Most of us are optimizing a number, whether it’s a retirement balance or a job title, and almost never stop to ask what it’s for. Wharton economist Corinne Low measures how people really trade time, money, and love, and she has a short exercise that shows how little of your ideal life depends on that number. Joe Saul-Sehy and guest co-host Anna Allem, CFP, put her ideas to work on careers, partnerships, and the awkward conversations in between. You’ll hear why a house can act as insurance in a marriage, why your job won’t love you back, and how to walk into a hard conversation holding real leverage.
What You’ll Walk Away With
- A two-minute exercise that shows what your money is actually for
- Why almost nobody in that picture is working long weeks, and what that says about your calendar
- What economists mean by “utility,” and why it’s richer than happiness
- The case for “having it almost,” and why dropping perfect can raise satisfaction
- BATNA, a negotiation term worth knowing, and how to build yours before a hard conversation at work or at home
- The coin flip study: why people nudged out of a stuck situation ended up happier
- Why buying a home can act as insurance in a partnership, and who that lets take a step back
- Why your job is a tool for converting time into money, and why that’s good news
- Quick-fire answers on splitting bills 50/50, who gets the last word on big purchases, and whether prenups are only for the wealthy
- One thing to put on your calendar this week that makes you richer without earning a dollar
Why This Matters Now
Most of us are working hard toward a finish line we’ve never described out loud. That makes it easy to keep climbing, keep saving, and keep wondering why the finish line keeps moving. If you worry about making a move you can’t undo, or you feel like everyone else got a rulebook you missed, this conversation is a friendly way to decide what you’re building before you build more of it.
From the Basement
Doug reveals that Mrs. Neighbor Doug exists, which stuns everyone in mom’s basement, and then explains why Joe’s mom’s negotiating style involves a threat to cancel the shrimp appetizer at The Sizzler. Joe also shares a story about a rare Venetian grape that only thrives because of stress.
Resources Mentioned
“Collateralized Marriage” and “Winning the Bread and Baking It Too”: two of her research papers discussed in the interview
Corinne Low at Wharton: faculty page with her research
Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours: Corinne Low’s book, in paperback
Our Mentor: Dr Corrine Low, PhD
Big thanks to Dr. Corrine Low for joining us today. To learn more about Corrine, visit Corinne Lowe | Substack. Grab yourself a copy of the book Having It All
Have a question for the show?
Want more than just the show notes? How about our newsletter with STACKS of related, deeper links?
- Check out The 201, our email that comes with every Monday and Wednesday episode, PLUS a list of more than 19 of the top money lessons Joe’s learned over his own life about money. From credit to cash reserves, and insurance to investing, we’ll tackle all of these. Head to StackingBenjamins.com/the201 to sign up (it’s free and we will never give away your email to others).
Other Mentions
Join Us Friday!
Tune in on Friday, when we explore how to adjust your financial plan when life changes the rules, from having kids (or deciding not to), going back to school, changing careers, or taking a sabbatical, so your money keeps working toward your ever-changing version of the best life.
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: Year-End Money Moves: Student Loan Savings, Roth Conversions, and Disability Insurance (SB1912) | Stacking Benjamins
Episode transcript
[00:00:00] opener: It’s easy to grin when your ship comes in, and you’ve got the stock market beat. But the man worthwhile is the man who can smile when his shorts aren’t too tight in the seat.
[00:00:19] opener: Okay, Pookie, do the honors
[00:00:27] Doug: Live from Joe’s mom’s basement, it’s The Stacking Benjamins Show
[00:00:41] Doug: Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and we’re all trying to build a bigger stack, but here’s the big question: what for? If you want more life, more money, and better work, today’s show is for you, because we’re gonna answer those questions with Wharton professor and economist Dr. Corinne Lowe. And now, two people who you will believe have got that sweet life of podcasting down to a science, it’s Joe and Anna, elle, elle, elle, elle, elle, elle, elle.
[00:01:12] Doug: I just never know when to stop. Elle.
[00:01:15] Anna: Thanks, Doug.
[00:01:16] Doug: You just get rolling, and your, and your tongue just keeps moving
[00:01:19] Joe: and- I’m sure that’s the way, Anna, you introduce yourself at parties, too. I mean, Anna elle, elle, elle, elle, elle, elle- Elle, elle, elle, elle … elle, elle, elle, elle, elle.
[00:01:25] Anna: Yeah, someone has to, like, hit my back to, like-
[00:01:27] Anna: get me to stop. Knock it out of me.
[00:01:30] Joe: Happy Wednesday, Stackers. We’re super happy you’re here. This is the Stacking Benjamins show. Man, do we have an interview I’ve been so waiting to do. Dr. Corinne Lowe is here, and if you’ve ever thought, you know, “I’m saving all this money. What am I doing it for?” Which I don’t know if it’s like this anymore, Anna, but back when I was a financial planner, people were like, “Yeah, let’s just talk about saving.”
[00:01:52] Joe: Like, it, it was so difficult to talk about your goals and to prioritize your goals and to actually have the money meet what you value that those discussion… And, and, and those discussions are so valuable, but people didn’t wanna have that talk.
[00:02:06] Anna: Definitely. Yeah. It’s a hard conversation, and, like, you might not even be in a place where you really understand what it is at that point.
[00:02:13] Anna: It’s an evolving conversation always, and, and, and it’s gonna change as you continue in your financial plan.
[00:02:20] Joe: The other thing I love about, uh, Dr. Lowe’s work, which I saw about a year ago for the first time, and we’ve been chasing her down ever since, just all of the squeezes that we have as a family. That, you know, we go through this part that’s kind of the messy middle, Anna, where you might have parents that are beginning to age.
[00:02:39] Joe: You might have young children at home. You have a boss that wants more from you. You might be married and have a spouse that thinks you’re not spending enough time with them. You have this huge squeeze in your life. How do you survive the squeeze? She also talks about that. And not
[00:02:55] Doug: the good kind.
[00:02:56] Joe: No, not the good kind.
[00:02:57] Joe: Yes, not the, definitely not the good kind.
[00:03:01] Anna: I have no comment to that.
[00:03:05] Joe: On today’s show, we go deeper into what makes money important. We’re going to apply an economist practical lens to money, to work, and to relationships, and ask that bigger question, beneath the numbers, what are you trying to make your money or your time do for you?
[00:03:23] Joe: Dr. Corinne Lowe is a professor at Wharton. She teaches an award-winning class there on navigating careers. She’s been doing that for over a decade, and now she’s going to help all of you Stackers do better in your career, life, home, and meld the three together. So maybe we actually get better home life.
[00:03:44] Joe: You know, I don’t like the phrase, and I don’t like the phrase work-life balance, ’cause I agree with a lot of our guests that are like, “Balance is baloney. There’s no such thing.” But actually taking care of these different pieces so that they all work together I think is, is really important.
[00:03:59] Anna: I feel like people hate that term now.
[00:04:02] Anna: I think the balance is creating it to be what you picture it to be. So it doesn’t have to be that like it’s everything in your life is completely balanced out, but what does it look like to spend time with your kids for you? It might not be the same amount of time that you’re spending with work, but what does that look like and how are we achieving that?
[00:04:20] Anna: But it, it’s, again, it’s not gonna be balanced. And nowadays, like, everything’s flowing into each other all the time. So it’s like how do we create these boundaries so that we are somewhat in that balance that you want? I have found, like obviously I’m navigating this a lot as like a young mom, and I’m trying to figure out what that means for me.
[00:04:41] Anna: And so I have a picture in my head, and obviously it goes out of balance every so often, but I’m trying to get to that point that I’m looking at.
[00:04:48] Doug: Yeah, like so many things in life, this notion of balance is what you make of it, or in other words, you get to determine what balanced is. It isn’t somebody, you know, else’s external definition of it, eight hours at work, eight hours with your family, and eight hours sleeping.
[00:05:04] Doug: You get to determine that. And one of the major light bulb moments I had was I was at a baseball game entertaining clients, and they were on their phone, like doing work stuff on the phone. I kind of joked about it, like, “Hey, man, we’re at the ballgame.” His reply was really enlightening to me, which was, “This device is what allows me to be at the ballgame right now.”
[00:05:27] Anna: Mm-hmm.
[00:05:28] Doug: Like, I never thought of it that way. It’s, it used to be like, oh, you gotta put all that stuff down and just focus and be present on the thing.
[00:05:34] Joe: Instead it was, “I would’ve said no. Instead I got to say yes.”
[00:05:37] Doug: Right. Sometimes it’s- Mm-hmm … right, yeah, like when I’ve gone on vacation with the boys and we go to these beautiful…
[00:05:41] Doug: we go hiking or we go to these beautiful places, I have really tried to enforce, look, you’re gonna go off separately, spend 30 minutes. I’m gonna keep your phone, and just go sit on that rock on the shore and just take some time to do that. And those are important moments, but in general, we all get so wrapped up in that.
[00:06:00] Doug: It can’t always be like that. There are times when the, the being able to work at 8:00 at night from home is what allowed you to come home at 5:00 or 4:00 to make dinner, or to, you know, do this other thing after school. Mm-hmm. And that’s all part of the balance. The fact that you’re working at 8:00 isn’t necessarily an imbalance.
