Executive Summary
In modern financial planning, there is an increased emphasis on engaging both partners in a client couple; reasons for this range from better understanding the household’s goals, ensuring everyone is heard equitably, and retaining one partner in the event of a disaster. Yet the reality for many couples is that financial decision-making, like many aspects of household management, naturally evolves into a division of labor based on interest, temperament, and strengths. And in some cases, forcing equal participation may actually create unnecessary friction rather than deeper engagement!
In this 191st episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and client communication expert Carl Richards discuss how to engage both partners of the relationship – and if it is necessary at all on a regular basis. As a starting point, the term "disengaged spouse" itself carries an implicit judgment – suggesting that one partner’s lack of enthusiasm for financial planning is a problem to be solved rather than a preference to be respected. In practice, many so-called disengaged spouses are not irresponsible or uninformed; they are simply disinterested in the mechanics of financial planning and comfortable delegating that responsibility to their partner and planner. Just as couples commonly divide responsibilities around parenting, home maintenance, or career management, financial oversight may simply be another area where one partner takes the lead. And while advisors often interpret limited meeting participation as a risk factor, some clients may feel relieved when they are not pressured to attend recurring planning meetings that they find tedious, stressful, or inconsistent with how they naturally process information.
At the same time, recognizing a spouse’s disinterest does not eliminate the need for inclusion altogether. Effective planning still requires understanding both partners’ values, priorities, fears, and goals – especially during the initial planning process when foundational decisions are being made. The distinction is that involvement does not necessarily require identical participation styles. Rather than insisting every spouse attend every review meeting, advisors may instead look for more flexible and personalized ways to help each person feel heard and understood. For some clients, this may involve periodic vision-oriented conversations rather than technical review meetings. For others, it may mean informal check-in calls, written reflections, or even voice memos shared before a meeting. The goal is not mandatory attendance, but meaningful input.
Two conditions become especially important when one partner intentionally delegates financial responsibilities to the other. First, the disinterested spouse must genuinely feel heard and understood. Advisors and the more financially engaged partner need to actively create space for that person to express concerns, priorities, and preferences in whatever format is most comfortable. Even if they are not participating in every meeting, they still need confidence that their perspective is represented in the planning process. Second, the disinterested spouse must also accept responsibility for the delegation itself. If they choose not to participate deeply in ongoing decisions, they must still support the outcomes collectively rather than distancing themselves from decisions after the fact. Delegation can work effectively, but only when paired with trust, communication, and shared ownership of the results.
Ultimately, the most effective planning relationships may come not from forcing identical engagement, but from recognizing the diverse ways couples collaborate, communicate, and delegate — and adapting the planning process to support clients where they are most comfortable and best able to thrive.
Authors:
***Editor's Note: Can't get enough of Kitces & Carl? Neither can we, which is why we've released it as a podcast as well! Check it out on all the usual podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts (iTunes), Spotify, and YouTube Music.
Show Notes
- Widows Don’t Fire 70% of Their Advisors: How a Misunderstood Statistic Shaped an Industry Narrative, from Kehrer Group
- Modern Husbands Podcast: "How Men Can Support Their Partner’s Career" with Brian Page (Conversation with Dr. Bruce Ross)
- Behavior Gap Radio: "I Finally Got Fired!" by Carl Richards
Kitces & Carl Transcript
Michael: Well, good afternoon, Carl.
Carl: Hello, Michael Kitces, how are you?
Michael: I'm doing well. I'm doing well. I'm enjoying the turning of the spring season, it is well underway here. Trees are budding. Allergies, unfortunately, have been particularly heinously bad for me this year. I've no idea why. I'm not even usually a bad allergies person, but I spent most of the past week just walking around with my eyes watering indoors. There was a day that I was stacked with meetings and I never set foot outside of my house, and my eyes were just red and puffy and watery from allergies.
Carl: Well, I think it's the problem. You should have stepped foot out of your house. I think that's the problem.
