A look inside the award-winning book from Alpha Financial Advisor’s Chief Relationship Officer, Ed Coambs — and why we recommend it to every couple navigating the intersection of relationships and money.
Most couples have had the moment. It usually starts somewhere small — a charge on the statement, a 401(k) decision, a Sunday-night look at the numbers — and ends somewhere much larger. A long silence. A familiar argument neither of you is sure how to finish.
That moment is the starting point of The Healthy Love and Money Way: How the Four Attachment Styles Impact Your Financial Well-Being, the book by Alpha Financial’s Chief Relationship Officer, Ed Coambs, CFP®, LMFT, CFT™. It is also one of the clearest, kindest, and most useful guides we know to the human side of financial decision-making — and a book we routinely recommend to clients, friends, and family.
Walking away from a money argument like that one, most of us tell ourselves we need a better budget. Ed’s book makes a different case. We need a better understanding of why money lands the way it does in our bodies, our relationships, and our decisions — and why our partner’s response can feel so different from our own.
An unusual lens on a familiar problem
Very few people are positioned to write this book. Ed is one of them.
He is a Certified Financial Planner. He is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. He is a Certified Financial Therapist™ — a designation he helped develop. He is a past president of the Financial Therapy Association and a frequent speaker on financial planning, financial psychology, and relationships. And across years of working with couples, planners, and clinicians, he developed an approach he calls financial intimacy: a way of understanding how each partner’s history, communication patterns, and values quietly shape the financial life they are trying to build together.
The Healthy Love and Money Way distills that approach into a book any couple can pick up and use.
“Money is part of the circulatory system of life. It flows through our lives from beginning to end.”
— The Healthy Love and Money Way, p. 100
The four styles you didn’t know were running the show
The premise is straightforward, and for many readers it is quietly transformative. The way you attached to caregivers as a child — secure, anxious, avoidant, or disorganized — is still operating in the background of every adult relationship you have, including the one you have with money. It shapes how you respond to risk. What you do under financial stress. What you tell yourself about saving, spending, generosity, control, and trust. How safe it feels to look at the numbers with another person in the room.
Most couples never name any of it. They argue about the spreadsheet instead.
“Ideas about money are caught, not taught.”
— The Healthy Love and Money Way, p. 26
Ed gives you the names. He gives you the patterns. And then he gives you the practices — clear, doable, sometimes surprising — to move from reactive money conversations to genuine financial intimacy.
Why we recommend it
At Alpha Financial Advisors, we have long believed that the dominant determinant of long-term financial outcomes is not investment performance — it is investor behavior. The Healthy Love and Money Way is the most accessible, most useful, and most compassionate guide we know to the human side of that behavior.
It will make you a more thoughtful partner. It will make you a more grounded decision-maker. It will change the texture of every financial conversation you have for the rest of your life.
If you have ever wondered why money decisions feel harder in your relationship than they should — or why the same conversation keeps showing up in a different outfit — this is your book.
Get the book
Pick up The Healthy Love and Money Way on Bookshop.org, or wherever you buy your books.
To explore how Ed’s work shapes the way Alpha guides clients through life’s transitions, reach out to our team. We would be honored to start the conversation.
Note: Quotes from The Healthy Love and Money Way cited via the AFCPE review of the book in The Standard (1st Quarter 2022).