Hey freelancer,
This made me come out of the woodwork to comment. I'm neither female nor married but I have a lot of sympathy for you and empathy for him because I used to be just like that.
I have no advice, but a few observations that might help, or not. I mean this as trying to lend insight to someone whose plight has moved me, and not as a judgment of anyone.
One of the greatest logical fallacies that the otherwise generally intelligent people in FI/RE/frugality/investing communities engage in is disregarding the fundamental nature of human existence. Cognitively, somewhere in his psyche, your husband truly knows saving/investing more, being more frugal, et cetera is what he needs to do. Everyone knows this Mustache stuff, at least the basics anyway. But knowing is not ability.
The trick isn't knowing, the trick is affecting your personal behavior, and that is, as I can attest, very hard. One thing I see a lot on this board is harsh and heartless criticism of people who claim they can’t save, can’t spend less, etc. with commenters acting like this is patently not true at all. Yes personal finance is something of a First World Problem, and some things deserve to be mocked, but genuinely troubled and helpless people are not among them. It is entirely possible to exist in a mindset where you really can’t conceive how to save money, I know because I’ve been there. If you can’t conceive of it, you literally cannot do it (this is the whole basis for Newspeak after all). It’s a terrible dark place that people who haven’t been there shouldn’t be expected to understand.
It is entirely correct for a person to say “I can’t save money”; what is not correct is to assume that’s the end of it. That person has to amend it that internalized statement, and until something pushes them to do so they genuinely are powerless.
I personally went thru stages:
Learned helplessness - “I can’t save”
Dawning understanding - “I can’t save because these factors prevent it”
Aligning my locus of control with reality - “I can’t save because factors prevent it, but some of these factors are under my control”
Accepting fault/responsibility - “I can’t save until I stop doing stupid things”
Confronting the problem -“I don’t understand why I do stupid things that keep me from being able to save money”
… and somewhere right after that I internalized the idea I can stop doing stupid things and save money, and I, well, stopped doing as many stupid things. I still do stupid things with money and always shall, but I now have the power to stop doing them as I begin to actually realize they are stupid. I can save money, but before I really couldn’t until I crossed the point where I was more rational than foolish.
This probably sounds ridiculous and trivial to most people who read FI sites, and truthfully I don’t expect anyone who hasn’t been more foolish than rational with money at some point to grasp the phenomenon even if they understand the concept. The best takeaway I can give such a person is that one has to start with the fundamental problem, and not ignore it or dismiss it. If you want to confront reality and be objective about personal finance, you have to acknowledge these mental obstructions are real, they objectively exist, and you must treat them seriously.
The victim of the mental obstruction has to overcome whatever it is they’ve internalized and realize their problem exists. It’s true that bad past decisions directly create most people’s money problems and it is their fault. However some compassion is merited because the people who have these problems could not possibly have anticipated all the negative consequences of their actions at the time they undertook those actions, they got to such extremes because that’s just what the human mind does. There’s a figurative hamster that lives in your brain, running on a wheel of rationalization to spin what you’ve done round and round to creates a fictional narrative that is your personal reality.
Most people who aren’t great with money did not purposefully set out to be the way they are even if they did do something they should not have. Their behavior and attitude may be ridiculous or frustrating, but it’s not wholly of their own design, their very human nature has created the irrationality out of whole cloth as an unintended side effect of a mistake. I only realize this because I finally realized the hamster was present.
Overcoming it requires some exhausting mental gymnastics that aren’t necessary for people who don’t have these problems. I believe it takes the form of emotional buy ins to increasingly rational thoughts about personal finance over time, so even the solutions can look as insane as the problem to someone who hasn’t overcome them, and there’s long stretches of time where nothing actually happens other than an internal wrestling match. At some point something will finally breakthrough, connecting the rational mind to their personal financial behavior in some way, and the person who has the breakthrough probably won’t even realize it yet or see their behavior change immediately or completely.
It took me years, literally years, to grasp all this. Even if my current self could talk to my past self, I could not have made my past self understand, I would have thought this was all a load of crap because at the time I was an idiot. It’s like explaining what blue is to someone who has never been able to see. Similarly I don’t think I can adequately explain it to someone who hasn’t been there either. It is just a state of being that has to come organically.
I’ll conclude with three things that I have learned, and what to realize about them:
It is important to divorce your self esteem from your personal finance skills. When I was mishandling money, I was deluding myself to thinking I was financially responsible because it was part of my self concept that good people manage money well and I wanted to be a good person, ergo the hamster started running hard.
Comfort is the enemy of change. My lifestyle when I was hemorrhaging money and exploding in wastefulness was very comfortable; I had to undergo a bad life experience before I could change myself.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. I had to learn to accept intermediary and remedial steps forward. For so long I believed it was pointless to even try because I couldn’t emulate the nearly perfect financial behaviors of other people; realizing it was about becoming better than I was rather than trying to emulate someone else was vital.
A person doesn’t always have it in their power to realize any of these things because their life may be such that they’ve never had to focus on them before. For me all three of these epiphanies only occurred because an external circumstance occurred. Sometimes something bad has to happen to a person before they can find the strength they didn’t know they had.
I realize none of this actually helps the problem, but then again it wasn’t meant as advice. I do hope maybe something I said gives some hope, some assurance what you’re feeling is justified even if perhaps it requires some reflection to fully gauge, or at least mild understanding into what your husband could be experiencing.