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After living together for the past 4 years, my fiancee and I are going to get married 6 months from today.  The main thing I'd like some help with is figuring out the best way to combine our finances, and to make sure that we're not missing any of the obvious. She's also said that she want to leave the money stuff (activities, decisions) up to me, but I'd like to at least share with her the broad strokes of what/how we're doing and where our money goes. I'm the type of person that tracks everything through mint.com every week, evaluates my Roth 401k/Roth IRA a couple times a year; while she has never pulled her own credit report. So I'd appreciate some advice as to what would make a useful overview for someone who isn't as concerned with all the specific details. Today, for the most part we have completely separate accounts for everything - credit, savings, checking. The only exception here is that we have a free joint checking account that we set up a while back for any joint-savings ventures. I've also added her as the beneficiary to my 401k and IRA accounts. Between the two of us, we have about $40k in debt, split into about 15k in credit cards and another 25k in student loans. The latter of which will continue to grow as she continues her education over the next 2 years. Overall, I can only think of a few specific actions for us to take. -Pull her credit report when we get some spare time to make sure there are no issues e.g. identity theft. -Add her to my insurance after the wedding. -Reduce retirement contributions down to the company 401k match, and reallocate the extra money towards paying off the debt. -Once the name change paperwork has been finalized, get both of our names on the savings/checking accounts that we decide to use, and then close the others. -Consider getting life insurance. I am leaning towards skipping this for now as I've saved more than a year's salary in my retirement accounts. Most likely I wouldn't bother with this until we have kids or someday buy a house.
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| # ? Dec 3, 2012 18:54 |
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| # ? May 20, 2013 19:43 |
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Life insurance is dirt cheap but gets more expensive as you get older. Go ahead and get a 20 year term for you and the new misses. There's really no reason not to and if she's not good with finances, she'll at least not be struggling if you die for some strange reason.
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| # ? Dec 3, 2012 19:12 |
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poemdexter posted:Life insurance is dirt cheap but gets more expensive as you get older. Go ahead and get a 20 year term for you and the new misses. There's really no reason not to and if she's not good with finances, she'll at least not be struggling if you die for some strange reason. Seconding the get insurance. A couple hundred thousand dollars if one of you were to pass away can help with many things. There are unpredictable things that can happen if a spouse passes away, so even if she has a good job she (and I'm not saying its going to happen, but I've seen it happen with some of the people I've counseled) could have depression that renders her unable to work for some time. That cushion would make her life much easier in the event anything happens.
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| # ? Dec 3, 2012 20:22 |
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Thirding the term life insurance for you (and your soon to be wife). Something that really helped me and my spouse when we merged everything was setting up a couple of meetings with a financial adviser. It really helps to get a picture of where you both stand with your assets and debts and the adviser asked us questions I wouldn't have necessarily thought to ask, as well as gave us good objective advice. Through some family referrals we found a good fee-based one rather than a commission-based adviser... just having those conversations with an objective third party about buying property, saving for future kids' college, and what sort of insurance we needed helped immensely. I would highly recommend it.
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| # ? Dec 4, 2012 01:03 |
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Initio posted:She's also said that she want to leave the money stuff (activities, decisions) up to me, but I'd like to at least share with her the broad strokes of what/how we're doing and where our money goes. I'm the type of person that tracks everything through mint.com every week, evaluates my Roth 401k/Roth IRA a couple times a year; while she has never pulled her own credit report. So I'd appreciate some advice as to what would make a useful overview for someone who isn't as concerned with all the specific details. I also leave the money/household management stuff to my spouse, and there are only a few broad-strokes that might interest me. Basically, I wouldn't mind knowing how much money we actually have, what rate the sum is increasing or decreasing, and what sort of expense I can make in a single transaction without causing trouble. Beyond that I really don't care, and I think it is a dirty subject to overly concern oneself with. I have no idea how much money we have saved, and I don't know if we have any investments or anything; she just gave me a card I can pay with and a card I can use for the hole in the wall. If my spouse tried to engage me about Roth 401k without a very good reason (like, I'm not earning enough and therefore we need to move, or whatever a Roth 401k relates to), I would have a problem with it.
