Scarcity mindset
Kamel said he believes Rachel’s husband is struggling to break free from a scarcity mindset which is why he’s not dealing well with the sudden windfall. A scarcity mindset is the belief that you won’t have access to what you want, even when you have access to your basic needs.
“He spent his whole life building a sand castle and you just wiped that all away with one big wave and now there's a mansion there that he didn't build, and I think that scares the crap out of him,” Kamel said.
A 2023 study published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience found that zero-sum thinking, or perception of insufficient resources, triggers many behavioral changes, including less empathy for others’ feelings. This is evident in Rachel’s describing her husband’s obliviousness to her frustration over his tight grip on the purse strings.
Similar research by Sendhil Mullainathan, an economics professor at Harvard University and Eldar Shafir, a psychology professor at Princeton University, found that a scarcity mindset is often the result of obsessively focusing on a lack of a specific resource, such as money, to the point that there’s no room to focus on anything else.
In other words, people develop tunnel vision that impacts other aspects of their lives, such as their relationships. After years of relentless frugality, Rachel’s husband seems to have developed this tunnel vision while she has avoided it, which is causing friction in their marriage.
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Read MoreSeeing eye-to-eye, financially speaking
Financial compatibility is a key ingredient for a happy marriage. In fact, 84% of American couples say they are on the same page with their partner when it comes to money, according to an Ipsos poll conducted on behalf of BMO. Nevertheless, 34% of partners consider money a source of conflict in their relationship.
Rachel and her husband seem to have been on the same page for a while, but the sudden windfall may have put them on divergent paths. The couple already have a financial advisor helping them manage the huge inheritance, but Kamel suggested they need to visit a therapist to help them resolve these psychological and emotional issues.
“Here’s the bigger conversation,” Delony says. “The marriage that you had is over. What you and your husband have to decide to do is [ask] ‘Are we going to build something new? Because every bit of our life is different now. We are multimillionaires and now the game has changed.’”
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