client of Richmond-based ClearPoint Credit Counseling Solutions is $22,292, or about 65 percent of their annual net income, and married couples make up nearly 40 percent of ClearPoint's debt management counseling. •Personal bankruptcies soared 40 percent last year in Virginia's Eastern District, which includes Richmond, compared with 2008, according to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court. In fact, faced with the possibility that their marriage might break up, the Wileys filed for bankruptcy in 1990.

After getting through that bruising time, Stephen said, "we kind of made a pact that we weren't going to end up that way again."

Guided by the steady beacons of open communication and realistic budgeting, the Wileys acted on that agreement.

"Cheryl sat down with me and said, 'We've got to get on a budget. This has got to stop right now,'" he said. "Once we got on that budget, it was like night and day."

While they encountered setbacks, today they're financially stable. With both spouses working -- he's a window installation manager and, ironically, she's now a debt management counselor -- they own their own home, they can afford to send their two daughters to college, and their credit rating is robust. And they're content with their lives.

But to reach that place, they first had to journey through often painful feelings.

"Money is always an amplifier of emotional issues," says Rob Fergusson, a certified divorce financial analyst.

According to family law attorney Mary Burkey Owens, "money and how people deal with their money is probably one of the biggest factors that lead to considering separation or divorce."

Money offers people a sense of power, status, safety and love, licensed clinical social worker Nancy Whitehurst explained. "When it comes to love and money," she said, "it is not always an easy rational matter of 'do the math.'"

Americans are everywhere confronted with messages promoting dissatisfaction with their lives, urging them to want more, to spend more and to satisfy those wants -- right now.

"This month, we are inundated by commercials that suggest that if you really love your wife, you will express it by giving her an expensive piece of jewelry," Whitehurst noted.

Americans tend to fall into two categories when it comes to finances: spenders and savers. Spenders find the act of buying reassuring, Fergusson said, while savers are comforted by watching their bank balance grow.

"Maybe one person lives in a philosophy of 'seize the moment, let's have joy for the moment,'" Whitehurst said. "That person's philosophy and how they treat money is very different from that of the person who thinks you need to save your money for a rainy day, and put off the fun stuff now in order to ensure you'll have safety in the future."

In a partnership of a spender and a saver, "every bit of spending is driving the saver crazy, and every bit of savings is making the spender feel oppressed," Fergusson said.

"Households don't understand the importance of shared responsibility and finances," said bankruptcy attorney Rudy McCollum. "The next thing you know, you've got people in over their heads with no resources to recover financially."

At bottom, "people equate money with survival," Fergusson said. "So money automatically becomes a major inducer of fear and of the need to control things. . . . Then they try to control each other."

As a result, said relationship consultant Barbara Lanebrown, "if you're a couple and have money problems, and you're not that enlightened, they can absolutely wreck your marriage."

Financial insecurity begets fear, and fear isolates them from others. "As we shut down, we lose the connection with our loved ones," said Lanebrown, who also does executive coaching. "It gets thinner and thinner."

About this time, Whitehurst said, couples find themselves stuck arguing only about the financial tip of the emotional iceberg.

Making matters worse, sometimes those in a relationship are lying to their partners -- and ultimately themselves -- about the problem.

ClearPoint's Bruce McClary remembered thinking something was off center with one couple he worked with in debt-management counseling. "You've got to be honest with me," McClary told them.

The husband, who had lost his job, reached into his backpack and pulled out $50,000 worth of bills from 16 credit cards. "Everything was maxed out, and he hit the brick wall," McClary said. "It was not pretty at that point."

But having reached an economic and emotional bottom, couples can begin to move toward economic recovery and a happy, loving relationship.

"If they are open with each other, willing to communicate, to create a family budget, and stick to the budget, to set up common goals -- a vacation trip or a new home -- and act accordingly," said attorney Owens, "you can nip any of those problems."

Contact Peter Bacqué at (804) 649-6813 or pbacque@timesdispatch.com.