[00:06:20] Doug: Don’t forget that you got to come home at 3:30 or 4:00, pick them up from daycare or whatever it is, and having to work at 8:00 is what allowed that. And I kind of like that idea that it, it fluctuates, it flows, the balance does.
[00:06:33] Joe: I do. I wanna finish this conversation after Dr. Lowe, who’s upstairs talking to Mom right now, after she comes down to the basement and visits with us.
[00:06:43] Joe: You can see where she’s going and how we always fight with this stuff, and there’s some other stuff going on that she’s gonna get into, which is the fact that… Well, I h- I hope she gets into it The 1950s and 1960s were a long time ago, but we still in our heads envision this kind of family unit that is vastly changed.
[00:07:02] Joe: And from an economist perspective, just looking at the numbers around what’s really happening in our life versus what we think we want to, sometimes this fiction that we have of the way things should be versus the way life really is also gets in the way. Plus she’s, she’s got a great piece on negotiating out of some of this.
[00:07:21] Joe: So if you’re in a bad situation where people want you to be something that you’re not, whether it’s at home or at work, how do you negotiate your way out of that? We’ll talk about that. We’ll also unpack it, Anna and Doug and I, afterwards. But for now, Dr. Corinne Lowe coming down to the basement. I really can’t wait for this interview.
[00:07:48] Joe: Stackers, listen to this direct quote from today’s guest, “I can tell you statistically whether you should buy a house before you get married. It’s not about money, it’s about insurance.” For the divorce. And okay, we, we need to back up because I did not have my house’s divorce insurance on my bingo card today.
[00:08:11] Joe: We’re joined by Dr. Corinne Lowe. I’m super happy that you’re here in mom’s basement with us. Thank you so much.
[00:08:17] Corrine: Thanks for having me over to your mom’s basement around this rickety card table.
[00:08:21] Joe: It is… That, that line, that line obviously shocked me, and there’s a lot of your work that just opened my eyes, so I can’t wait to get into this.
[00:08:32] Joe: But you’re a Wharton economist. You’ve spent your career studying poverty, studying hard trade-offs. At what point did you turn that same lens on your own marriage and go, “Wait, I, I could run the numbers on this. Like, I’ve got the skill set to look at this in economic terms”?
[00:08:50] Corrine: I think what’s interesting is I’ve always been fascinated in this trade-off that women make between kind of career and family, and so I was working on that during my dissertation before I had kids myself, before I was, like, worrying about the fertility time horizon.
[00:09:04] Corrine: I wasn’t in that phase of my life yet. And it was almost the other way around where almost each thing that I researched started coming true in my own life because those experiences are so universal for women. And then that became motivation for me to dive back into it with the experiences I was having and look at what the data said and just see the way, you know, no matter how smart we think we are, no matter if you’re an economist who studies career family trade-offs, that there are just some of these forces that are so strong, that are structural in the economy, that you get kind of pulled into these highly gendered traps.
[00:09:39] Corrine: I think it’s a really universal conversation, and I think it’s a conversation that men should be listening to every bit as much as women, so I’m really excited to talk to the Stackers out there because it’s a conversation we all need to have about, you know, what do we need to do to, uh, have it all?
[00:09:55] Joe: Yeah, half our audience is men, and as I was reading your work, I was just thinking how much we all need to read this.
[00:10:02] Joe: These statistics, these incredible statistics that you share are so revealing and, and frankly so helpful to having a healthy relationship, whether it’s a relationship at home or at work, and we’ll talk about both. Mm-hmm. But before we go deep, and I know this is gonna be difficult, if you had a one-sentence version of really what you found, w- what would that be?
[00:10:24] Joe: What would that sentence be like?
[00:10:27] Corrine: I’ll start with time use. So I think is really interesting is that I think the one-sentence version is that we’ve had a revolution in women’s time use, and we haven’t had a revolution in men’s time use, and that’s leaving us in some very hard situations that now couples are navigating individually, but it’s really a bigger picture societal thing, which is that you have women enter the labor force, start to take on the same roles as men in a lot of ways, often start to bring home as much money as men.
[00:10:52] Corrine: But you don’t have any kind of a restructuring or any kind of change in societal norms that allows men to step into the home front and to kind of feel affirmed in their masculinity by doing that. And so I think that would be my one-sentence summary is this, asymmetric gender revolution.
[00:11:07] Joe: Well, and also by the same token, I mean, I like that you focused on the men in our audience, but the women then feel this squeeze, right?
[00:11:14] Joe: As I’m adding all of these things that maybe the average stereotypical mom in the ’50s didn’t have. It’s a whole new world, Corinne.
[00:11:23] Corrine: Absolutely. And so that’s exactly, I mean, I was saying, you know, I think it’s important that we talk about men and masculinity, but where that’s leaving us, it’s leaving both people in a bad position.
[00:11:32] Corrine: Because you have women who are winning the bread and baking it too, that’s the title of one of my papers, and then you have men who I see in my data might be the lower earner in the household, but they’re still actually working more hours a week because they don’t have an alternative role of what does this look like to kind of be, you know, maybe be a provider in the household if it’s not just through going to work.
[00:11:53] Corrine: And then you have on the other side, his wife, maybe she’s a nurse, she’s earning more money than him, right? In the data I can see their wages, and she’s earning more money than him, but she’s working fewer hours because she’s still the one to, you know, pick up the kids from daycare, to put the kids to bed, to pack the lunches, to call the pediatrician.
[00:12:09] Corrine: And it’s our roles are incompatible with our realities right now.
[00:12:14] Joe: You had a statistic, a graph, that I liked, and maybe I’ll ask your publisher if we can just include this- Yeah … in the show notes, but it’s a graph of how much work over the years the woman does around the house, the household chores that the woman does, and how that’s changed over the years, and, uh, how it’s changed for men.
[00:12:35] Joe: And for men it has changed very little, and as a woman’s feeling the squeeze, it’s gone down, but it still is much, much more than a man is doing in the house. And, and I actually, it’s funny, I look at my house. I work from home. I take care of a lot of things, and we’ll get into this, but I think Cheryl and I do a good job of taking care of each other.
[00:12:54] Joe: I would still put the things that she does at home, even though she has a very busy career, as ahead of me. It did not shock me. It was horrifying to see it in person- Yeah … but it did not shock me. But with that basis, that we’ve got a lot of things that we need to figure out, we can see where some of the conflicts in our relationship, not just at home, but also at work, come from because of this.
[00:13:18] Joe: Let’s begin where you begin, that our lives, you say, have this hidden scoreboard, like a video game. Walk, walk me through that. What is the score really?
[00:13:28] Corrine: For a lot of people who are stackers, you’re always kind of thinking about maximizing something, and a lot of times you might be thinking about maximizing money or that retirement account balance.
[00:13:37] Corrine: But I’m an economist, and when we think about what individuals are maximizing, individuals are very different from firms. Firms value money. They value profit, right? The firm’s health is determined by a line that’s dollars and cents. Individuals actually aren’t like that at all. What do individuals value?
[00:13:57] Corrine: Well, economists had to give a name to it, and we call it utility, which is sort of like happiness, right? That it’s like, okay, we don’t actually eat money, we don’t actually get joy from money. We value what money brings us. But it’s a little bit richer than happiness, and I think that’s why it’s such a great concept for people to know because in utility terms, we could see that setting limits with your toddler who then throws a temper tantrum, that could be a positive utility decision, even though it doesn’t feel super joyful.
[00:14:25] Corrine: Right. Or more meaningfully, sitting by the side of a dying family member crying, we wouldn’t say that’s maximizing happiness, but we understand as human beings that’s something we value. That’s utility. So utility encompasses all of those things. And if you think about utility as what you’re maximizing, it’s very clarifying because then when you’re making financial decisions, you’re making them in service of the utility they will ultimately bring you.
[00:14:51] Corrine: So it’s, yes, we’re maximizing the retirement account, but that’s so I can have these things that I value that are important to me when I retire.
[00:15:00] Joe: Yeah. For what? I mean, the big question is for what? What am I putting the money away for? Exactly. Yeah. As I’m reading this, of course, I start thinking to myself, right?
[00:15:09] Joe: Like, what am I solving for? What are, what are my big things? And, and if I asked you yourself, Karen, as somebody that’s studied this way longer and more than I have, what your own utility function is optimizing for, could you answer that? Because it was a struggle for me.
[00:15:23] Corrine: Yeah. So I don’t think it’s simple to answer it, and it’s complex.
[00:15:26] Corrine: It doesn’t have like a one single answer because as I said, it’s not quite joy, it’s meaning, and that’s so many different things. But the way that I ask people to figure this out for themselves is to picture a world without constraints. Economists call this unconstrained maximization, right? So if you could actually have everything you want, so you’re a mega billionaire, and I want you to picture what your life looks like, what surrounds you, and how you’re spending your days.
[00:15:54] Corrine: And all of that, that is utility. And so in your picture, there’s some things that you can buy with money. Somebody listening had a yacht in the picture. Somebody listening had a newly renovated basement. There’s some things you can buy with money, and there’s other things that you might have noticed that were having time to pursue an artistic hobby I haven’t gotten to do for a while, taking care of my body, spending time in nature, spending time with loved ones, which you can’t buy with money.
