What Happens When A Couple Has Different Financial Advisors?

When Rick Parks and his wife Cindy got married a couple of years ago, the Knoxville couple shared a lot of things together: A home, family trips and holiday gatherings.

One thing they did not share: a financial planner.

They each had their own careers, retirement savings and financial planners -- his with Charles Schwab, hers with Primerica, and they were happy with them.

"We have different investing styles -- I'm more aggressive, Cindy is more conservative," says Rick Parks, 53, owner of two automotive repair businesses. "We were both in good financial positions, and just felt comfortable with our own planners."

The Parks are not alone in starting out their relationship with different financial planners. In fact, 13 percent of couples keep their own respective financial advisors, according to the 2015 Couples Retirement Study by Boston-based money managers Fidelity Investments.

It found 28 percent of couples reported keeping their financial accounts "mostly" or "completely" separate from their spouse or significant other. That was up from 20 percent of couples who did so just two years earlier.

The trend seems to be generational. The age group most likely to keep finances separate: Gen Xers, with almost a third of couples keeping their money mostly or completely apart. In comparison, only 23 percent of baby boomer couples keep their money in different pots.

Part of the reason is that Americans are getting married later than ever, often after careers (and financial plans) have already been established. The average woman gets married at 27, and average man at 29 - both historic highs, according to the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.

While keeping separate planners might feel more comfortable at first, it also raises a number of potential problems down the line, like conflicting strategies, overlapping holdings and duplication of fees.

Jacquette Timmons, a New York City financial behaviorist and author of Financial Intimacy, says the couple should get planners in a room quarterly, or at least annually. "You don't want a situation where one advisor is doing something that completely offsets the strategy of the other advisor," says Timmons.