Michael: Is that the problem? Maybe I'm allergic to the indoors now?
Carl: Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, it's crazy. It's been a...we don't need to spend too much time in the weather, but it's been this amazingly warm winter-spring, and then it snowed an inch last night. So like my walk this morning, everything covered in white, super beautiful. And now it's green grass outside. So it's that time of the year in Utah.
Michael: It's turning. It's turning.
Carl: Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of things we're allergic to...
Michael: What was that?
Carl: Speaking of things we're allergic to...
Michael: Oh, sure. All right. What do you want to queue us up on today?
The "Disengaged Spouse" In The Financial Planning Relationship [01:25]
Carl: How about, how about, you know... That was a terrible, terrible intro. Every once in a while, I run across beliefs that I just always assumed were true.
Michael: Okay.
Carl: And my wife's actually quite good at this. I'll just say, "Well, that's because that's how you do it." Right? And she'll occasionally say, "Says who?" Like, "We can't move to New Zealand." "Says who?" And you know where that ended.
Michael: In New Zealand.
Carl: Yeah. Yeah. So we have these beliefs sometimes that we just accept as true. And I love it when you occasionally get a chance, for some reason, and I'm never quite sure why these happen, but to question them. And sometimes I refer to them as "Carl's little heresies." Because sometimes I get in trouble for even questioning some of these ideas. And I have a new one.
Michael: Oh, okay.
Carl: I have a new one.
Michael: Well, let's just go right in without any fear of repercussions or consequences.
Carl: I've long since gotten over that. Well, I still have that fear, but I quite enjoy it now. And often I'm wrong though. Often I'm wrong. So let's just hold this one loosely. Here's the question I'm asking. Why do we have to get both spouses involved, spouse or partner? So let me just paint this scenario. And I'll give you a couple threads. It'll take a minute to tie these threads, and then we can talk about it. So I've always been taught, it's a grave business risk if you didn't almost force both spouses to be involved. Like, "I will not meet with you unless you're both there." There's even language that you hear a lot like, how do you engage the disengaged spouse? We have training around it. It seems like a code of professional conduct somehow, that you have to involve the spouse or partner that may or may not be interested.
Michael: You're doing a financial plan for a couple. Yes, it feels slightly obligatory.
Carl: Yep. Yep. Okay. So here we are. So I had this interesting experience, because it turns out I'm the disinterested spouse in our relationship.
Michael: With you and Cori, like in your marriage.
Carl: In our marriage, as it relates to financial planning, I'm the disinterested spouse. I'm the one that was like, "Do I have to go to this meeting?"
Michael: Come on, Carl, you're the financial planner.
Carl: I know. I know.
Michael: How did you become the disinterested spouse?
Carl: That's why I identify more as an artist than I do as a financial planner. So interestingly, our financial planner, who's named Christy, and my wife decided early on...our relationship with Christy is relatively new, probably five years now. Early on in that relationship, they fired me from needing to be at the meetings. They said, "Hey, we don't think you need to be here." And I remember...
Michael: So apparently, Christy didn't get this memo that you're supposed to engage the disengaged spouse, not fire the disengaged spouse.
Carl: I think Christy might be one of the enlightened ones that believes this heresy that I'm about to share. But I remember being this much...and for those just listening, I'm making a millimeter with my fingers...a teeny, teeny, teeny little amount hurt and, all the way to the moon and back, thrilled that I had been fired, that I had been relieved of this pressure to attend all the meetings and review all the agenda items. And I was like, what do you make of that? So that's thread number two, is I was thrilled. And so here's what I'd love to talk about.
Michael: Having personally been the disengaged spouse, you were happier when they allowed you to disengage.
Carl: That's right. So I have three things I want to talk about. One, just that general idea, heresy or not. Michael, if we were playing a TV game show and you had to say heresy or not, what would... And number two, how can we change the language? Because that language, I did not consider myself disengaged. That's a really negative term. It implies something that needs to be fixed.
Michael: Yeah, yeah, it does.