[00:16:23] Corrine: And if I ask people very honestly, even the people listening who, like, love their job and they say like, “Oh, my career brings me so much meaning. I love my job.” If you ask people honestly, was anybody working sixty hours a week in that picture? I bet nobody would say yes. Which again clarifies the for what, that our career is actually only a means to an end.
[00:16:43] Corrine: Our ultimate goal of our job is for it to pay us in money. I describe it as a technology for converting your time into money. It’s an ATM that you can put your time and effort into and get money out of. And hopefully, that exercise lets you picture what are you maximizing. You’re not gonna get all of those things because in the real world, we face constraints, we face trade-offs.
[00:17:06] Corrine: But your goal is to get more of everything in your picture, and it’s a holistic picture. So it means if we just pursue the things that you can buy with money, we’re gonna lose out on the things that you actually needed time to really enjoy that were equally a part of your picture
[00:17:22] Joe: Two things fascinated me as I went through your exercise.
[00:17:27] Joe: The first one was, and I think you asked us to l- like, begin by just listing six things fairly quickly, and I list six, and only two of them have anything to do with money. One is educating as many people as possible about financial literacy j- just because I do find it fun. Yeah. I find my career very fun.
[00:17:45] Joe: So that was on the six, kind of it was something I find a lot of utility in. Getting to speak to people like you, like, it’s super fun to do this, and also joyful when people tell me that we changed their life. Mm-hmm. Then the other one was experience the world. Not just see the world, but get to meet people in different places around the world, ’cause I find that as we meet more people, I find my worldview changes and becomes better.
[00:18:09] Joe: But the other four had nothing to do with money, and that was the big aha. Uh, b- I’m like, w- you know, on a daily basis we’re telling people how to do a Roth IRA conversion, Corinne and, and yet four things could be solved without even doing that.
[00:18:22] Corrine: Yeah, I know. That’s exactly what’s so interesting, right? Is that it- it’s so easy for humans to think of ourselves as mini firms, that we’re maximizing revenue, we’re maximizing profit when that’s not actually the purpose of our lives at all.
[00:18:35] Corrine: And so I think it’s really important to think about money as a tool, and you wanna take good care of your money, absolutely, because it is a tool to get so many different things. But you also can’t let your pursuit of financial wellness interfere with your pursuit of this more holistic wellbeing of overall utility, and I think that’s where people can get stuck, especially, and this was me, if you have some old narratives from your past where you felt insecure about money at some point, or you grew up poor and you’re kinda trying to, like, climb out of that hole, or you’re trying to fill that wound as you’re like, “Okay, if I just work a little bit harder and I get a little bit more money, then I’m gonna feel safe.”
[00:19:14] Corrine: But if you really think about what utility is for you, it’s so easy to miss out on the things in that picture that you could literally be doing right now. Which means if we define true wealth as having the things in your picture, you could make yourself richer right now by just setting aside some time to do one of those things in your picture that you feel like you’re not getting to do enough, right?
[00:19:37] Corrine: And that would actually make you richer, and you don’t have to go out and work harder or get a side hustle to do that.
[00:19:42] Joe: Yeah. When the definition of richer starts to change, that’s a powerful thing. And I think, obviously, then number two then, Stackers, after you write down these things is then look at your calendar.
[00:19:52] Joe: Like, uh, Corinne, I think that’s what you’re saying. Look at your calendar and say, “Am I living these? Am I actually going after the things that I’m telling myself are important?” And for me, I find often that I’m not chasing the things that I’m telling myself are the most important. The second thing that struck me as you were talking is how different yours would be than mine are.
[00:20:13] Joe: Yeah. And I grasped that right away, but then I think about the fact that- We talked about gender differences at the top of this discussion, but in any relationship, whether it’s with our boss, a coworker, uh, a child, whatever it might be, in any relationship, just having that discussion is one we rarely have.
[00:20:31] Corrine: Yeah. And I tell young people this, you wanna find out if the person that you’re dating, if you’re aligned on utility goals. Because if the person that you’re dating says, “Oh, well, for me, prestige and being the boss and being high up in the hierarchy is super important to me, it’s part of the utility,” well, that person’s gonna wanna put a lot of their time into the job and the career space because that’s something that they value as kind of an end in itself.
[00:20:56] Corrine: Whereas if you say, “Well, no, I actually only see my job as a means to an end, and I really value spending time with family and having kids and investing in those kids,” you’re actually gonna find an incompatibility that you didn’t realize you had if you just stick with the more surface level question of, how many kids do you want, right?
[00:21:12] Corrine: Mm-hmm. “Oh, we both want two kids. Great.” But actually, we have very different values about how we really wanna spend our time and how it converts into that deeper utility. So I totally agree, it is unique to everyone. But I also think that’s one of the really neat things about spending time thinking about your utility function, is it frees you up from comparing yourself to your colleagues or your neighbors or your friends because everyone’s maximizing something different.
[00:21:38] Corrine: So of course there’s somebody at your firm getting more promotions than you, or of course there’s somebody making more money than you, but their values, their utility function might not be the same as you
[00:21:50] Joe: Well, and this, this leads to people feel like they’re failing at having it all. Everybody wants it all, and we feel the squeeze.
[00:21:58] Joe: But you have this phrase, having it almost.
[00:22:00] Corrine: Mm-hmm.
[00:22:00] Joe: My good friend Paula Pant has a show called You Could Afford Anything, Just Not Everything. Mm-hmm. And, and this seems to be kind of along the same lines. You could have it almost. Why does this reframe of having it almost actually make people feel better instead of worse that you’re not gonna get everything?
[00:22:15] Corrine: Yeah. I think one of the things was going through the squeeze myself, was just realizing how much that pursuit of perfection is part of what undermines our ultimate goal of utility, is that if you’re constantly judging yourself against this perfect vision where we are going to be an amazingly accomplished 80s career woman and we’re gonna be an Instagramable trad wife-
[00:22:37] Corrine: who, where everything in our homes looks absolutely perfect, right? We’re always gonna feel like we’re not enough, and then we’re gonna be dissatisfied even with the things that we really value. So why would I want less utility for the same amount of stuff? So I think this reframe of, like, when you’re going through the squeeze, when there’s so many things to juggle, that life is going to be messy and imperfect, that life is going to involve trade-offs, that in order to have something that you really value, which, like, let’s say that’s time with your kids, maybe it means giving up having a perfectly clean house.
[00:23:10] Corrine: Or in order to really reach this career milestone that’s really important to you, maybe that means giving up some time with your friends. And so once you understand, look, those trade-offs are there, that’s what it is. That doesn’t mean that you don’t have it all. That doesn’t mean you’re losing or failing at the game of life.
[00:23:23] Corrine: That just is what it is. And so to me, that having it almost idea was kind of a way of capturing that, of giving yourself permission to reframe what this means. Because if you understand how our time is getting so squeezed from all sides, and we didn’t talk about … We talked about this incomplete gender revolution, but we didn’t talk about for those people who are parents out there, the way that parenting time has skyrocketed and how that- Oh
[00:23:44] Corrine: also put enormous squeeze on people who are parents. If you understand that we’re getting squeezed from all sides, our career wants more from us, our kids need more from us, the gender roles haven’t changed at home, it just doesn’t add up. Something has to give. And so just making peace with the fact that, like, okay, it’s gonna be a little bit messy.
[00:24:01] Corrine: It’s gonna be a little bit just in time. It’s gonna be a little bit DIY. But that’s my all. That’s what’s bringing me utility, and I’m gonna enjoy it instead of constantly judging it and denigrating it because it’s not perfect.
[00:24:14] Joe: Speaking of giving things up, you are very vulnerable at the beginning of this project, and you talk about your own marriage and about how you were very fearful of becoming a single parent.
[00:24:27] Joe: We do the same thing in our career often. We’re afraid of being unemployed, but I’m in a job that m- might be asking too much or there could be a ton of friction. Even with friendships, sometimes we have friendships where it just is not a good deal. I wanna go much deeper into your work and this idea that you present called your BATNA.
[00:24:50] Joe: This is apparently an, an econ term. A lot of our stackers don’t know anything about it, but I thought this was a really important concept. Can you explain what your BATNA is?
[00:24:59] Corrine: Yes. This comes from a negotiation science, and a BATNA is B-A-T-N-A, your best alternative to negotiated agreement This is something that’s so important to understand because any- you can think of basically any relationship, a marriage, a job, a friendship, as a negotiation where the status quo is you’re gonna continue that relationship, you’re gonna continue to engage in that business partnership, whatever it might be.
[00:25:27] Corrine: But if you ever feel like you are starting to get a bad deal in one of those relationships, it’s really important to make yourself not fearful, to understand and even to build up your BATNA, your best alternative to negotiated agreement. So for somebody who’s in a marriage that’s not working, it might mean actually thinking about what would it look like if I were to be a single parent?
[00:25:52] Corrine: What would the supports that I would need to put in place? What would I do financially? And not coming into those asks then within the relationship from a place of fear, but coming in from a place of strength. And if you do decide you wanna continue and you wanna save that marriage, you’re coming in and you’re saying, “I actually know I can do this on my own, but I want to do it with you, but here’s what needs to change.”
