The first thing is who pays for what in a relationship? And, I think this is kind of a challenging one because, you know, it really depends on the relationship. When I first started dating my wife, April, I think we kind of have a fairly traditional relationship, you would call. And I, kind of, as the guy would pay for stuff on dates, but she did pay for stuff on occasion, as well. But, you know, it was just something that I felt that I kind of wanted to do. It would be especially in the beginning of the relationship when we were dating, just to kind of pay for things and it’s just always kind of been who I was. But like I said, it really depends on the relationship, and I think the important part about it is that you communicate about it. You don’t want one person or the other feeling like, well, I’m independent and I can pay too. Like, what’s going on here? Because I’ve heard that, as well—that some people take issue with the man always paying. But, again, it really just comes down to communication. You should talk to the person you’re dating, or the person you’re in a relationship with, about what you’re comfortable paying for, and what you’re not.

The second thing is that you really need to be comfortable with the financial habits of the person that you’re dating or the person that you’re in a relationship with. You know, they say that finances is one of the top-ranking reasons why people get divorced and break up—you know, bickering and fighting over financial stuff. So, it’s really important that you feel comfortable with the way that your partner spends money and saves money and that kind of thing. I’ve seen a lot of questions on my different videos saying that, “Man, I have a really different financial perspective on saving and spending than my partner. What do I do?” this kind of thing. And you know, to be honest, it’s very challenging because as you’ll know, some of the things that you encounter on a day-to-day basis in a relationship, a lot of them have to do with financial aspects. And so, I would recommend to try, if possible, if you’re not in a relationship especially, to seek that out as a very important characteristic of a potential future mate. And, if you are in a relationship, definitely you’re going to need to put in the work and work on those issues to make sure that you guys can communicate about this kind of stuff because it’s so important.

The third thing is that you need to be really careful about entering into joint financial agreements when you’re in a relationship, like co-signing for a car loan, or something. I think that when you get into these kind of contractual and legal financial obligations when you’re in a relationship, you really need to think long and hard about doing that because… you may not think about it now, but if unfortunately you break up, it can get really messy. I would suggest that you really think long and hard about doing that when you’re in a relationship. Even in a somewhat committed relationship, because it can make a breakup that much harder.

So moving into how to handle and manage your finances in a marriage, I think one of the most important things is realizing that you’re responsible for more than just you now. I think that you really need to work hard at trying to accommodate your partner’s financial habits, like we were talking about earlier. A big part of a marriage is compromise, so you need to be willing to work with them, and not just totally putting your foot down. I mean, it may be important to if you really believe something that’s really important to you financially,absolutely you need to stand up to your convictions. But, you need to be willing to concede certain aspects, even if you may not necessarily agree with them, because a big part of marriage is learning how to compromise. So you kind of really need to realize that you’re not just responsible for yourself financially anymore and the financial burdens and obligations that your partner brought and you brought to the marriagethey’re joint now. So, whatever your credit history was, whatever loans that you have nowthose are also your partner’s now, so it’s important to think about that.

So this kind of leads to right into our next point, which is that this is something I personally believe marriage is about making what was once separate, joined. And I think that goes with the whole kind of bond and commitment that you’re making to your partner. And, what I mean by this is that I really personally think it’s important to join all of your financial accounts, and incomes and, this is actually part of the original questionshould you have separate accounts or joint accounts. And that was something April and I did very early on. And actually, we did this prior to even getting marriedwe were engaged. So obviously the intent is there, we were going to get married, so that was something that we decided was quite important. You know, kind of a caveat to that is that in terms of your overall credit profile, credit history, I think that I’ve talked to financial advisors about this, and they say that the best way to do it is you should have a joint credit cards together with both you and your partner’s and your spouse’s name on it. But you should also maintain one or two credit cards in your own name to continue building your separate credit histories. So, that is important to build your overall credit profile. And the other thing to note is that you can have a very successful marriage doing it separately. I think that the important thing is, again, communication. But I also know couples especiallyperhaps it’s their second marriage, and they’ve gone a good chunk of their life managing their accounts independently. And so, when they get re-married, they don’t necessarily merge all of their financial accounts. And, I can understand that. But even in a first marriage, it really is just about what works for you and your partner, as long as you communicate about purchases. So again, I really think it just kind of depends on what you and your partner decide is best for your family.
The last thing that comes up quite a bit is communication, and we talked about this a few minutes ago, which is that when you talk about the things that you buy this comes up quite a bit. You don’t necessarily need to ask each other every time, “Oh, can I purchase this $30 thing from Amazon.” That kind of gets laborious, right? What we’ve found has been somewhat helpful is maybe setting a threshold, saying, maybe anything over a couple hundred bucks—that would warrant a discussion, saying, “OK, does this fit in our budget for this month? Is it OK for me to purchase this?” That has worked pretty well for us. So, I think that can be a helpful trick.

Source: www.gtinspire.com

'Kind of' just too much in this write up. Nice tips though.