There are questions we answer quite casually in everyday life. Where do you live? What do you do for a living? How long have you known your partner? And then there is the question that can make even a pleasant evening suddenly feel strange: how much money do you actually have?
At first, the answer seems simple. There is, after all, a number somewhere. Perhaps several, depending on whether you count bank balances, property, businesses or debts. But you do not say that number into an empty room. You say it to a person with whom you have a particular relationship. Afterwards, that person knows something about you that they did not know before. Whether the information changes the relationship at all, you only find out later.
So I am less interested in whether talking about wealth is good or bad in principle. What matters is whom you tell what, why you tell them and what the other person is supposed to do with that information. There is a world of difference between a couple's shared household budget and a passing remark to an acquaintance. Both conversations are about money. But only one of them may actually require an exact figure.
A number never tells the whole story
Imagine someone mentions over dinner that they own five million euros. To one listener, that immediately means a life free of financial worries. Another thinks of a business that is valuable on paper but pays out very little cash. Someone else simply hears that the person opposite owns more than they themselves will ever earn.
All three are reacting to the same number. And all three can be completely wrong. Wealth is the stock of economic assets minus liabilities. It can be liquid or tied up, belong to one person or to several family members, and come with obligations attached. The figure on its own says nothing about how someone lives, what they can spend each month or what risks they carry.
Even so, the number quickly turns into a story. People decide that someone is generous, mean, independent or especially successful, even though none of these qualities appears on a bank statement. Being open about your wealth does not automatically mean giving up control over how you are seen. But it does give others a new starting point for their assumptions.
That can be welcome. Perhaps someone finally wants to stop beating about the bush when a larger joint purchase is on the cards. Perhaps they want to explain why they no longer need to work. The wish not to have your whole person interpreted through a sum of money at every encounter is just as understandable.
Privacy is a decision about relationships
In her 2013 work on Communication Privacy Management Theory, the communication scholar Sandra Petronio describes a fundamental problem in human communication: people want to share information about themselves while also controlling who knows it. Often, it is only through being shared that private information becomes something several people have to look after together.
That sounds more theoretical than it is. If you tell your sister how large your wealth has grown, then at first your sister knows. Perhaps she treats the information as confidential. Perhaps she mentions it to her partner because she takes that for granted. Her partner may then pass it on to someone else. It does not even take bad intentions for information shared between two people to become family news.
In 2010, Petronio looked specifically at how private information is managed within families. Her approach helps explain why disclosure is often more than a single moment. From the point of view of the person sharing it, whoever is told something confidential may also be taking on a responsibility. The catch is that both sides need to understand that responsibility in a similar way.
This matters especially when it comes to wealth. A good relationship can make disclosure easier. But it does not guarantee that everyone involved has the same idea of discretion. So anyone who shares a figure is perfectly entitled to add that it should go no further. A request like that is not a sign of mistrust. It simply makes a boundary visible that had so far gone unspoken.
Between closeness and needless curiosity
In personal relationships, openness can create closeness. A 1994 meta-analysis by Nancy Collins and Lynn Miller found several links between personal self-disclosure and mutual liking. People are more likely to reveal things about themselves when they like someone. At the same time, the act of disclosing can itself lead to greater affection. How strong the relationship is, however, depends on the situation and the kind of information involved.
This general research does not mean anyone is obliged to share their wealth. A conversation about worries, values or plans for the future can be more personal than revealing an exact amount. Conversely, someone can know every detail of your finances and still understand very little about the person behind them.
Perhaps a friend wants to know why you have stepped back from work. Then an answer such as “I now have enough financial room to do that” may be perfectly sufficient. But perhaps they are asking out of genuine interest because they are considering a similar decision themselves. In that conversation, more information might be useful. The right degree of openness also depends on which question is actually being asked.
You can be honest without telling everything. This is not an invitation to deceive anyone deliberately. It is simply the plain observation that discretion is part of living your life on your own terms. Even a good friend does not automatically need to know what the house, the business or the investment portfolio is worth.
Partnerships are a different matter
If you share your life and your financial commitments with someone, you cannot simply declare certain information a private side issue. Joint expenses, debts, risks and agreements may affect you both. A partnership therefore raises different questions from a friendship or a chance acquaintance.
In a paper published in 2025, Nirajana Mishra, Emily Garbinsky and Suzanne Shu drew on eight studies with a total of 8,474 participants to examine why couples sometimes talk less about money precisely when financial strain is growing. One important factor was the expectation of conflict. Those who anticipated an argument were less willing to raise financial topics. When a potential conflict was seen as more resolvable, on the other hand, willingness to communicate increased.
This does not mean that every conversation goes well, nor that a couple must immediately disclose every single asset. The study mainly examined how financial strain affects people's willingness to talk. It is not a study of millionaire couples agreeing on a full statement of their wealth.
A 2022 study by Matthew Saxey, Ashley LeBaron-Black and Melissa Curran involving 1,950 young adults in the USA also found a nuanced picture. Talking about finances earlier in a relationship was associated, through better financial communication, with higher relationship quality. At the same time, it was also linked to more financial conflict. Once people talk, they inevitably touch on disagreements that had previously been comfortably out of sight.
You should not turn this into a simple formula. There is a difference between keeping a private financial sphere and withholding information that directly affects the other person. When it comes to joint financial decisions, transparency is often a precondition for both partners being able to have a genuine say at all.
Silence and concealment are not the same thing
In a study published in 2020, Emily Garbinsky and her colleagues defined the idea of financial infidelity more precisely. It refers to financial behaviour that someone expects their partner to disapprove of and therefore deliberately hides. The researchers developed and tested a measure for this across several laboratory and field studies, as well as actual account data.