[00:26:14] Joe: Can I share one statistic that surprised me? Yeah. You found this out yourself, that single mothers actually sleep more than married mothers.
[00:26:23] Corrine: And they do less housework, and I was shocked that this was true. I had a woman who had gone through this recently before me said, “Corinne, you think it’s gonna be harder, but it’s gonna be easier because when you’re married you make this big elaborate family meal.
[00:26:37] Corrine: But when you’re a single mom, you feed the kids an apple and a cheese stick, and then you eat whatever you were gonna eat for dinner anyway.” And that is so true. It’s like you kind of give yourself permission to stop playing this role and trying to make everything perfect because you know as a single mom that it just doesn’t add up.
[00:26:52] Corrine: Yeah. But the data shows single moms, they sleep more, they do less housework because often in a marriage that isn’t working you’ve fallen into a pattern where instead of really dividing things equally, actually that mom is carrying the load for everybody in the household. That’s one piece of dispelling the fear, but I think the same thing with a job.
[00:27:11] Corrine: If you’re gonna go in and have a conversation with your boss, price yourself in the market first. Go look at what else is out there. Get your CV up into shape so that you are going in from a position of strength.
[00:27:22] Joe: Yeah. How does that change the conversation then?
[00:27:25] Corrine: It really changes how you feel, right? When you go in from that position of vulnerability that like I’m asking for a favor, and I think in, in particular women have a tendency to do this, to always feel like, “Oh, I have to ask for a favor.
[00:27:38] Corrine: I have to like, you know, try to get somebody to do something.” And instead of coming in from a little bit of a position of deserving this, think about developing your BATNA, ’cause it’s not just knowing your BATNA, it’s developing it. And so what I mean is it’s reactivating for a job. It’s reactivating the contact you haven’t had.
[00:27:54] Corrine: It’s having the coffee chat with somebody at a company who might be interested in hiring you. It’s calling up a recruiter and seeing what your price is. So you’re developing your BATNA so that then you can come in from a position of strength. You can say- Look, I actually know my worth, and I really wanna work with you to make sure that I can stay in this role, and I can continue to grow, and I can continue to thrive, and I can get that worth.
[00:28:16] Corrine: All of this is wrapped up in this idea that you mentioned at the beginning of this section, that human beings have a tendency to stay in stuff that’s not working. So there’s a study by economist, um, Steve Levitt of Freakonomics fame, where he showed that if you have people think about a decision, a two-way decision, and then flip a coin, and then you randomize whether they make their own decision or whether they follow the coin flip, when they follow the coin flip and you survey them later, they end up happier, okay?
[00:28:46] Corrine: Wow. Because people will, uh, tend on their own to stay stuck in the status quo more than they should, and the coin, you know, pushes them out of the status quo.
[00:28:55] Joe: Oh, that’s fascinating.
[00:28:56] Corrine: Yeah. So people have status quo bias, and we tend to think the unknown is scarier, so we don’t want to try. ending the marriage.
[00:29:06] Corrine: That might be an extreme example. But we also don’t wanna try changing jobs, we don’t wanna try moving cities, and sometimes when we do it, we find possibilities that we couldn’t have even known were there.
[00:29:16] Joe: It ends up being far better. Like, I think of some of these big moves that I’ve made during my career, it ended up th- the grass wasn’t greener, but it was so much different and so much more fun, and allowed me to be so much more alive.
[00:29:28] Joe: I like being a financial planner. I love talking to you here far more in mom’s basement than being, than, than when I was a financial planner. I would have never done that had I not had the confidence to do that. And I can just feel how when I look at my BATNA, I begin to get the confidence behind my voice and behind my posture.
[00:29:48] Joe: I mean, I d- I think it, it reveals itself in a lot of different ways during that conversation with the boss.
[00:29:54] Corrine: Yeah. I think you’re exactly right. That’s what people should be thinking about, right, is thinking about you’re not stuck. You’re never stuck in a situation. When you feel stuck, figure out what your best alternative is, and then if you decide to stay, you’re making a really active choice to say, “Oh, I actually really checked out the alternative path, and this is actually better for me, so I’m making an affirmative choice and I’m giving myself back the agency.”
[00:30:20] Joe: You know the self-talk, though, Corinne, that we give ourself. We’re like, “Oh, I chose this person because of love,” or, “I chose this job because of love.” You’ve a whole chapter about this called Love is the Epsilon. It sounds, in some ways it’s romantic, in another way it comes across as cold, like love is like a rounding error, right?
[00:30:39] Corrine: Yeah.
[00:30:39] Joe: Defend that phrase. Like, like y- you say that we don’t really choose out of real love anyway.
[00:30:46] Corrine: Yeah. Well, the phrase comes from when I was giving a presentation of my dissertation where I showed people were kind of matching based on income and based on essentially age with what I call reproductive capital.
[00:31:01] Corrine: Somebody raised their hand in the audience and was like, “Do you economists really believe this? Do you really believe people match on these factors? What about love?” Right? And I showed a graph, and the graph shows, you know, people are pretty well matched on these factors, and then there’s this noise around that line.
[00:31:15] Corrine: And I said, “No, love is here. Love is the epsilon.” Love is that error term that’s why I as an economist can’t perfectly predict who you’re gonna marry, right? It’s gonna say most of the time people, women are married to somebody who’s taller than them, but sometimes somebody falls in love and, you know, they’re matched the opposite way.
[00:31:32] Corrine: Nicole Kidman was married to Tom Cruise, whatever. That’s love. That’s the piece I can’t predict as an economist. But I found that phrase so helpful because people have a tendency to say if I talk about- Thinking about what a partner brings to the table in terms of shared values, in terms of your utility function, people have a tendency to be like, “Well, that’s cold, and that’s unromantic,” right?
[00:31:55] Corrine: And I say, “Well, if I look at the data, people are not just matching on random love.” There’s a lot of systemic factors. You’re much more likely to marry somebody close in age to you. You’re much more likely to marry someone if you’re a woman who’s taller, if you’re a man who’s shorter. You’re much more likely to marry someone who went to a similar school and has a similar education background.
[00:32:12] Corrine: It’s not that you are randomly, you know, pulling people and it’s just whoever you love most in the world. So love is there. Love is important. Attraction is important. But those are necessary conditions for a relationship to thrive. They’re not sufficient conditions that are going to carry you through the rest of your lives, and that’s so important because You know, speaking now from my 40s, I can tell you that love and attraction change over the course of a relationship, and maintaining them is actually very dependent on those systemic factors.
[00:32:45] Corrine: When somebody helps you live your best life, have your all, get your utility needs met, you’re gonna sustain love and attraction a lot more versus when you feel like someone else’s goals are in conflict with yours.
[00:32:57] Joe: Wow. And actually, you can even apply that to the job, right? You could apply it to your boss.
[00:33:02] Joe: You could apply it to your relationship at work.
[00:33:04] Corrine: Oh, I wanna talk about that, for sure. Because people say, “I love my job,” and again, as I said, when I ask them to picture what would you do if you were a mega-billionaire, nobody says they’d be working 60 hours a week. People like you who say, “I love talking to people, I love educating people,” and you get a lot of meaning from your job, and for me too in doing research and educating people about that research, I get a lot of meaning from my job.
[00:33:26] Corrine: If money were no object, do it for, like, 15 hours a week, maybe 20. And your job does not love you back. If your job goes through downsizing or has a financial crunch, they will lay you off. Love will not keep you there, okay? You are not actually a family. So I think it’s important to be a little bit less romantic about these relationships with our jobs.
[00:33:48] Corrine: Mm-hmm. And a little bit more transactional. And as I said, think about our job as the technology for converting our time into money, and the better the technology is, you might get meaning along with it, right? You might get fulfillment along with the money, and that’s great. Isn’t it great if you can convert your time into money and get meaning and fulfillment at the same time?
[00:34:10] Corrine: But I think a big mistake is people where they’re getting all that meaning and fulfillment, but they’re not getting any money, and then they’re putting so much time in that they’re missing out on meaning and fulfillment they could be getting by pursuing hobbies or spending time with their kids or with elderly loved ones.
[00:34:27] Corrine: I think it’s really important to take a hard look at your job and say like, “Am I getting out what I want given what I’m putting in?”
[00:34:35] Joe: I wanna take a little detour from this wonderful kinda straightforward walk we’re having. When you’re talking about love, you also talk about the dating apps, and I find some of this stuff, Karen, that you brought up so gross.
[00:34:48] Joe: Like, just … B- but, but the statistics don’t lie, right? Stats don’t lie. The, um … D- d- don’t get me wrong, stats can lie. Uh, so I will personally- And you can lie
[00:34:57] Corrine: with stats, yeah.
[00:34:58] Joe: Well, yeah, yeah, and I’ve seen people lie with stats. You have a point about the age penalty- on dating apps for women. And something around if a woman, and hopefully you can fill this in, because I think it’s if a woman is older than a man by X amount, she needs to make $7,000 more per year that she’s older for him to have any interest in her.
[00:35:21] Joe: Like, there’s a m- there’s a math equation to my love.