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| # ? Dec 4, 2012 05:06 |
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I thought life insurance was more of a thing you get when kids come around. Although, there might not be a huge time gap in between. I always thought a joint account for common expenses and your own made sense if both of you look after your money, but if she doesn't really seem to care too much it would probably be better to combine everything.
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| # ? Dec 4, 2012 05:11 |
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I have been married two years and what works for us is that we communicate a lot. We discuss finances once a month and cover everything from debt repayment, savings rate, budgeting, vacation spending etc. it works great because if she wants a new couch, or I want a new TV we most likely have already discussed it, both people know if the money is available and there are no hurt feelings if we have to wait 6 months and finish saving for the trip to the cousins wedding in Colorado. Having one person be solely responsible in my opinion is a very bad idea. (No offense to anyone who does this). If you want to be deliberate with your money and be able to own your own home, retire, save for kids college then you should both be discussing the short and long term goals to get there. Finances are the number one cause for divorce and communication should be at least once a month to make sure you both are on the same page. I took Financial Peace University (Dave Ramsey) with my fiancé and I think it was the best thing we did to prepare ourselves for marriage.
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| # ? Dec 4, 2012 05:50 |
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After 2 years of marriage, my wife and I still have separate everything. Our paychecks go into our own private checking/savings. The only thing we really share is she's on my car insurance and I'm on her health insurance. We've done a pretty good job of allocating who pays what bills and I feel that if it were to be combined, I might get a bit too anal about the finances and what our money is spent on. So, when she comes home from the store with a bunch of household items that I would consider frivolous, I don't have to worry because that's her money to spend how she wants and her portion of the bills always get paid. We have thought about going the route of a credit union and if we did, we would probably combine but the headaches of getting everything changed and all the auto-debit payments that would I have to be resolved is a headache that I'd rather continue postponing.
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| # ? Dec 4, 2012 17:04 |
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Harry posted:I thought life insurance was more of a thing you get when kids come around. Although, there might not be a huge time gap in between. I have life insurance to pay off my mortgage should I die. edit: and give my parents and/or girlfriend a sweet vacation.
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| # ? Dec 4, 2012 18:46 |
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I Might Be Adam posted:After 2 years of marriage, my wife and I still have separate everything. Our paychecks go into our own private checking/savings. The only thing we really share is she's on my car insurance and I'm on her health insurance. My wife and I are basically in this category. However, we are going to join a credit union soon and merge our finances together. It's important that you communicate your goals with one another. My wife's next big goal is to buy a bigger home. That's all well and good, but our spending habits have been poor for the past 6 months or so. We had a little sit-down together and figured out the numbers, and now are hoping to start saving again. We did best when we sat down once a month and figured out where our money was going, what costs we were had coming up, etc. We also planned out vacation expenses in advance and saved for them, as well as any other large purchases (cars, appliances, etc.). We trust each other not to blow money on impulses or non-necessary things without first discussing it.
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| # ? Dec 4, 2012 19:32 |
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I Might Be Adam posted:After 2 years of marriage, my wife and I still have separate everything. Our paychecks go into our own private checking/savings. The only thing we really share is she's on my car insurance and I'm on her health insurance. My wife and I have done mostly this through 10 years of marriage and it works well. We do have a joint account for all household financial items, though - mortgage plus additional payments, utility bills, grocery budget, emergency fund and additional investments (although that's on currently hold with our rapid home payoff plan now). Contributions were initially based on income differential, but now its just kind of loosely correlated since we don't reevaluate every year or anything. Everything else is separate, although we make joint decisions on annual enrollment and investments beyond retirement. It works well for us and, more importantly, did very early on in our marriage. We have never once fought about money or had some of those "well, you spent $X on Y, so I get to spend it too" type of arguments you hear some couples have. e: ^^^ I didn't mention vacations or joint fun money. For vacations, we just each pay out of our own funds, although we have a joint Delta AmEx that we split the monthly payoff on based on our own spending and then split the miles earned to buy Caribbean 35k miles tickets, so I guess that could work out unevenly, but whatever. For regular dinners, going out on the weekends, all that, we just randomly each pay for things. jackyl fucked around with this message at Dec 4, 2012 around 19:43 |
| # ? Dec 4, 2012 19:41 |
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Good advice in this thread. The most important thing is to align your goals. If you can't afford to both take semiannual nice vacations and spend $600 on clothing/entertainment/bar/restaurants each month, you need to discuss how you are going to prioritize those things with your limited resources. The point of putting together a budget (even if it's more of a guideline) is to allocate spending before it happens to track towards a goal. The thought process changes from "I work hard and deserve to go to restaurants now and again" to "Going to dinner with my friends would put me over budget for the month, and will jeopardize the trip we're planning to Thailand in May." Those resource constraints exist anyway, and if you don't pay attention to them on the front end, you'll end up posting a Cornholio/Zaurg/Tacobox/tuyop-esque BFC e/n thread a few years later.