Carl: So I want to talk about the language. And then the third thing is under...and maybe we should start with a third, but I actually have been thinking about this for quite a while now, recorded a Behavior Gap Radio episode on it where I'm processing it. I came up with two rules, that if you're what I was referring to as the disinterested spouse, there's two rules that you have to follow to make this still work. So, what order would you like to approach this? Heresy or not, what we call those people, and what the two rules are.
Michael: I would come back to the rules at the end here, because I still want to talk about just this phenomenon.
Is It A Problem If One Partner Is Less Engaged With Financial Planning? [06:48]
Michael: So what would you call yourself as the...
Carl: Totally disinterested.
Michael: As the "insert word" spouse. I don't want to say disengaged spouse, because it's offensive to you as the "insert word" spouse.
Carl: I was having this great conversation with Dr. Bruce Ross at University of Kentucky. I was having this conversation on a podcast with him and we were using disinterested and disengaged. And actually, afterwards, we had an email conversation where we came up with some different words like "intentionally delegated", or "creatively interested in something else". But I would have called myself just disinterested. I just really didn't...disinterested.
Michael: Okay. And to the point that you were happy when you don't have to go to the meetings anymore.
Carl: So happy, literally so happy. So happy. And I was just thinking about, if I had to go to a meeting tomorrow, well, you could even ask our financial planner, it's impossible to pin me down for a financial planning meeting.
Michael: Well, if I disliked the meetings that much, I would probably be hard to pin down for a meeting as well, which maybe is part of the point. Yeah. So what made the meeting so unpleasant for you?
Carl: Well, and I should be really clear. I believe if there was anybody who could make these meetings interesting for me, it's our current financial planner.
Michael: Yeah. I'm pretty sure I know, assuming it's not a fake name, who Christy is. Christy is a fantastic financial planner. So I'm all the more fascinated she couldn't sway you and that she was in with your wife to fire you from the meeting.
Carl: Well, she went a step further and said the fact...because prior to that, we went a couple of years without a planner. And we had one prior to that before too, who was also awesome. But there was a period of time where we didn't have a planner for a while. And Christy said to me, using some of my own words, which I always find quite annoying, she said something like, "The fact that you thought you were the best person for this job, that Carl was the best person to be the financial planner for the Richards family," she said, "is hilarious."
Michael: Your family. What gave you the presumption that you could be the financial planner for our family just because you did it for other families?
Carl: Yeah. She was like, that's hilarious. So I think what Christy's actually done though is pull a giant trick on me because now she just calls me kind of in the middle of a day one day and just checks in and wants to have a call. I think she's doing this in a way that really works really well for me, but the traditional meeting with the agenda, sit down as a couple, have a conversation about the budget and the numbers and the projections, just wasn't interested in it.
Michael: So I want to go one moment further there to really understand.
Carl: I can feel myself getting in more trouble as you're asking more questions.
Michael: That's all right. It's all right. It's not my problem.
Carl: I know.
Michael: So here's what I'm trying to understand. Is it the literal meeting part? "I don't like meetings and have to show up to meetings and be present for meetings to do all the diligent things that you do in meetings." Or is it the money part and the financial planning part? "I don't enjoy having these money conversations and needing to navigate a bunch of these money decisions."
Carl: Yeah, I mean, I've actually thought quite a bit about this because it's sort of like there's some piece of this that I have to be... And I am now speaking on behalf of...I'm happy to personalize this, but I'm also speaking on behalf of all disinterested spouses or partners everywhere. There's some part of this – you have to be really careful as a disinterested spouse or partner to not abdicate your responsibility. That's cute that you think you don't have to be involved in these tough decisions. I found myself saying that to myself, like, "Hey, wait, are you just bowing out because these are tough decisions?" I don't think that's the case. I'm okay with hard decisions. It's not the way my brain works. I like to think of creative solutions to things. I like to think of... I don't do well with projections about the future that I know won't be exactly... I don't know what...I don't do well with meetings. I can barely stand sitting down to talk to you for 45 minutes.