[00:35:25] Corrine: Well, that’s exactly what I mean, is that when people say, like, “Oh no, it’s all about love,” and then I can say, like- … “Well, I’ve run the studies and I can tell you it’s not all about love,” right? Because if I change people’s characteristics, people get a different reaction on dating apps.
[00:35:36] Corrine: And so there is, there’s some hard-nosed, you know, uh, stats that go into who we’re, quote, “attracted to” or who we’re interested in, right? And the other way as well, right? In that same study I found that women were more attracted to men the higher their income was, right? And so we are looking for things from a partner that are not just, like, romance, right?
[00:35:57] Corrine: We’re looking for a partner that is going to help us meet our life goals. And I guess the kind way of looking at that first statistic was that a lot of this had to do with fertility and reproductive capacity. So I have a friend who jokes that she’s like, “Well, I’m 41 but my eggs are 37, so should I put that on the dating app?”
[00:36:14] Corrine: You know? ‘Cause if it’s, it’s partly about reproductive capacity. If my life goal is to have children, then I want somebody that I know I’m gonna be able to have children with. There’s a part of our brains that is like the lizard brain that’s been trained by evolution to kind of go for certain things.
[00:36:29] Corrine: And for women I think that’s sometimes the person who’s gonna, like, kill the wild boar, right? Or protect us. Sometimes that’s incompatible with what’s actually gonna make us utility today. Because, you know, today there’s a lot fewer wild boars, there’s a lot fewer, you know, roaming hordes we need to be protected from, but there is a toilet paper roll that needs to be replaced-
[00:36:51] Corrine: and a hand soap that needs to be refilled.
[00:36:53] Joe: Been a long time since I’ve killed a wild boar for Cheryl, Corinne. Yeah. But I have changed a toilet paper roll.
[00:36:58] Corrine: Yes. If you do that, then, you know, that’s really being a provider today, okay?
[00:37:02] Joe: I don’t wanna brag, but I might have changed one yesterday. But just saying.
[00:37:07] Joe: Normally we stop for Doug’s trivia right here. But you know what? We’re gonna take a quick break from the sponsors to make sure we can keep on keeping on. We’re gonna hear from them, and then we’ll be back with more Dr. Corinne Low.
[00:37:23] Joe: Let’s go back to the line that opened the show. Unpack this. Why is buying a house together basically buying insurance against divorce?
[00:37:31] Corrine: Yes. This is from a paper that I have called Collateralized Marriage, if you want a really romantic title. The idea is, if you actually look at the history of American marriage, okay, is that we used to have in the 1940s and ’50s something that economists call specialization, which is that women invested at home, and they raised the kids, and men were in the formal labor market, and they brought home a paycheck.
[00:37:56] Corrine: And that exchange, that deal worked as long as the marriage lasted, right? Because the idea is she invest in the kids, the kids go off to college, he’s the one earning the paycheck, but he keeps sharing the spoils of his paycheck. Then we have the divorce revolution in the 1970s, where suddenly there were women who had done that.
[00:38:13] Corrine: They had invested in the kids, and only he had a career, and somebody like my grandmother left her job, right? She was working as a secretary when my grandpa went to law school. They got married, and they had kids. She left that job, and she raised the kids. She took care of the house. And these women ended up divorced in their 40s, starting over with minimum wage jobs, and they found out that that bargain they thought they’d entered into was not as long-lasting as they thought, and they told their daughters and granddaughters, like, “Do not let that happen to you.
[00:38:40] Corrine: You always have to have a way to support yourself.” So with that, this model of specialization collapsed, because women had to go into the labor force in order to have a backup career. I call this your money machine. You’ve gotta build up your money machine, and then even if you put it in a, a closet for a few years and it gathers dust, you always have it to kind of spool it back up if you need it.
[00:39:03] Corrine: And what we show in this paper is that specialization still can be advantageous and in fact we still see it in a lot of high-income households. And I don’t mean the full specialization of the 1950s. It’s not necessarily a stay-at-home wife and only one person with a career, but it is often the mom being the one to take more parental leave, the mom being the one to work part-time some time during her career.
[00:39:26] Corrine: Maybe they both start out at law firms working 60, 70 hours a week, and then they decide it’s better for him to work 80 and make partner, and for her to switch into a supporting role at the law firm, to switch into recruiting or, you know, something that’s not client-facing. See this in a lot of couples.
[00:39:42] Corrine: His income grows and hers doesn’t grow as much. What you need, if you’re going to do this, is really good insurance that you are going to be okay if this marriage doesn’t last. And so the paper shows that buying a home serves as that insurance, because the home is going to be divided in the case of divorce.
[00:39:58] Corrine: And so we see that couples who own homes are more likely to specialize. And again, not that extreme specialization of the past, but are more likely to have a little bit of that safety where she can invest more at home and in the kids, and he can invest more in the career. And we see it pay off in his career.
[00:40:14] Corrine: He actually earns more, and we see it pay off in the outcomes that we see for the family.
[00:40:19] Joe: They talk about in good movie making that a good movie has high stakes. Uh, th- they’re not just fighting, like some of these superhero movies drive me crazy ’cause they’re fighting, and I’m like, “Okay, when this 50 minutes gets over.”
[00:40:32] Joe: You know, so I, I, I generally don’t like those. But when the characters have to do something because of the stakes, I feel like what you’re saying is the equivalent here, the house is stakes. We have some real stakes here in this marriage, and rather than just separate, we are gonna have to figure this out.
[00:40:51] Corrine: Yeah, and we’re both showing, right, that we have skin in the game, and therefore it also nudges you to say when times get hard, let’s figure out how to renegotiate our terms rather than turning to that bat, right? Because now, you know, you kind of, you, you have more invested in that joint capital. And so I do think it’s a powerful thing to think about- As a couple, when you make a decision, like one person taking a step back from the labor market, and you think that that is jointly beneficial for the couple, to think about what insurance does she have.
[00:41:25] Corrine: Does she have insurance in terms of financial wellbeing? Not just in the case of divorce, but death, disability, AI taking the husband’s job. How is this family going to continue to thrive in the case where that one person’s career doesn’t turn into what you think it’s going to be or it isn’t there anymore?
[00:41:46] Corrine: And I think that’s a real conversation that families need to have as we’re just in a age with a lot of turmoil, a lot of disruption.
[00:41:54] Joe: Well, and I, I look at it the other way as let’s get away from that traditional role. Let’s flip it. Let’s say that her career has more upside potential. She’s really loving what she does.
[00:42:04] Joe: He’s not loving what he does. And maybe we flip the traditional roles. You’ve done studies that show that she is more likely to specialize, which could make her exponential, the whole family exponential amounts of money if she feels like she has a much more supportive family structure at home.
[00:42:24] Corrine: Exactly.
[00:42:24] Corrine: And I think that’s what’s so interesting now is, again, with all of this career disruption that we’re seeing, is we talk a lot about like, oh, if, you know, there’s a trade shock and people’s jobs get taken, reskilling them for another industry. But recognizing that so much value, so much of our utility is actually created within the home, and recognizing that, like, we should be flexible to our roles within the home too, not just for a man to change industries, but to say, oh, let’s say her career takes off and his stalls out because he was a software engineer and AI just eliminated his job.
[00:42:54] Joe: Yeah.
[00:42:54] Corrine: Can you get value from a different role at home and recognize that is every bit as economically valuable as going out into the labor market?
[00:43:04] Joe: Yeah. So how do we, how do we begin to… Let’s say that, uh, Cheryl sees that the deal we have right now is not the optimal deal for her, or for me it’s not the optimal deal.
[00:43:16] Joe: How do I renegotiate this without starting a fight?
[00:43:22] Corrine: Well, I think the key thing is we should keep separate values versus implementation. So I think if you can agree on shared values, and this is why I talk to couples about tracking their time, and I always say start with a values conversation. Don’t start with an accusation of you do, you do less or I do more.
[00:43:39] Corrine: Start with, “How do we think time should be divided?” And I find that couples are often very aligned there. And then you say, “Well, the rest is just details. Now let’s get curious about the data on how we’re implementing this.” And so I would say the same with a conversation about optimizing your two careers.
[00:43:55] Corrine: What are our values? What do we want for our kids? What’s our vision for the future? What do we want our eventual lives to look like? What do we want our retirement to look like? And then being able to say neutrally, without ego, “Well, what’s the best route to get there? Is it investing in one of our careers, or is it investing in both of ours equally?”
[00:44:14] Corrine: Maybe it’s her career that actually is the highest, higher investment career, and maybe if we think about our shared goals as a family instead of staying trapped in that narrow mindset of, “Oh, I’ve always got to maximize income, I’ve always got to maximize success,” maybe that frees somebody up to see, “Oh, actually, for that vision I ultimately have, your career might be our path to get there.”
[00:44:34] Joe: There was a great piece in the Wall Street Journal at the beginning of this year that said the big retirement crisis is mattering. But I can also see this if in a relationship one person decides to put their career on hold to support the other person’s career because they’re wondering if they matter in the same way that they had- Mm-hmm
[00:44:52] Joe: before. But you reframe this as this career pause or a slower season as a chapter, not an ending. Talk to the person listening right now who feels like she or he got left behind. What do you want them to hear?
