00:00The Bloomberg Money Team wrote about this book and how it's sparking all these discussions
00:04everywhere about marital finance. Nikki Waller leads that coverage for us here at Bloomberg,
00:09and she joins us now. And Nikki, this is something where women in book clubs are talking about it,
00:14and they are taking more control of their finances and taking a deep dive into financial
00:19planning to understand their household finances. It's just as you said. People are reading this
00:24book as a cautionary tale and a horror story, and they are phoning their financial advisors
00:28and saying, I need to crack open the books on my finances with my husband or partner.
00:34And this is the case where women often out-earn their husbands or they're at parity,
00:37except when they take time off to have kids and they kind of lose some ground here.
00:41So there's this extra urgency and this, once there was a stigma about talking about all this before
00:48getting married, but it's not becoming the case anymore. It's more practical now.
00:52It is less of a stigma, but even so, the numbers show that a lot of women, close to half,
00:59are entrusting their husbands with all of the financial decision-making.
01:02Why? We all have our horror stories and our families of this. I have multiple horror stories
01:08of I'm the man, I'm smarter than you are, leave me alone, just trust me, I'll give you the passwords
01:13when I die. That's the status quo still.
01:16Yeah, and we have really smart people. I mean, take Bell Burden. She is an Ivy League
01:20educated corporate lawyer, and she still hated this over. And I think a lot of this talks about,
01:26comes back to the gendered ways we think about money, that this is men's work and this is women's
01:31work. And it's kind of cool to hear from these women who are cracking the books and even their
01:35husbands are saying, well, finally.
01:37There is a broader trend, and this is something you guys wrote about too, of young couples signing
01:41prenups. This idea that it's not just men or the wealthy partner in the group. Everyone is kind of
01:50inquiring about this and looking into this to protect whatever assets or liabilities that they
01:54come into the marriage with.
01:55And there are so many reasons for this. People are marrying later in life. We talk about this all
02:00the time. They have more investments, more stockholding. So it's not like getting married at age 20 or 21
02:05and both partners have very little. People are coming into marriage with their own kind of book of
02:11business.
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