You Didn’t Mean To Step Away From Your Money but It Happened Anyway

Between Tables is where I explore the emotional, psychological, and practical sides of money, especially for women carrying a lot.

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Women are incredible delegators. Until we’re not.

We divide and conquer. We split the household tasks, the school pickups, the grocery runs, the appointment scheduling. We carry the invisible weight of remembering that the dogs haven’t been fed today and your son’s science fair project is due and your daughter has SWAPS (just learned about these things) to make for her Girl Scout camping trip and there are Easter baskets and a meal to prepare and your mother-in-law’s birthday is next week and you still haven’t ordered the gift. (Some of these examples may be from my own life. My husband does, for the record, remember and purchase gifts for his own family.)

We get very good at identifying the things we can hand off.

Except we never actually hand things off. Not really. Because our tabs do not close.

Fully closing a mental tab requires a level of trust that most of us have learned, through experience, to withhold. Not because we’re control freaks (though some of us are, hi–it’s me). But because we’ve handed things off before and come back to find them half-done or entirely undone. We reclaimed the task without saying a word, vowed to never let that happen again, and added it back to our own list. We’ve learned. We carry it all because closing the tab has cost us too many times.

Except for one area.

There is one domain where I watch women not only close the tab, but hand the entire laptop to someone else and walk out of the room.

Money.

According to the Financial Health Network, 71% of married women take primary responsibility for household shopping. Only 41% take primary responsibility for decisions about savings and investments. We run the household. We just aren’t running the part that funds our future.

How the Wheel Gets Handed Over

It doesn’t happen all at once. And it’s rarely a conscious decision.

Someone has to deal with the finances, and it’s usually whoever is more comfortable, whoever stepped in first, or whoever said “I’ve got this” at the start of the relationship. Sometimes nobody wants to drive and straws are drawn and someone steps up, but to what extent, nobody really defines. The rest gets assumed. The wheel changes hands, and months or years go by, and suddenly one person is making every financial decision in the household while the other has no idea where the accounts are, what’s in them, or how the money is being invested.

A UBS study of nearly 3,700 high-net-worth women across nine countries found that 58% defer long-term financial decisions to their spouses. Only 23% take charge of long-term financial planning themselves. And the generation most likely to hand over the wheel? Buckle up, because it isn’t the baby boomers you’re assuming. It’s millennials. 88% of single millennial women say they plan to participate equally in financial decisions after marriage. Once married, 54% defer to their spouse, a higher rate than women over 50. We intend to be equal partners. Then life happens and the tab gets closed.

The mental load is not a myth. It is a physical weight that settles into your body and doesn’t lift. And when you are carrying all of the things, when you are genuinely bogged down in the day-to-day survival of keeping a life running, something has to give. The money is the thing that gives. Not because you don’t care about it, but because it doesn’t scream. The kids scream. The calendar screams. Your boss’s email screams. The finances don’t demand anything. So they get set aside.

The tab doesn’t close with one big decision. It closes in the small moments. The question you almost asked but didn’t want to seem like you weren’t paying attention. The financial update you nodded through because dinner wasn’t going to make itself. The conversation that got interrupted and never came back around. The thing you meant to follow up on and then forgot. Question by question, conversation by conversation, until one day you realize you have no idea what’s actually happening with your money, and you’re not sure when you stopped knowing.

And that not-knowing is costing you.

Except They’re Being Set Aside at a Cost

The money you’re not watching, not curious about, not engaged with: that is the money your future security depends on. It’s the money that gives you options, the ability to make choices later: to leave a job you’ve outgrown, to care for an aging parent, to weather something unexpected without everything falling apart. Money, managed well, is freedom. Not in a vague aspirational way. In a very practical, very real, very specific way.

The problem is that none of that feels urgent in the moment. There is no immediate relief in reviewing your asset allocation. Knowing your retirement account balance doesn’t make the morning easier. It doesn’t get anyone to school on time. So it stays in the background, and life stays in the foreground, and time passes.

And time is the variable that matters most with money. The compounding effect of bad decisions, or no decisions, or decisions made without enough information, adds up exponentially over the years. That’s the math that’s invisible while you’re busy managing everything else.

What I’ve Actually Seen

I see it everywhere. At dinner parties when the subject changes. Across the table from clients who are brilliant in every other area of their lives. With family. With women who are older than me, younger than me, at the exact same stage of life as me. I’ve been in the industry for 20+ years, and unless I’m at a professional conference or hired to speak, in social settings, I find myself predominantly speaking with men if money comes up in conversation. To be in community as a female financial planner is to witness this constantly. The statistics don’t surprise me. They show up in real life every single week.