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| # ? Dec 4, 2012 20:28 |
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SpclKen posted:I have been married two years and what works for us is that we communicate a lot. We discuss finances once a month and cover everything from debt repayment, savings rate, budgeting, vacation spending etc. it works great because if she wants a new couch, or I want a new TV we most likely have already discussed it, both people know if the money is available and there are no hurt feelings if we have to wait 6 months and finish saving for the trip to the cousins wedding in Colorado. This. We also use tools like shared google docs (finance spreadsheets) and gcal. I made up a spreadsheet that takes our paychecks and shows amount being taken out for taxes, pre-tax shelters, etc. then calculates in outgoing regular bills, retirement savings, blah blah and gives us a final number of monthly "slush" we can use to either boost savings further or have fun with. One of us gets a raise or a regular bill changes? Adjust that field, the rest auto-adjust. It's great  .Mint.com can also be good for this sort of thing but you need to stay on top of it if you have complicated financials as it can end up with duplicates, put spending in the wrong category, etc. especially if you get work reimbursements. mcsuede fucked around with this message at Dec 4, 2012 around 21:36 |
| # ? Dec 4, 2012 21:33 |
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mcsuede posted:We also use tools like shared google docs (finance spreadsheets) and gcal. I made up a spreadsheet that takes our paychecks and shows amount being taken out for taxes, pre-tax shelters, etc. then calculates in outgoing regular bills, retirement savings, blah blah and gives us a final number of monthly "slush" we can use to either boost savings further or have fun with. One of us gets a raise or a regular bill changes? Adjust that field, the rest auto-adjust. It's great Did you write your spreadsheets yourself, or did you dig up some generic templates from somewhere? I've been keen on getting ahold of something that will track and graph current savings rates with a compounding interest formula (where you can adjust the interest %) and other similar stuff but haven't had much luck. Admittedly I'm no banking/finance/excel whiz. Can you recommend a source? For the OP- I'm the main financial planner in our family, which given that I'm reasonably green to it all should possibly be worrying but anyway. What I've been doing is writing up a report that I can email my fiance every month in Word, which is mostly composed of various tables in a template. The tables show a snapshot of our finances, so what amounts are currently sitting in which accounts, how much our shares are worth, and what our savings targets per fortnight are alongside what our individual contributions to each category were for that fortnight. It's reasonably straightforward, though this is mostly because our financial situation is not terribly complex. I keep updating it as the month goes, and at the end of the month I put at the start of it how much total we've saved (and whether we're on or behind target) before any of the other info so if that's all he wants to read he doesn't have to hunt for it. (On google if you're interested, link is https://docs.google.com/open?id=0By...cVB6MjVTZldGbjA) I initially started with listing all possible expenses for a year, especially the big ticket items like renewing car registration, school fees and our quarterly utility bill. I broke these down into amounts to set aside every fortnight in a designated Bills account. Then I assigned a few to my fiance and the rest to me, roughly based on how much we get paid individually (our pay goes into our individual accounts, I generally make about 30-50% more per fortnight than he does). Our savings efforts are pretty similar to this process as well. Personally I think everything would be easier if we had just the one account into which both pays went into and out of which all expenses/savings money came out of, and the main reason we don't have this is because it would mean taking a day off work to actually make it in to a bank branch in person to open a new account. Hooray for living in a rural area! We have savings goals that have come from general life goals as a family - wanting a house, yearly holidays, children, investing for retirement - and even though I list our contributions separately I don't tend to think of them that way, it's only so I can work out how much to move from our personal transaction accounts (I have the power to move cash in to and out of our savings accounts from his linked personal transaction account, and vice versa) every week into the savings accounts. Our savings goals also have deadlines (our baby fund for example is set to aim to have a certain amount by the time I turn 31 ie. when we have our first child), though they're not super strict by any means. It's more to give us a kick in the backside- because there's a set amount demanding to be put away every week/fortnight it's incentive to kill any thoughts of frivolous spending dead. Almost like self-imposed 'debt'. I treat it with all the seriousness of a pauper scraping together every hard-earned cent to service a debt before the debt-collector comes to break kneecaps, which can get somewhat stressful at times...until I remember to take a deep breath and feel fortunate as all hell that we don't actually have any debt.