Michael: I know the secret is that we often record two of these.
Carl: I know.
Michael: That's how we do it. So you're like stuck with me for almost an hour and a half in total.
Carl: I like conversation, right? So conversation dynamics. And again, it's not that... Our financial planner and my wife are both dynamic and really good at conversation. So I don't know. Why do you think? Because you've known plenty of these disinterested spouses, why are they not interested?
Michael: So, look, I feel like I've seen so many different reasons over the years, or at least like trying to figure out reading between the lines of family dynamics for disinterested spouses. So for many, I mean, this has shifted a little bit now, doing this 25 years when I started, right, retired clients were mostly silent generation. So to stereotype lightly, a lot of very traditional family dynamics and family gender roles, right? The standard there was something the effect of the husband was responsible for the balance sheet, and the wife was responsible for the checkbook.
Carl: Yeah.
Michael: So she paid all the bills and she knew all the money in and out, but he did the investment things and the assets and liabilities. And so investments and a lot of financial planning things were more balance sheet exercises than cash flow, at least especially then. And so very common that, I mean, the disinterested spouse was disinterested because this couple made a couple's division of labor decision 50 years of marriage before I showed up. And they were not particularly interested in changing their 50-year marital dynamic because I said, "Well, I'd really like you both to be at the meeting."
Carl: Okay. Let's remove...because I think you're right. Traditionally, that has been an issue. And I'm actually curious if we can get to... Because I was thinking something very similar, but if we remove gender from it, I think there's something very similar going on with leaning into strengths. Division of labor. I don't say to my... I happen to really enjoy and I'm pretty good at the landscaping. My wife really is also good at it and enjoys it, but would rather do something...
Michael: She's the disengaged landscaper.
Carl: Yeah. That's why I don't say to my wife, "How come you're so disengaged in landscaping?" Right? We could think of lots of other examples of like where you said, "Hey, you really liked that, or at least you don't mind that. Would it be okay if...?" Like, I actually don't mind doing the dishes. I find it to be a creative activity, a really Zen activity for me. I don't say to somebody else, "Hey, you're a disengaged dish person." We just need a division of labor decision based on interests and/or strengths.
Michael: Well, and I mean, my rough guesstimate over the years, there were more couples that did it the other way around, from a gender perspective, than it was for my retiree silent generation clients at the beginning. But I will say, again, my purely anecdotal lived experience, I don't feel like division of labor is any less than it used to be, just couples are more varied about what their roles happen to be than what it was historically.
Carl: True.
Michael: Right? So I don't know whatever it was, if 20% of clients had a disinterested spouse, 20% of clients today still feel like there's a disinterested spouse. It's just back then, it was 100% of the time it was a wife, and now it was not necessarily a wife. There was a wider range of gender decisions, but the phenomenon of, "Hey, it turns out a division of labor is kind of a thing in business and in couples. And that couple probably made a division of labor decision long before they got to your office and they're not necessarily interested in upending that division of labor decision" -- that rings true and reasonable to me from what you're framing here. I still get some, "Yeah, but..." issues, which maybe we'll come back to in a moment. But just on its face value, do couples have division of labor about stuff that they deal with in their household? Yeah. Is that a thing? Yeah. Has that always been a thing? Yeah. Is that going to continue to be a thing? Probably.
Carl: And what's wrong with us? Imagine the relief I felt. I was thinking about this with clients. Because I have specific clients in my mind that...in fact, I can remember a client named Judy who was just incredibly...she was a full-blown professional artist, incredibly whimsical. And she literally couldn't even stand the meetings. And I kept trying to get her to come. And now I wish I could go back and be like, "Judy, guess what? You don't need to come at all. Could you just send us a note? Could you take a minute and journal on what's really..." And we can get to the two rules in a minute, but give her a way, give the disinterested spouse a way to participate so that they're feeling seen and heard, but they don't have to...instead of forcing, I can think through...yeah, another one. Brian, Denise took care of all this stuff. And Brian really didn't want to be there, but I was like, "You have to be there. There's important decisions being made." And I get that. So that's why I feel there's a little bit of shame from my perspective. When I felt great about being fired, I was like, "Huh, there must be something wrong with me because both spouses or partners are supposed to be equally engaged in this meeting. That's what we do."
