5 Questions To Ask Your Fiance To Align Your Financial Goals

1. What Are Your Financial Goals?

This may seem simple enough right? I mean, you are planning to get married to the love of your life, you have had "the talk" right? How many kids do you want, do you like to travel, etc. But have you honestly sat down and had an honest conversation about your financial goals? Do you know if your future spouse wants to live paycheck to paycheck? Will you fully fund your retirement savings every year? You both want to have a dedicated travel fund? Having this conversation will ensure there are no gotchas later in your relationship!

2. What Is Your Current Debt Situation

This may seem similar to question #1, but oh is it totally different! Your significant other may have similar long term financial goals, but secretly have $30,000 in credit card debt they are bringing into the relationship! These questions do not need to be show stoppers with the relationship, but you are marrying not only your partner, but your partners current financial situation. So do a quick health check during this conversation. Both of you should write down all of your current debt whether it be a mortgage, student loans, and/or credit card debt. What happens if you get debt numbers you weren't expecting? This means more serious relationship conversations need to occur.

3. What Spending Is Non-Negotiable?

Some people have non-negotiable items when it comes to spending money. Whether this be the daily coffee, a mani/pedi every week, etc. This is an important conversation to have with your fiancé to ensure you have a baseline amount of spending that cannot be reduced without negatively impacting daily life.

4. What Do Your Current Investments and Goals Look Like?

Understanding how your partner has invested money in the past is helpful to ensure you are aligned with your financial lives. By now, I hope you are seeing a pattern in these questions. Each one can be used as a pillar to a larger conversation to streamline and de-stress your financial lives. Take a few moments and each write down the different investment accounts you have, their total balances, and how they are invested. This doesn't have to be in depth scrutiny as to why they bought a specific stock! This conversation is designed to help open you both up about your lives, and how they are going to interact in the future.

5. Do You Plan On Having Children? How Many?

This was is an obvious question that every couple ABSOLUTELY NEED to have before getting hitched. This has ended a large number of relationships before the wedding day because an honest conversation was had. There are still even more marriages that fail because this conversation never occurred or one spouse the other would change their mind.

These questions were great to align our Financial Goals! Now What?

If you are looking for a helpful worksheet to help track some of these conversations, and even more, grab your free copy of our Newlywed Financial Worksheet and keep the conversation going!

If you are looking for a free place to help consolidate your finances together, we recommend Personal Capital. This is a free tool that helps aggregate your financial accounts, loans, retirement, etc. Once you link your accounts, depending on your asset levels you may have a Personal Capital team member reach out to you which you can decide to talk with or not! Their free tools are certainly awesome to use.

You have heard your parents say you should always pay your bills so you don't ruin your credit score. But what is credit? How can you build credit? Why should you care about your credit? These are all great questions, and we are going to dive in!