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[MUSIC PLAYING] Brought to you by the Every Dollar App, start budgeting for free today. My wife and I moved to Canada a year ago. We didn't pay rent for the first six months and bring home $7,000 a month. We made an agreement to separate our finances, and my responsibility was to save money for a new car. I didn't pay attention to my expenses and saved nothing. I lied to my wife about the amount I had saved and pretended everything was OK. After I started listening to your show, I've decided to tell her the truth. I feel like I have totally destroyed her trust in me and our future. How can I save my marriage and get trust back? I usually tell people that your feelings don't tell you the truth. But in this case, Adam, your feelings are telling you the truth. You did destroy her trust in you and her trust in your future. 100% you did. George, this whole situation is a mess. Well, started with we made an agreement to separate our finances. So started with we moved to Canada. Well, that's true. I wasn't going to go there. I love my friends in Canada. I know I do too. Sweet people. All right, so we moved to Canada and we didn't pay rent for the first six months. And they make $7,000 a month and they said, all right, you do you. I do me. Here's my job. I'm going to save up for the new car. You go do this. And then he didn't do any of it, which is one reason we tell people to combine finances because it creates trust, and accountability, and transparency, and unity, all the things that make a marriage great. But instead, he went, no, no, I got it, I got it. And then didn't and then had a shame spiral and then could not tell her the truth that he had $0 saved, which also begs the question, where the crap did that money go, Adam? What did you spend it on? Yeah. Because you're going to also have to tell her that part. And that might be the hardest part of all. It's when you realize you've painted a wall with a lie and you start wall-papering over that lie with other lies. And all of a sudden, you are in a pretty thick padded room here with nowhere to go. Here's your path forward, Adam. You tell her, we have to have a hard conversation. And I made some huge mistakes. And I need to be honest with you. And then you take a pause. And she's going to want to say, tell me right now, what happened, say, this is not the time for that. We're going to go-- we're going to meet in 30 minutes at a restaurant. We're going to meet in 30 minutes in a park in a neutral location, or somewhere in the living room where you don't normally have hard conversations. We need to change the environment for this one. Because this is a before and after conversation. Your marriage, if it survives, this will be different. And George's question that he raised is key. If this happens to me, after I get over the initial shock, I'm going to ask, what happened to-- what is it, $3,500 times six months? Where's that money? And is it in food? Is it in gambling? Is it in guitars? Like, what is that money? Where is it? Can you get any of it back? Is it gone? All those questions, you better have answers for those as you sit there. And here's another key, George. Adam is never going to use the word "you." Every word-- every sentence is going to start with, I did this. Here's what I did. And if you had just-- we're not going to do any of that. I lied to you. I've been deceiving you for months. And I'm coming clean because you deserve better. Here's what I have done. And I'm going to lay it out. And there is no path forward other than the path of honesty. Or we're just going to make this thing bigger and bigger and bigger. And how do you rebuild that trust? Well, it's going to take time. It takes a moment to destroy it. But then it takes this pattern of being trustworthy, where you've proven, hey, you know what? I put 1,000 bucks away. We've combined the bank accounts. You have full transparency. You have a vote. I have a vote. That's what's going to create that over time. But she has to see that you're actually never going to do this again. So I often tell couples, George, when this situation happens, any sort of trust violation, the other person who you're asking, hey, I've hurt you and I've lied to you and I've violated your trust, I need you to trust me again, they get to dictate for a season the parameters for what trust rebuilding is going to look like. If X, Y, Z happens, then on the other side of this will be more trust. I get to see your phone every day. Here it is. I get-- I want to track your phone. Here it is. We're going to do an every dollar budget every day. Every day. Here you go, right? You will not carry a debit card for 60 days, like whatever. We're going to take the internet out of the house. If you're struggling pornography, I don't care what it is, the other person gets to set what's going to make them feel safe. And then we're going to slowly work that thing back. And that's going to be tough, tough, tough, tough, tough, tough. Create your free every dollar budget today, the simplest way to budget for your life.