Michael: Yeah. So look, now my "Hey, what about..." sort of asterisks start cropping up there. I still struggle very much with, "I just literally don't know how to make a financial plan for you and plan for your shared goals if you don't show up in the fricking meeting. Just tell me what the goals are and help me understand where you want to go." Particularly because now, as I've said in other versions of this podcast, I don't even believe your goal is when you tell me your goals. I'm like, I've gotta go a couple of layers deeper to get to what the real goals are. Speaking, I guess, rhetorically in this conversation, okay, so maybe there's a difference between, "I need both of you engaged in the initial planning process because we need to make a plan that reflects both of your goals and objectives and values and what's important to you. But after we get through that part of the process, if one of you wants to be the primary in this relationship, because a lot of our client couples already do that naturally in how they divide things as a couple, we're happy to work with you on that." I don't know. Would it have been easier in the early planning meetings with your wife and Christy, if Christy at least told you, "You have to be at this one, but once you get through the initial planning process, I'll let you off the hook"?
Carl: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's interesting just to...I think to me, where I land on this is, if we just gave ourselves permission as planners to lean into the strengths and feel, feel like.
Michael: "Our strengths", or the couple's strengths?
Carl: The couple's strengths and to think strategically about it. And one of those would be like, "Hey, maybe once a year we just need to check in big vision, you know, almost..." And maybe that meeting's held somewhere different. Maybe it feels different. Maybe it's on a walk. Maybe it's what Christy's doing now, which is like slipping in these phone calls every month or so, every quarter, at least, "Hey, just want to check in." And then after I hang up, I'm like, "She was just financial planning me." You know? So maybe that's more what I'm thinking, but I do like the acknowledgement of, "Hey..." So, yeah. And I think you're right, initially.
Two Financial Planning Rules For Disinterested Spouses [21:06]
Carl: So let me just quickly, to get this out of the way, the two rules that I came up with. And again, I am sure I'm wrong about all this. I just think it's an interesting discussion for us to be having as a profession. The first rule was the person who is creatively disengaged, intentionally focused somewhere else...I don't know what the right word is, that person has to...
Michael: Is "disinterested" okay? I feel like disinterested is reasonable.
Carl: I kind of like disinterested. As long as it doesn't feel diseased, like it needs to be fixed.
Michael: Yeah. It's not...
Carl: Intentionally disinterested.
Michael: Disengaged feels judgy. Disinterested is just acknowledging, "You're really not interested in this conversation, are you?"
Carl: Because that's exactly what I would say, I'm just not interested. So the person who is disinterested needs to feel completely heard. And so that falls on all parties involved. So the disinterested person, I would say to the disinterested person in this case...and I've been in...you think of this as maybe how a really good board runs or any sort of counsel, right? You want everybody there to vehemently, aggressively argue for their perspective. And in order for the person who's in charge, that's ultimately going to make the decision, to be able to make that decision and hold a cohesive board, everybody on the board needs to feel like they were heard. Because then if I make a decision, I'm going to make a decision that it might be that we're going in a slightly different direction than what Sally said, but Sally needs to feel like her opinion was heard, understood, honored, even though you decided to go a different direction.
So we've got to carry those conditions, and that falls on the disinterested person, the interested spouse, and the planner, all of which need to be like, "Hey, no, we need... What would you like? And what would this look like?" To find ways to get them engaged in that visioning perspective, like you pointed out. So number one, they need to feel completely heard...not just heard, but understood. They need to be able to say what they think, what they want, what they're worried about. And they need to know that it's been received. And then again, that's work on all parties. You'd say to the disinterested spouse or partner, "Hey, you really got to be vocal here."