[00:45:07] Corrine: You said it so well, that life is a book with many chapters, and in any of those chapters you are making certain investments.
[00:45:15] Corrine: I reframe when people talk about child penalties and women’s wages, I say, “Well, actually if we look at the data, she was investing in child human capital, which means that she was investing less in her own human capital, so naturally- It’s a different currency. Yes. There’s a new
[00:45:28] Joe: currency.
[00:45:29] Corrine: Exactly. And so I would ask, what are you investing in in that season, and what do you expect the returns of that to be?
[00:45:36] Corrine: And if you feel like you aren’t getting the returns to that within your relationship, that’s a conversation to have. One quick checkup that I ask couples to do is to say, “Are you both getting equal leisure time?” Because sometimes if one person is in the labor force and one person is at home with the kids, but you’ve decided this is your shared values.
[00:45:53] Corrine: You think both of these things are important. Well, wait a minute, why does he have a golf hobby where he’s away for six hours every weekend and she hasn’t been to the gym in four years?
[00:46:02] bit: Yeah.
[00:46:03] Corrine: We’ve got to find ways to actually recognize those contributions if we’ve aligned and said, “These are our shared values.
[00:46:09] Corrine: We value these contributions equally.” So you see it in leisure time. That’s a quick checkup. You see it in spending power, decision-making power. Like, if you decide these are investments that we both value equally, well then it shouldn’t be that just ’cause she has the paycheck and you’ve decided that he should take a step back, that she actually has the financial decision-making power.
[00:46:28] Corrine: Uh-uh, right? You’ve decided these are our shared values, this is what we’re maximizing together. One person is converting their time into money in the labor force. The other person is enabling that to happen by investing at home. Those both need to be recognized with the decision-making power at, in the financial relationship.
[00:46:44] Joe: And this goes back to where we started, which is this conversation that we avoid, that we’re afraid of, can be so powerful. Like, you can become a juggernaut machine with you and your kids, you and your boss, you and your spouse, you and whatever partnership that you’re in. I love cementing the things that we talk about when we have phenomenal pros like you on the show th- by playing a quick little game.
[00:47:07] Joe: I’m gonna give you a phrase, and you either say, “This is true,” “This is false,” or, “It’s complicated,” and maybe just a little bit of discourse about, about why. ‘Cause I think for our stackers, this’ll take this and bring it home. Splitting every bill exactly 50/50 is the fairest way to divide finances in a relationship.
[00:47:24] Joe: Is that true, false, or complicated?
[00:47:27] Corrine: Absolutely false, and, uh, as you know, because I think that we make different investments that can bring equal value into the home, and it’s not necessarily through the paycheck. And so if you have decided maybe one person stays home, doesn’t have a paycheck at all, how are you gonna split those bills?
[00:47:41] Corrine: So no, you have to have a conversation about values and what each person’s contributing. It’s much more complicated than that.
[00:47:46] Joe: I love the idea of different currencies. Like, we all bring different currencies, and we’ve different scorecards. It’s so powerful. Second, the person who earns more should have the final say on big purchases.
[00:47:58] Joe: True, false or complicated?
[00:48:01] Corrine: You know that I’m going to say false, because also often that person earns more because of investments that the lower earner has made in enabling their career. So really those spoils of those career belongs to both people. Have this discussion early on in your relationship about how are you going to treat that human capital that one person is accumulating that is gonna show up in financial capital later on as actually a joint spoils of the investments you’re both making.
[00:48:27] Joe: Some of the phenomenal research that you have done really goes hand-in-hand with some of the research I’ve seen from a former guest, Scott Galloway does, especially around kids and what it costs for kids. And people think that people aren’t having children because they’re messing around and because they’re not smart.
[00:48:45] Joe: Actually, financially, Corinne, based on your research and Scott’s research, they’re not having kids because they’re super smart. So let me give you this one. Taking time off for kids always costs you more in lifetime earnings than it’s worth. True, false or complicated?
[00:49:01] Corrine: I think that that’s absolutely false.
[00:49:03] Corrine: If you think about the goal as being utility, if you want kids, then kids are going to bring you an enormous amount of utility. And so there’s no way to kind of put a price on that in terms of your career earnings because, again, earnings are for what? They’re ultimately to get you utility. So you’ve gotta decide what your best path is to maximize your utility, not to maximize your earnings.
[00:49:22] Joe: Kids are so expensive, though.
[00:49:24] Corrine: They are so expensive. And we could use policy makers to step up to make those trade-offs not quite so stark.
[00:49:29] Joe: 100… 100%. 1,000%. Prenups are only for rich people or people who don’t trust their partners. True, false or complicated?
[00:49:41] Corrine: I’m gonna say that one is complicated. I think that the discussions that you have in a prenup are very, very important to have.
[00:49:49] Corrine: What I’ve seen in my research is that a lot of times prenups are used to create a more generous financial settlement than that would be, that would be granted by the courts, because prenups are used in a case where somebody already has a lot of assets they accumulated before the marriage, and they want to promise some kind of certain payoff to the other person even if the marriage ends, whereas the court only divides assets that are accumulated after the marriage.
[00:50:13] Corrine: So I think you should understand the divorce law in your state and understand what the status quo is, and then decide if you feel like you need a prenup to actually protect you further because of your unique circumstances. But you should have the conversation around financial transparency and shared financial decision-making in your marriage well before you start picking out, out wedding colors and flowers.
[00:50:34] Joe: So important. And a- again, another conversation that’s rarely done. If somebody only takes one thing out of this conversation and does it this week, what should that be?
[00:50:45] Corrine: I want you to go be productive taking leisure time. ‘Cause what I mean by that is we know if we go to work and we get something done, we get paid in money, we feel productive.
[00:50:54] Corrine: But ultimately, you’re gonna take that money, and you’re gonna buy something with it that brings you utility. So really, the goal was utility. So in economics terms, if you go right now and you do something that brings you utility, you were just as productive. You produced just as much in economics terms.
[00:51:10] Corrine: And so if you go away from this conversation, and you start with that picture at the beginning of if you were a mega billionaire, what would your life look like, and you put one of those things on your calendar, I made you more productive, I made you richer, and you should feel really good about how you’re spending your time.
[00:51:25] Joe: The book is called Having It All. In the book, Corinne is writing specifically to women. What I found fascinating, and this is the first thing as, as we got to know each other before we hit the record button, I told Corinne that as a man, this is stuff men need to read. Men need to read this to know the squeeze that’s happening with the women in your lives.
[00:51:52] Joe: I think it’s so important. I think it’s such an important work. Having It All, where do we find it?
[00:51:56] Corrine: The paperback is available wherever books are sold, and you can follow my Substack if you wanna hear more about what I have to say, corinnelowe.substack.com, and you can find me, um, on Instagram. But yes, I think, guys, it is such a good gesture if you are in a relationship to show up having done your homework, to read this book, to understand the issues that are facing women, and to understand also a richer life for yourself where that goal isn’t just financial success.
[00:52:23] Corrine: That goal for you, too, is also having it all.
[00:52:25] Joe: Yeah, I think this is required reading, Stackers. Uh, women and men, uh, Stacking Benjamins. Dr. Corinne Lowe, thank you so much for educating us. What a great time. Thank you so much.
[00:52:36] Corrine: Thank you. It was a great conversation.
[00:52:39] bumper: This is Chris from Heavy Metal Money. When I’m not raging in a mosh pit, I’m stacking Benjamins.
[00:52:45] Joe: Big thanks to Corinne Lowe, and holy cow, guys, what, what an incredible interview. Let’s talk first about this idea of utility that economists talk about all the time, Anna. This is what financial planning is all about. It’s not about who dies with the most money wins. In fact, I saw this statistic a few weeks ago that the average millionaire thinks they don’t have enough money to retire, and the way they solve it is by just throwing more money at the problem.
[00:53:14] Joe: When Dr. Lowe talking about utility, w- we don’t know if we need to throw more money at the problem or not until we know what we actually want
[00:53:22] Anna: And that’s a lot of time that you’re throwing money at the problem. Like, if you just are like, “Oh, I’m gonna throw money at the problem so that I can be ensured that I’m gonna be able to retire,” that could be an additional five years until you feel satisfied- Hmm
[00:53:37] Anna: with the amount of money that you have. That’s five years of working that you could have done X, Y, and Z, whatever makes you passionate. And so it is really important to understand, like, that’s y- you understanding what your plan is and when you can take a step back or whatever it is, whatever is in the plan that you’re, you’re working with.
[00:53:57] Anna: You’re buying yourself potentially years of being able to do what you wanna do.
[00:54:04] Joe: W- well, and in this study, to your point, when people do throw more money at the problem, it, it didn’t make them feel more secure. Mm-hmm. I think frankly, the only thing that makes you feel more secure is once you know what the actual goal might be.
[00:54:17] Joe: I think people get freaked out by, “This has to be in stone. You know? Wait a minute, if I write my goal down, it has to stay written down.” Like, there’s, there’s nothing that says, Anna, you can’t take this goal and rip it up tomorrow. Like, you can change the game whenever the hell you want.
[00:54:33] Anna: Mm-hmm. Yeah, maybe they just don’t trust themselves or I don’t know what exactly it is.