I want to tell you what I’ve seen on the other side of that delegation. Not to scare you. But because I think if more women knew, the tab would stay open and the questions would get asked.

Aggressive market timing. Spouses who sell in and out of accounts as the market drops, waiting for the “right” moment to get back in. A full exit. Everything in cash. The questions never asked out loud: What is enough? How far down is far enough? What happens if it doesn’t get there? What if it goes down further and the target keeps moving? What if it turns around tomorrow and you’re sitting in cash watching it climb back up without you?

Over-concentration in a single position. Sometimes it’s a company they believe in. Sometimes it’s employer stock. Sometimes it’s an inheritance they feel an emotional obligation to hold. Whatever the reason, putting the bulk of a portfolio into one stock or one holding is a level of risk most people significantly underestimate, until the holding drops 60% and they realize “diversification” wasn’t just a buzzword.

Not knowing where the accounts are. Women who, in the middle of a divorce or after an unexpected death, had no idea how many accounts existed, where they were held, or how to access them. Not because anything malicious was happening, but because the tab had been closed for so long.

Behavioral biases running unchecked. We all have them. Every single person, regardless of how much they know about investing, is subject to cognitive and emotional biases that can override rational decision-making: overconfidence, loss aversion, recency bias, anchoring. The behavioral spiral, unchecked, costs you. And it costs more when nobody is asking questions.

The Vow You Never Made

When you stood at the altar and exchanged vows, you promised a lot of things. You promised to love and to cherish. To show up in sickness and in health. You held hands and looked at each other and meant it.

But you didn’t say: And I trust you to dollar-cost-average our savings into a diversified portfolio across asset classes and review our asset allocation annually as we move through different life stages.

You didn’t say: And I trust you to make sure there is adequate life insurance on each of us so our family is protected should the worst happen.

You didn’t say: And I trust you to know when to engage a financial planner, what questions to ask, and where the limits of your own financial knowledge are.

Nobody says those things. But somewhere along the way, the wheel was handed over as if those vows had been made in full. As if “I’ve got the finances” somehow covered all of it: the strategy, the risk management, the estate documents, the insurance review, the tax efficiency, the behavioral guardrails. As if loving someone and being reasonably good with a budget was the same as being equipped to steward a family’s financial future alone.

What “Good With Money” Actually Means

Before you nod and say yes, but my partner is good with money, I want to ask you something.

What does “good with money” mean to you?

Does it mean they pay the bills on time? That they don’t overspend? That they earn well? That they talk a good game about investing? All of those things can be true at the same time as someone who is also over-concentrated, emotionally reactive to market swings, underinsured, without an estate plan, and operating on instinct rather than strategy.

Being good with money is not a fixed trait. It’s a set of skills and knowledge and, critically, the ability to recognize the limits of what you know. The most dangerous financial decision-maker isn’t someone who knows nothing. It’s someone who knows enough to feel confident and not enough to know what they’re missing.

We don’t know what we don’t know. And that applies to your partner just as much as it applies to you.

The Princess Rescues Herself

I’m not telling you to become a financial expert. I’m not telling you to take over the financial management of your household or fall in love with your brokerage statements.

I’m telling you to stay in the room. And to start asking.

Know where the accounts are. Know how the money is invested, broadly. Know whether you have adequate life insurance, and on whom. Know whether there’s an estate plan and when it was last updated. Ask the questions, even the ones that feel too basic. Especially those.

I’m in my 40s. I have professional female friends. I have mom friends. A handful who cross both. The ones who cross both, we talk about all of it: money, business, goals, kids, family, community, life. Everything on the table.

I know that’s not everyone’s experience. Money is loaded. It’s personal. It can feel like an indictment of your choices or your marriage or your competence. I’m a financial planner. I’m probably the last person at the dinner party most people want to get into this with.

But I notice things. I notice when women in my circle are opting out. When the subject changes. When someone defers with a wave of the hand: “oh, my husband handles all of that.” I understand why. The bandwidth isn’t there. The subject feels foreign. The trust is real. Why open a tab that doesn’t feel like yours to manage?

I’m not writing this to fault anyone. I’m not writing this to suggest that your partner is making bad decisions or that your trust is misplaced. I’m writing this because I care about what happens to women on the other side of a life event they didn’t see coming. Divorce. Death. Disability. A bad year. A decision made in the dark that turns out to have cost more than anyone realized.

The women I worry about most aren’t the ones who are bad with money. They’re the ones who are wonderful, capable, brilliant humans who handed the wheel to someone they love and stopped asking questions about where they were going.