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| # ? Dec 7, 2012 14:22 |
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Harry posted:I thought life insurance was more of a thing you get when kids come around. Although, there might not be a huge time gap in between. Its certainly more important once you have children. But the sooner you buy it the cheaper it will be. That being said, i bought 20 year term of 500k for about $200 a year at 30 years old. You do want it to last atleast until the kids are out of the house. So if you plan on having having children 5 or 10 years down the line maybe shop a 30 year term instead.
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| # ? Dec 7, 2012 15:21 |
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Don Lapre posted:Its certainly more important once you have children. But the sooner you buy it the cheaper it will be. That being said, i bought 20 year term of 500k for about $200 a year at 30 years old. Life insurance is a very good idea regardless of children and is saving my rear end right now. My mother passed away last month and had life insurance through her work. Funeral costs and lawyer/court fees have already racked up over 10 grand against me, and that's ignoring me having to pay the mortgage and bills on the house while poo poo goes through the court. It'd be much higher if I chose burial over cremation, and what's left over in the life insurance account will be used to upgrade the house (just paint and floors) so that it'll be fit to sell. I don't know what I'd do if she didn't have life insurance, and I'm a grown adult with a decently cushy job.
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| # ? Dec 7, 2012 19:08 |
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I'll add another vote for making sure that you have adequate (term) life insurance. My wife and I have combined finances where both our checks all go into one account. To make sure that we're on the same page for long-term and short-term goals, we have a spending plan that we do every month (we use YNAB, but a sheet of paper will work). This helps us go through and put down on paper what we're going to do with the money and arranges how we save for travel, clothes, household expenses, food, etc. It also makes sure that she can do things like buy groceries without worrying if it's dipping in to the money that we're saving for car insurance. A critical part of our setup since both of us have different hobbies and priorities for personal expenses is that we have a certain chunk of the community money set aside for each of us to spend, no questions asked. The amount varies per month, but it gives us each some breathing room where we can sidestep any issues of frivolity. We've found it easiest to have just one person in charge of the finances - both managing the accounts and paying bills. However, the marriage is a partnership - you should make sure that she knows what you're doing (if you do a monthly spending plan, you can sit down at the beginning of the month and do that together) so that if anything should happen to you, they'll be able to make sure that the lights stay on. I've seen this described as the "legacy drawer" that has a listing of contact information and account numbers for all your institutions. Since we do almost everything online, it also includes the master password for my KeePass password safe with all the banking passwords as well. Congratulations!
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| # ? Dec 10, 2012 05:16 |
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The plan I had for when my husband and I started to share our finances was to each have our seperate accounts and then a joint one for joint expenses and a bit extra for saving that we'd both pay into. Unfortunately it didn't work out like that because one day he had a hissy fit at the bank while trying to change a direct debit and ended up just getting all his salary paid into the joint one so now that's where all our money goes. Now I deal with all the finances and he is not interested at all. If one or other of us want to make a large purchase (holiday, new furniture, etc) we'll discuss it first but really he just wants to leave it all to me. It's fine and makes sense for us as neither of us have hugely expensive hobbies or anything but it does worry me that if I died or anything he'd have no idea how much money we had or where it is.
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| # ? Dec 12, 2012 12:17 |
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How are you guys getting term so cheap? Even at 20 year, 30yo, 500k runs ~$600 a year. If it was $200 a year I'd be all over that...so right now I just go with group life insurance through work, but it's no good if whatever illness I get causes me to have to quit...
