James, as you know, we require spouses part of our planning process.

Spouses, partners.

Now, require sounds like an intimidating word.

And many of you who reach out to Roach, you first reach out to Root and you're the one spearheading it.

You've been managing the finances.

You maybe enjoy hearing how we help clients optimize and you might want that for yourself.

But maybe your spouse or

partner just generally finds finances less interesting we actually don't think that's the case

we think they just haven't been asked the right questions yet and your spouse plays a really

important role in your planning process they're the one sleeping right next to you they have the

best seat in the house we want to to understand, are you really stressed out?

You told us during our meeting that you're not worried about being bored, but your

spouse said that you are going to bed looking at chat GPT, wondering what activities you

can do in retirement.

So we really want to make sure your spouse, as well as yourself, have a really detailed planning

process, and we want to make

sure both of you feel equally heard. That's the topic for today's episode.

That's the topic, and the reason for that, the reason that we've been talking about this,

and yes, we'll talk about root for a second, is why do we require our spouse, or both spouses

to be involved with someone's married to go through this, is because people this perception that okay we need to go get our financial plan done that's something I can do it's almost like I need to go to the grocery store and buy this I can take care of that my spouse will take care of the other thing you go pick up the dry cleaning I go pick up the Cheerios and it seems like that divide and conquer and it's done The financial plan is not just a math problem to be done. I think that's most people's perception. Run the Excel scenarios. Run the financial planning scenarios. Whatever it is, I'll take this back, all communicate it to my spouse and will be good. And that's the wrong way to look at it. People look at the financial plan as like the thing that they are getting or is the final product, whereas the financial plan is just a means to an ends. I think that oftentimes when there is a spouse that's not as involved, for me, for example, I tend to be the one that's doing a lot of the money stuff in our household. My wife, Ashland, is not doing nearly as much as it.

So I, if I was going to financial planner, I might say, hey, Ari, I want to work with you.

I kind of handle all the financial stuff. Ashland doesn't need to be here. Let's go ahead and get started. And your response to me, you would say, well, we're not going to get started until actions here and the reason for that isn't because oh she needs to understand what uh uh the right roth

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