Having a separate account or a deliberately private expense does not automatically meet this definition. What matters includes the expected disapproval and the deliberate concealment. That seems important to me, because in conversations about money every form of privacy is sometimes made to look suspicious. Being in a partnership does not mean losing every right to a personal sphere. At the same time, appealing to privacy does not excuse deception when both partners have previously agreed on something binding.
In a longitudinal study of 124 couples published in 2025, Morgan Joseph and Johanna Peetz examined both the hiding of financial information and secretly looking into a partner's finances. Simply considering the two behaviours together makes it clear that financial communication is not only a matter for the person expected to disclose something. The other person's reaction, and how they respect boundaries, are part of it too.
It would be a mistake, however, to apply this research on couples directly to friends, siblings or casual acquaintances. Expectations of openness differ considerably. Someone paying off a joint loan needs different information from someone you meet for a coffee once a month.
Talking openly without reading out your bank balance
In practice, there are far more options than full disclosure or total silence. You can say that you are financially independent without naming a sum. You can talk about higher or lower outgoings, about professional freedom, about uncertainty, or about why a particular decision has become possible. And you are perfectly entitled to say that you would rather not discuss the exact state of your wealth.
A 2025 study by Matt Meister, Joe Gladstone and Emily Garbinsky suggests that, under certain conditions, talking about finances can even ease financial anxiety. Across various research approaches, an improvement appeared particularly when people talked about aspects they could influence, such as spending and budgeting decisions. Perceived control played an important role.
This is an interesting addition to the idea that silence about money is inherently harmful. The research concerns conversations about personal finances, often involving financial strain. It does not show that a wealthy person should make their net worth public in order to feel better. Perhaps the value of some conversations lies precisely in being able to discuss a problem without laying bare your entire financial history.
I find this distinction helpful: the question of whether to talk about money is often too broad. It makes more sense to ask which conversation you actually want to have. Is it about a specific joint decision? About a worry? About understanding each other? Or does someone really just want to hear an interesting number?
Family and the public are separate spaces
Within families, disclosure can trigger expectations that had never been voiced before. After a successful company sale, someone may want to reassure their parents. They may want to explain to their siblings that they can afford to change the course of their life. Equally, they may fear that a figure mentioned in passing will become the yardstick for every future request.
Those expectations are explored in more detail in the article When your family expects money. Here, the focus is on the decision that comes first: what information is shared at all, and who is meant to hear it?
In public, the situation is different again. A report, an interview or a social media post can only be taken back to a limited extent. In addition, information there reaches people with whom there is no relationship of trust whatsoever. There can be good reasons to make your financial success visible, for example when a company is presented publicly. The decision just should not be treated as if it were comparable to a confidential chat at the kitchen table.
And of course, there is information that has to be disclosed in the context of genuine shared obligations, contracts or legal requirements. This article does not assess any such obligation in an individual case. It is about voluntary openness in personal relationships.
The person behind the number stays the same
I am convinced neither by the demand that you must always talk openly about money nor by the idea that a large fortune must always be hidden. Both ignore the fact that people have different relationships and different reasons for telling or holding something back.
If you confide the exact size of your wealth to someone, you are first of all giving them a piece of information. What comes of it depends on the relationship and on how it is handled. Perhaps you will be better understood afterwards. Perhaps nothing will change. Perhaps you will discover that the other person has an attitude to money you knew nothing about. Sometimes that alone is a useful insight.
The question of other people's motives gets its own space in Can I trust you, or my money?. Here, a sober yardstick is enough for me: say as much as makes sense for the relationship in question and the matter you share. A number is no ticket to honest closeness, and discretion need not be a lie.
The idea behind Tired of Wealth makes my own attitude to a possible voluntary transfer of wealth unusually visible. But it gives me no claim to know other people's financial circumstances. Anyone who wants to protect their own financial privacy owes nobody a speech justifying it.
Sometimes a short sentence answers the money question better than the most precise figure: “I'm doing fine, but I'll keep the details to myself.” Between reasonable adults, that really ought to be enough.
Sources
Collins, Nancy L., and Lynn Carol Miller (1994). “Self-disclosure and liking: A meta-analytic review”. Psychological Bulletin, 116(3), pp. 457 to 475. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.116.3.457
Garbinsky, Emily N., Joe J. Gladstone, Hristina Nikolova and Jenny G. Olson (2020). “Love, Lies, and Money: Financial Infidelity in Romantic Relationships”. Journal of Consumer Research, 47(1), pp. 1 to 24. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucz052
Joseph, Morgan, and Johanna Peetz (2025). “Hide and Seek with Finances: Financial Infidelity and Financial Snooping in Relationships”. Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 46, pp. 122 to 135. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-024-09988-2
Meister, Matt, Joe J. Gladstone and Emily N. Garbinsky (2025). “Opening up about money: The unexpected benefits of personal financial disclosure”. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 189, Article 104430. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2025.104430
Mishra, Nirajana, Emily N. Garbinsky and Suzanne B. Shu (2025). “Discussing money with the one you love: How financial stress influences couples' financial communication”. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 35(2), pp. 288 to 296. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1430
Petronio, Sandra (2010). “Communication Privacy Management Theory: What Do We Know About Family Privacy Regulation?”. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 2(3), pp. 175 to 196. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1756-2589.2010.00052.x
Petronio, Sandra (2013). “Brief Status Report on Communication Privacy Management Theory”. Journal of Family Communication, 13(1), pp. 6 to 14. https://doi.org/10.1080/15267431.2013.743426
Saxey, Matthew T., Ashley B. LeBaron-Black and Melissa A. Curran (2022). “The Sooner, the Better? Couples' First Financial Discussion, Relationship Quality, and Financial Conflict in Emerging Adulthood”. Journal of Financial Therapy, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.4148/1944-9771.1299