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| # ? Dec 20, 2012 07:12 |
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Agesilaus posted:I also leave the money/household management stuff to my spouse, and there are only a few broad-strokes that might interest me. Basically, I wouldn't mind knowing how much money we actually have, what rate the sum is increasing or decreasing, and what sort of expense I can make in a single transaction without causing trouble. Beyond that I really don't care, and I think it is a dirty subject to overly concern oneself with. I have no idea how much money we have saved, and I don't know if we have any investments or anything; she just gave me a card I can pay with and a card I can use for the hole in the wall. I hope your spouse is ok with this and doesn't resent you. This is the exact attitude my husband has- "I can't help with this because I will gently caress it up," and it causes me a lot of stress. I certainly don't feel awesome about my money management skills and it is a lot of responsibility.
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| # ? Dec 20, 2012 15:16 |
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I would say don't sweat life insurance. If you both earn enough to live comfortably on your own, don't have mortgages, then I don't see why you'd worry about it until you have kids. We meet every 6 months or as needed to talk about our spending goals. Common purchases like all household items, groceries, rent, etc. have spending targets each month (not a budget) and anything extra stays in our checking account. Combined long-term savings targets get discussed and amortized over the amount of time (e.g. Now much we want to spend on Christmas gifts divided by 12 to set a monthly goal, house down payment divided by 60 months to set a monthly goal for how much cash to have in five years) then taken out at the beginning of the month. That way you psychologically don't have that money on the table to spend. All of these costs get added up and put into a joint checking account on the first of the month, according to our incomes. the joint money gets whisked away to their respective holding accounts (savings or investments depending on the horizon) as soon as possible. These conversations can definitely be tough at first, but I find that they help set goals and priorities and the numbers force us to be realistic. We each deal with our individual savings targets separately, but we each basically repeat the same thing--debit our IRA and other savings cash at the beginning of the month, keep a fudge factor, and be realistic about treating ourselves. I'm all about trying to align the psychological barriers to promote saving and investment and make spending on things I really care about easy and guilt-free, because I've been saving for them.
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| # ? Dec 24, 2012 03:51 |
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MrEnigma posted:How are you guys getting term so cheap? I just bought 500k 20yr in the spring for $18 a month, non smoker preferred plus from Zander insurance. I'm 31, male, and my father died of colon cancer at 53. You need to shop around more.
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| # ? Dec 27, 2012 04:16 |
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She's in the process of going back to school for a degree, so she wouldn't be earning anything for the near future. I think picking up $500k or so of insurance would definitely make sense. Another update is that we've pulled her credit report and we've seen a number of negative items that aren't valid. There are a number of accounts that were opened in another state which she has never lived in - we think there is someone that shares the same name with her who lives there. Another negative item is a joint credit card that was opened with out her knowledge by one of her relatives when she wasn't even 18 - this had thousands of dollars racked up, and the card is listed as 'Charge Off'. We disputed the items with the credit agencies, but a number of the accounts including the big one that her relative opened simply came back as 'validated'. What are our options here? Can we dispute this further?
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| # ? Jan 17, 2013 18:20 |
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That's textbook fraud. You'll have to start by getting a police report for identity theft regarding the account in question and will have to send that in as a supporting document to the credit bereu that is showing the account. This will also be important when the third party collection companies start calling to try to collect any deficiency on the account.
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| # ? Jan 17, 2013 19:16 |
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Is there another option that wouldn't involve the police? Neither of us really want to send a relative to jail. My thought was basically proving that she was a minor when the account was opened - which should mean that they would have to take her name off of the account.
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| # ? Jan 17, 2013 19:30 |
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Initio posted:Is there another option that wouldn't involve the police? Neither of us really want to send a relative to jail. My thought was basically proving that she was a minor when the account was opened - which should mean that they would have to take her name off of the account. Chances are the police would just take the report and forward it to the DA's office who won't take action on it, and most credit reporting companies and card companies won't do do much without the report. It would be one thing if your wife had opened the card while she was a minor, but without a copy of the card application its hard to say what was written down. They may try to claim she was the one who fraudulentlyopened the card as a minor. It sucks that a relative broke the law, but they're the ones who put themselves in that position.
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| # ? Jan 17, 2013 19:45 |
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| # ? May 20, 2013 19:43 |
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A credit card company wants to be sure it was fraud. So they make you file a police report.
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| # ? Jan 21, 2013 01:17 |
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