[00:54:37] Anna: But it’s okay to pivot and to change those, and that’s important in life, and we have goals that are such long-term, 30, 40 years long, that we absolutely have to change them at some point.
[00:54:51] Joe: And I think another piece of this that I love that she brought up was the fact that a lot of these goals maybe hurt our income streams.
[00:55:02] Joe: Like, if I’m a spouse and I wanna spend time at home with the kids, if I’m a spouse and the person that I’m married to or the person who I’m in a relationship with gets a job in another city and I have to quit my job ’cause it’s location dependent and I gotta go follow them to another city, there are other currencies other than money that are at play here, Anna.
[00:55:22] Joe: Mm-hmm. And sometimes these currencies are so much bigger. Investing in your kids or investing in your partner’s career, even though it costs you money- There’s so many other currencies you gain along the way.
[00:55:36] Anna: Yeah, absolutely. You gotta think outside of just the dollar amount, and I think that’s what we try to understand as financial planners, and the reason why we work with a set amount of families, because we really wanna get to know them deeply and understand what their goal is.
[00:55:53] Anna: Are they primarily driven by the dollars that they see on their retirement accounts? Are they primarily driven by their kids’ happiness with their own happiness, or is there a specific goal that they have in mind? It’s really important for us to also understand that within our clients so that we can help direct them when they come to us and they say, “Hey, we wanna move,” and we have to decide, you know, I’m gonna bring up as many questions as I possibly can to understand the intention of that and what’s going to happen, and help them make that decision.
[00:56:28] Anna: And for them to know for me, it’s not just about money, too. It’s, for me, it’s about them being happy. And so I support them in whatever it is that they, they find to be the best decision for their family.
[00:56:40] Joe: Have you ever done this exercise she talks about of no financial constraints, what would I do?
[00:56:46] Anna: I haven’t done it with many of my clients, but, you know, it is actually a question that we ask sometimes w- during our onboarding process- But if y-
[00:56:53] Anna: to understand if there’s something different.
[00:56:54] Joe: But have you personally done it?
[00:56:57] Anna: I have thought of it as, like, a exercise with just, like, my husband and I. We’ve talked about- Yeah … you know, like, what would you do differently? And to answer the question, there’s not very much different that I would do with my life right now.
[00:57:12] Anna: There’s stressful seasons that I wish weren’t as- But in, in, in the same way I find some of these seasons to be challenging, not necessarily stressful, there’s a couple of things, but for the most part, like, I feel very happy with how I’ve landed in terms of my responsibilities in life. And yeah, there are some things that I would probably wanna change, but there’s not much.
[00:57:35] Anna: With what I have, there’s not a ton that I can do differently, and I feel very lucky in that way.
[00:57:41] Joe: Doug, have you and, uh, Mrs. Neighbor Doug, have you guys had this conversation? Like, if there were no financial constraints, what would you do?
[00:57:48] Doug: Wait, there’s a Mrs. Doug, Mrs. Neighbor Doug?
[00:57:51] Joe: Wait, what?
[00:57:52] Doug: Yeah, we don’t talk about that often, but yes, there is.
[00:57:55] Doug: And, uh, of course we have. We’ve been married a lot of years, and I don’t think you, you stay married over 30 years without having those discussions about what would things be like without financial constraints. And we achieved some of them. Actually, we achieved a lot of them. And, and I like the way you phrased it, Anna, there are seasons.
[00:58:14] Doug: ‘Cause when you look at it that way, you know the season’s gonna change. Mm-hmm. And that, that eliminated a … We did too, and that eliminated a lot of friction and stress from us when we realized this is just a season that will either change on its own, or we’ll make it change because of decisions that we’re gonna make.
[00:58:31] Anna: And even if you had unlimited money, would that season change? And would you even want it to change? Right. Because sometimes that challenge is a part of growing- Yeah … as a human being.
[00:58:42] Doug: I like the way you just phrased that. I think that’s an excellent perspective on that. Would you want it to change?
[00:58:47] Joe: We’re going back through that Stanley Tucci Discovering Italy show.
[00:58:52] Joe: Uh, Doug, I’m sure you’ve watched this. Have you watched this show? No. No?
[00:58:56] Doug: I haven’t, no.
[00:58:57] Joe: Oh, just fantastic TV, and he’s looking at, uh, foods around Italy. He’s outside Venice, and there is a specific grape they thought had gone es- extinct. You’ve heard this story before with other grapes. Turns out that it wasn’t extinct.
[00:59:11] Joe: They found a few. They, they brought it back. It only grows in this marshland outside of Venice. It’s the only place this grape grows, and what’s interesting is this grape grows there because it’s learned to deal with the stress of the saltwater that nothing else works in. And, and the fact that without stress in its life, you wouldn’t have this fantastic, hugely expensive wine, by the way.
[00:59:36] Joe: You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t have it.
[00:59:37] Doug: Yeah, yeah.
[00:59:37] Joe: And, and I think it’s such an analogy for what Anna was talking about, you know?
[00:59:42] Doug: As you were telling that story, Joe, I had time to think about your question of would you want some of those things to change that stressed you out at the time. When our kids were younger, kind of elementary school, middle school ages, I…
[00:59:55] Doug: And they couldn’t drive, of course, I was the parent that ended up taking on a lot of that stuff. It at the time is hugely stressful trying to get out of work at the, you know, at the right time because you’ve gotta get the kid to whatever the practice is or whatever that obligation is, or just get them home and get them doing their homework and all of that kind of stuff.
[01:00:14] Doug: At the time, it’s stressful because you’re trying to balance those demands, which are very real. You can’t just leave the kid at school. Happened one time, by the way. One time.
[01:00:23] Anna: We’ve all been there.
[01:00:25] Doug: It still- I
[01:00:25] Joe: was, I was just thinking, I know specifically the day that I did this.
[01:00:29] Doug: Well, I think we all
[01:00:30] Joe: do. Where you get the call, they’re like, “Hey, you coming to pick up your kid?”
[01:00:32] Joe: And you’re like, “Oh, man.”
[01:00:34] Doug: Yep. Uh, no, well, in my case, so quick side story. In my case, I was at home, and then Mrs. Neighbor Doug came home a little bit later. It’s getting dark, and she- Oh, no … said, “Where’s-” Where’s your son?” Like, well, this, I just assumed like he hadn’t come in through the laundry room yet, where she l- put the car seat down or something.
[01:00:54] Doug: Nope, he was still at daycare. We both left him there. It was totally my fault. 100% my fault. The worst feeling ever. It was, it was quite a day, but I still remember it. I got there to the daycare, and there’s some very, uh, large Russian woman just standing there holding my son with the just worst look on her face.
[01:01:11] Doug: Anyway, back to all of that, and all of that stress was, when I think back of what created such a great relationship with, with me and my sons, it was all of that time with them in the car or after school. I mean, we have the most amazing relationship now, and it’s because I frankly, we… I’ll say I put myself in a position to be forced to spend that time.
[01:01:34] Doug: Mm-hmm. Because of the way we structured our day, I was the one who often did that. And looking back on it, that is the key to so much of my happiness now in life because I built those relationships with them in those key years.
[01:01:47] Joe: Well, and I remember a long time ago, Doug, you and I having a discussion that I was happy to be a part of about where you live now, and you and Mrs.
[01:01:55] Joe: Neighbor Doug talking about this dream of having this property that- Yeah … you know, looks different now and is different now than what you’d envisioned at the time, but starting to build for it 20- Yeah … five years ago. Yeah,
[01:02:07] Doug: you were there at the beginning of that.
[01:02:08] Joe: This thing that you’re living today is pretty- Oh, yeah
[01:02:11] Joe: exciting because you had the discussion, right? And I love the fact that Corinne talks about how one partner might wanna deal with time differently than the other one does. But we shouldn’t avoid those conversations. The fact that you have different ideas around how to spend your time and how to spend your, you know, these different currencies that you have, it’s so important to get that out in the open and to have that.
[01:02:34] Doug: Anna, when you’re becoming a financial planner- Do you either have to or choose to take marital counseling classes? Because I- I- … gotta believe, I gotta believe that as you talk through some of this stuff with your clients, when the spouse hears what the other person says is, are their priorities, it probably really scares the first spouse.
[01:02:59] Doug: Like, “Well, that doesn’t line up with what my priorities are.” Mm-hmm. “And if they wanna do that, that’s gonna impact my stuff,” and then now we’re back into the friction. Yeah,
[01:03:06] Joe: yeah.
[01:03:07] Doug: I mean, how do you help clients get through that?
[01:03:10] Anna: That’s what I was gonna say to Joe, is we see this in almost every couple to a certain degree.
[01:03:17] Anna: So some people it’s very, very small gap between what they want, and they’re very supportive of each other, and it’s a very healthy, like, already figured-out situation when it comes to us. And then there’s the other end of the spectrum, where what they want is so vastly different, and it is really hard to work through, and it’s really showing them what it would look like saying, “Okay, if you are wanting to step back at 50, and the other person wants to step back at 65 in terms of retirement, here’s what it’s going to look like.
