As we grow older, it’s important to honor the financial and emotional dimensions of our choices.

My husband and I are in the midst of one of those big, gnarly life decisions. We’re trying to decide where to live, and it’s as if our feet are literally stuck in mud.

In a nutshell: One New York City neighborhood we’re considering is more affordable, but we don’t have much of a social network there. The other area has a lot more going on, and it would keep us close to friends we cherish, but homes are considerably more expensive.

We keep trying to convince ourselves that moving to the cheaper neighborhood is the way to go, especially with retirement inching closer. But buying a place in the other area means we’d be more connected to people we love — also a big asset, given the quality of life we want as we get older.

I’d assumed that we kept stalling because each option has a compelling upside. But according to Myra Strober and Abby Davisson, coauthors of Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life’s Biggest Decisions, it’s not the choices per se that are so difficult, but how we approach questions where money weighs heavily in one direction and emotion tugs in the other.

“You’re supposed to make financial decisions and career decisions with your head, and make emotional or relationship decisions with your heart. But you need a framework that combines both.”

“Society really teaches us to separate money and love decisions,” says Davisson, founder of the Money and Love Institute, a consulting firm. “You’re supposed to make financial decisions and career decisions with your head, and make emotional or relationship decisions with your heart. But you need a framework that combines both.”

That’s because, despite our best efforts to keep them apart, the financial and emotional sides of many of life’s big choices aren’t separate at all, says Strober, professor emerita of education at Stanford University. “They bleed into each other,” she says. “So rather than try to address them as separate entities, it’s much wiser to address the financial and the personal together.”

A Framework for Big Decisions

This powerful idea — that money and love overlap in pivotal decisions, and only by working with both can you arrive at a satisfying solution — emerged from a course Myra Strober taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business called Work and Family. Abby Davisson, then a student at GSB, took that class in 2008 — and the two later decided to collaborate on a book that would elaborate on Strober’s main principles.

While the book itself is not prescriptive, the authors created a decision-making model called the “5 Cs framework” to help people examine the different financial and emotional threads that run through a situation. The steps include clarifying what’s important to you; communicating and checking in with others (to get feedback and gauge the impact of your decision); and exploring all your choices and the potential consequences, so you don’t get stuck in an either-or mindset.

“There’s so much research about what makes for a meaningful and fulfilling life over time,” says Davisson. “But we don’t always connect that with how we’re going to fund that life — and this framework is one way to bring both parts together.”

“How do we align your financial choices to support who and what you love?”

A couple of years ago, Mark T. Johnsen, CEO and founder of Wealth Architects, an independent advisory firm in Mountain View, California, attended a presentation Davisson and Strober gave at Stanford, and their ideas resonated with him immediately, he says. “When I heard the words money and love together, it hit me profoundly, because love was something that I hadn’t thought deeply about in a financial context.”

“How do you align your financial choices to support who and what you love?”

Although Wealth Architects has always brought a values-centered approach to its advisory services, adding in the gravitational pull of love to the elements of well-being they emphasize has helped to make their work even more holistic, Johnsen says, noting that Davisson also works as a consultant there. 

“We are really trying to help people be more intentional about how they’re investing for positive change,” says Johnsen, a member of the Stanford Center on Longevity Center Advisory Council. “That’s where the concept of love comes in: Are you doing what really, deeply matters to you — and how do you align your financial choices to support who and what you love?”

As we all know, these big life questions don’t fade away as we grow older; if anything, they loom larger because the stakes are that much higher. Being able to hold a deeper conversation about money and love can be particularly beneficial when thinking about a longer lifespan, where it’s crucial to weigh issues of care and independence, work and well-being, in light of your financial goals and emotional truths.

That doesn’t make the process an easy one, as my husband and I are discovering. But our thinking about where to live and why is shifting. People tend to rely on swift, intuitive judgments — what Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman called System 1 in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Bringing love and other emotions into our long-term decision-making requires slower, more deliberate System 2 thinking, Davisson notes.

“As we’re all living longer, and as our needs evolve, it helps to think of the financial piece as a tool,” she says. “You can use money to invest in other assets that are important to maintain and grow over a long life, like your relationships, your community, your mental, physical and spiritual well-being. 

“It’s important to remember that those assets are just as important to invest in — and that compounding works here as well. These small deposits over time do add up.”

MP Dunleavey is an award-winning journalist, columnist for SCL Magazine and a regular contributor to the Kiplinger Retirement Report. She was a New York Times personal finance columnist and a contributing editor to Money magazine.