Michael: Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Carl: And then the second condition lies on the disinterested spouse or partner. If you're going to take...if you're going to allow yourself...if you're going to be thrilled about being fired, you genuinely have to be okay with whatever decision is made. And you have to say, especially if it's a different direction than maybe you would have gone – these have to be our decisions, not, "You made that decision." There's no going back and second-guessing it. Those are the two conditions I created for myself.
Michael: It just kind of feel like couples dynamics decisions in general.
Carl: Sure. I just think you need to be very overt about it. If you're going to be the disinterested spouse and have the privilege of being fired...
Michael: I love that you call it a privilege.
Carl: Oh, then you need to make sure, "Hey, wait, wait, wait. I don't think you guys understood this. I really feel strongly about how we fund education for the kids," or, "I'd much rather spend money on this than invest it here," or whatever it is. You need to voice your opinion, which could be hard. As I say that out loud, it's interesting. If you're the disinterested spouse, you need to voice your opinion. That may be challenging, right?
Michael: Well, it feels kind of challenging if you're not coming to the fricking meetings, Carl.
Carl: How about this? "Hey, we're having a financial planning meeting, one of our regular maintenance meetings. If you'd like to attend, we always love to have you because, believe it or not, you add a lot to the meeting. It makes it much better. If you don't want to attend, if it's just not interesting to you or you got something you'd rather be doing like going to the dentist for a root canal..."
Michael: Hypothetical comparison.
Carl: Hypothetically. "Then, like anything, if you'd like to, just record a quick voice memo, just talk through anything that's on your mind. Send it to me, make sure I have it, and I'll make sure that we get that transcript and we review it as part of the meeting."
Can Advisors Retain Widowed Disinterested Clients? [25:46]
Michael: So the other thing that strikes me about this conversation. I feel like, as planners, this tends to come from two places, like this urge for having both spouses involved. One is something to the effect of, I think what you said earlier, like, they're not going to engage in the plan, they're not going to buy into the plan. I can't even make a good plan if I literally don't know what half the couple's goals and desires are. So there's some point, at least at the beginning...
Carl: Yeah. Reasonable.
Michael: ...that I need you. All right. Even you didn't get fired from the first meeting. You got fired after the initial planning process.
Carl: That's right.
Michael: So I do feel like there's something there that I don't know how to let go of upfront, but maybe I could at least express to a client, "All right. You've got to go through a little early process with me. It's important because... goals, your voice heard, input, all those things. Once we get to the maintenance mode, I'm not going to pressure you to come to all the meetings. I'll let you off the hook, right?" However you say that appropriately to a client in context. The second reason why we do this, and just I'm fascinated because this was literally in the news days before we are recording this episode.
Carl: Oh, no, you're going to talk about something like the retention of the spouse or something.
Michael: Of course, that's why you care about the engagement, Carl. I don't want to lose the spouse when you follow the thing. It was 70%.
Carl: Yeah, of course. Like, you know how many spouses are like that. Yeah.
Michael: 70% of spouses leave after the...
Carl: You've got to engage them.
Michael: Right. You've got to engage. So this is fascinating to me because there was an article that just came out from...it's like some consulting firm that does interesting data on consumer trends who took on this question about advisors...or consumers firing clients. So I don't know the full details. They get panel data from consumers. They look at them longitudinally over time. And so they just actually went back and looked. I'm not sure if it's longitudinal or they just ask over the past two years, but they tried to find out how many consumers actually change financial advisors. And I think their number was something like 5% of consumers had changed advisors in the past two years. Which I heard, I'm like, okay, kind of rings true, 2% or 3% a year switching around. That's about where a lot of firms are with retention. And then they went and looked at the widows and said, "If you are a recent widow, have you fired your advisor recently?" And the number that they came up with was 13.7%. So call it for 14%.
Carl: What are you talking about? I thought that number was like 70% or 80%, like everybody.