[01:03:52] Anna: Do you guys support that plan if, you know, we have this large gap in differences?” Or, you know… And I think so much of this is where our industry is headed to as financial advisors in, in the AI. I know it’s, like, so annoying to talk about AI, but more and more of our profession is going to be You know, not replaced by AI, but there’s a lot of it that’s going to be done just really, really quickly, and, like, our planning processes are not gonna take as long.
[01:04:23] Anna: So more of what we need to be doing is actually more on, like, the therapy side of things. Which
[01:04:27] Joe: is great ’cause that’s something we… I’m sure you wanted to do more of anyway.
[01:04:31] Anna: Mm-hmm. So it’s just more about that, like, human interaction and figuring out, like, what does everyone want? And, and that’s what I think we need to move towards more as financial advisors as opposed to, like, just doubling down on the data and the facts.
[01:04:43] Anna: And all that stuff is great, we talk about it all the time here, but more of it is actually just figuring out what two people want, or one individual. Doesn’t have to be two people. An individual might not know how to make these decisions.
[01:04:54] Joe: Oh, 100%, yeah.
[01:04:56] Anna: And you have to be involved in that too.
[01:04:58] Joe: And I love how you pivoted to this is even important for, for anybody, single, in a relationship, married, whatever.
[01:05:05] Joe: But also, this discussion is also important between you and your boss. Like, when she changed it from at home to you and your boss. You and your boss have different goals for your time. You and your boss maybe don’t communicate about how it’s a best use of spending your time, and she gets into this idea of negotiation.
[01:05:23] Joe: And you’ve been there, Anna, I’ve been there, where you had a client that needed just to make more money or needed a change of work. This idea she brings up of a BATNA, which is best alternative to a negotiated agreement. And to replay this, Stackers, I know you just heard it 20 minutes ago, but just to replay this, you go in and you’ve done a bunch of research into your alternative.
[01:05:49] Joe: If my boss doesn’t give me what I want- Here is what the alternative looks like. So Anna, this may… I love this idea in a negotiation because it gives you the ability to walk away. You can go, “You know what? If you say no to this, here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna do this thing over here.” And oh my g- all of a sudden you have all this leverage that you didn’t have before, ’cause you’re willing to walk.
[01:06:10] Joe: Mm-hmm. Like, the power in a negotiation to do that helps the negotiation so much.
[01:06:15] Anna: I think the other person understanding where you are in terms of values also really helps drive that conversation too. Helps that.
[01:06:22] Joe: Uh, yes. Yes. A lot. And whether you’re negotiating who’s doing the dishes tonight or, or who’s, who’s picking up the kids from childcare, to Doug’s point, or what you’re doing at work, that BATNA idea is a great way of negotiating.
[01:06:36] Joe: It’s wild how she’s able to put numbers around all of these, these things, the statistics around all these things that matter so much in our lives. Man, if you know somebody who is struggling to communicate about their goals, about their relationship with either work, home life, all the above, this is a great interview for you to pass on to them.
[01:06:56] Joe: I’d love, love, love to hear your thoughts. You can join us in the basement, our Facebook group, where you can hear more about what other stackers are thinking when it comes to these negotiations that we have. I’d love to have a discussion about this in our Facebook group, stackingbenjamins.com/basement.
[01:07:15] Joe: Doug, let’s mosey out on the back porch for a second, because we got some maybe chances- To talk in person- Yeah, yeah … not in a Facebook group about this.
[01:07:25] Doug: Real fast, uh, I wanna bring up that I think a week from tonight, October 28th at 6:30 PM, our Southern Minnesota Benjamins After Dark group is meeting at 6:30 at the Maverick Innovation Gateway, where they always meet, in Mankato, Minnesota.
[01:07:43] Doug: And, uh, if you live in Tucson or Boston or Minneapolis, Seattle or Hawaii- … um, check out our groups there. Oh, I forgot to tell you, Joe, we did start… There’s a group that started up in Hawaii. Uh, they want me to come and, and be a guest, so I’m gonna… I’ll just submit my expenses for reimbursement.
[01:08:01] Joe: Yeah. Uh, pass.
[01:08:02] Joe: Hard pass on the reimbursement, but you go, girl.
[01:08:06] Doug: But, uh, yeah, but we got some great groups all over the country, and if you’re interested in forming a group where you live, we can help.
[01:08:14] Joe: And also, our group in Seattle, the organizers of our group there, they need some help. So if you’re in the Seattle area and you’d like to help us, uh, get this group off the ground, give me a ring, joe@stackingbenjamins.com, or DM me in any of the social channels where you see me commenting.
[01:08:32] Joe: Uh, I’d love to talk to you, and I’m sure that our organizers would love to talk to you as well. You know, as you know, Doug, these, these groups are hard to navigate on your own. And, um, they’re just juggling a lot of different stuff. So let’s get the Seattle group,
[01:08:45] Doug: uh- Well, it, you know, it, it’s tough to get ’em up and running.
[01:08:47] Doug: Once they’re up and running, uh, they kinda, you know, take on a life of their own. But yeah, it takes a little bit of effort to get ’em started, but then the, it grows
[01:08:54] Joe: quickly. I think when we look at the success in Mankato, Boston, and in Twin Cities, they have multiple people. Kevin holding down the fort in Tucson.
[01:09:03] Joe: By the way, I know Kevin would love some help in Tucson if somebody wants to help him, although he’s done a great job of keeping that group rolling, and it’s always great to see what they’re doing down in Tucson. What else we got, Doug?
[01:09:16] Doug: Joe, in our Facebook basement group, Larry shared something online that everybody needs to be aware of.
[01:09:23] Doug: Figured out just how easy healthcare decisions are these days, so I think everybody needs to hear this.
[01:09:28] Joe: Yeah, Anna, it’s been super easy helping clients with healthcare decisions, hasn’t it been? I’m sure.
[01:09:32] Anna: Extremely easy, yeah. Black and white.
[01:09:35] Joe: This is great. This is all you gotta know, guys, when it comes to your healthcare.
[01:09:41] bit: When the Yoni thing went down, my Canadian friends were like, “Oh my God, like, what is going on with the healthcare system? Like, how crazy is it actually down there that something like that would happen?” I was like, “Well, it’s not that crazy. You know, you just have to know the difference between your co-pay and your co-insurance and your deductible and your out-of-pocket max, right?”
[01:10:00] bit: And your deductible is what you have to pay with cash before your insurance kicks in, and then that’s when you pay a percentage of that, which is your co-insurance, until you hit your out-of-pocket maximum. Which is technically the maximum amount of money that you’d ever have to pay in a given year, but it’s actually not because you’re also paying monthly premiums similar to car insurance, right?
[01:10:16] bit: Um, and sometimes your employer will cover a percentage of those, but it’s only a percentage. It’s not the whole thing, right? And then you’re thinking, “Okay, well then, like, what happens with my family?” And that’s a really good question. Um, if you have a family, it’s a new deductible and a new out-of-pocket maximum.
[01:10:29] bit: You have to recalculate all that math until you figure out how much it’s actually gonna cost you in a year, and it’s really hard to budget for that. But the IRS is like, “Don’t worry, guys. I got you. I got you. We have something called an HSA.” And that’s something where you can put– It’s a health savings account.
[01:10:41] bit: That’s where you put pre-tax money into a health savings account, but then you can then pay for your co-pay and your co-insurance and your deductible and your out-of-pocket max, right? And it’s like you get it at a discount because it’s pre-tax dollars, right? You can only get that if you have a high-deductible plan.
[01:10:53] bit: Um, and if you don’t have a high-deductible plan, you can only do it with a federal savings account, which is similar to the HSA, right? Where you put pre-tax money into a bank account, then you can pay for the, the co-pays and the co-insurances
[01:11:08] bit: disappears if you don’t use it in a given calendar year.
[01:11:12] Joe: That’s all there is to it.
[01:11:13] Anna: It’s so simple. Yeah, I don’t know how people make mistakes.
[01:11:17] Joe: Larry, thanks for sharing that. Doug, what are our big takeaways from today’s show?
[01:11:22] Doug: Well, Joe, first, take some advice from Dr. Corinne Lowe, and before you negotiate, figure out your BATNA, your best alternative to a negotiated agreement.
[01:11:32] Doug: That’ll give you confidence and power to walk away from a bad deal. Second, more from Dr. Lowe: think of career breaks as trade-offs and not losses. More money doesn’t equal more life, and there are different currencies we’re stacking, not just Benjamins. But the big lesson from today’s show: if you tell Joe’s mom what your BATNA is ahead of time, she’ll just tell you where you and your BATNA can go.
[01:11:57] Doug: That woman’s batsh- crazy when it comes to negotiating. She’s a ninja, and her BATNA is always threatening no shrimp appetizer at The Sizzler, and we all know there is no best alternative in that scenario. Geez. Shrimp at The Sizzler, it’s like their best meal. Thanks to Dr. Corinne Lowe for joining us today.
[01:12:17] Doug: Her book, Having It All, is in paperback. You’ll find it wherever books are sold. We’ll also include links in our show notes at stackingbenjamins.com. This show is the property of SB Podcast LLC, copyright 2026, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. You’ll find out about our awesome team at stackingbenjamins.com, along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots.
[01:12:44] Doug: Come say hello. And oh yeah, before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and we’ll see you next time back here at The Stacking Benjamins Show.
Leave a Reply