Michael: Yeah. So this was the thing. So then, apparently, they went to track down because they were like, "Huh, we got 14%, and the industry says 70%." So they went to try to track down the origin of the 70%. No one can find the origin of the 70%. The people who it's commonly attributed to is Spectrum Research. They called the old head of research of Spectrum and he said, "No, that number didn't come from us. I don't know where it came from, but it wasn't from us."
Carl: Come on. Heresy all the way down.
Michael: No one can find the origin of this number, or validate it, or find any research to substantiate that it was ever actually measured that way. So...
Carl: Really?
Michael: Yes. They went completely cold trail to everyone who's ever been cited as giving that stat, which eventually went back to a research firm that said that didn't come from us. It's like George Walpert ran research for Spectrum. He's like, we never had that finding. In fact, he said, "I have no idea where 70% came from. 70% of consumers don't change anything that fast."
Carl: A whole generation or two trained building process and procedure and engagement models around that fear.
Michael: Now, again, they did find, again, I'm roughly rounding the numbers, 5% of consumers leave every two years in general, and 14% of widows. So like, okay, the attrition is 3X as bad, but it's not 40X as bad to get from like 3% to 70%.
Carl: I wouldn't have been surprised if that...you'd almost expect that number to be 15% to 25%. That's a reasonable thing.
Michael: Well, yeah. I mean, goodness, even if I've got a great relationship with the spouse, just yeah, that level of turmoil and losing a spouse, maybe you make some changes in your life. I mean, some subset of those is probably because "I just prefer a local advisor. And when my spouse died, I moved across the country to be near my grandchildren, and I found a new advisor who's local to me." I mean, there's so many reasons.
Carl: Or some trust relationship or, yeah, many different things.
Michael: That can change.
Carl: But anyway, the point is that's fascinating. That's the point.
Michael: So, yes. To your comment, right? I mean, why do we call it disengaged? I mean, there's a frame of that. Who are they disengaged... I mean, they're disinterested because they're not interested in the money stuff.
Carl: Subject matter.
Michael: They're disengaged because they're disengaged with me. I mean, that's a planner-centric word to me, not a client-centric word. And it comes from because you're supposed to engage the less-engaged or disengaged spouse because you don't want to lose them because 70% of widows leave. And now all of a sudden it's like, well, maybe not many of them actually leave in the first place, which was why I was interested even when you brought this up, that maybe we really are making a much bigger problem out of this than we have to be. Or now I even start wondering the other direction, like, cool, how many couples over the years did I just not get because I was so insistent that both members of the couple have to be engaged? And the truth was, if the disinterested spouse, the spouse's choice was to do all the meetings that I'm going to make that person do or just not get a financial plan, I'm going to bet in retrospect a lot of them just didn't get a financial plan.
Carl: For sure.
Michael: And now I'm not even helping them incrementally versus at least in retrospect, okay, maybe I could have insisted on the upfront planning meeting, but not ongoing. Or I guess, as you've highlighted with Christy, find other ways to engage. Now, if Christy comes and listens to this, I'm betting that you're not going to get phone calls every month anymore, Carl.
Carl: I don't know if those are every month. It's every other month. And I hope I keep getting them because I enjoy them. And so I think that's... You know what I love about...as we wrap up here, I think my favorite parts of the work that I get to do and then my favorite episodes of this show are ones that ask interesting questions. And I'm okay with not having the answer, I just think it's an interesting thing that maybe it's not heresy. Let's be open to the idea that maybe there's other ways to look at it. What would it look like? What would the world look like if you... I mean, if there are people like me, I'm honest, like I was so thrilled, so happy. And I even wrote in the, yeah...anyway. So one of my best days, you know?
Michael: Clients hire us to delegate and not deal with this. And then we made a policy that says, "You know, that thing you wanted to delegate, I'm going to make you keep coming to the meetings, the thing you didn't want to do and hired me to delegate."
Carl: It's just interesting for us to bounce that around. So thanks for doing it.
Michael: Awesome. Thank you, Carl.
Carl: Cheers, Michael.
