In a recent Wall Street Journal article titled “Financial mistakes newlyweds make,”* the author and several financial advisors urge couples to have the “money talk” before walking down the aisle.
The article provides several practical tips for opening the dialogue with your significant other. One financial advisor even recommends carving out time for a monthly “money date” over breakfast. While portfolio talk over poached eggs may not be your style, there are clear benefits to laying your financial cards on the table before you take the plunge. Honest discussion about your debts, general agreement on your saving and spending habits, and alignment of your long-term investing goals with those of your partner seem like reasonably critical components of happily-ever-after.
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Many of us do a pretty good job of getting insurance on all the usual suspects: homes, health, cars, life. But I recently came to think about another kind of insurance—what we should do to help our loved ones prepare emotionally to take over our financial decision-making.
In many cases, we’re talking about women. And while many women already handle family finances, some may delegate financial matters to someone else. When this happens, unfortunately, there can be a heavy emotional price to pay after a major life event.
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A few months ago, my wife and I opened a small savings account for our young children to help teach them the power of saving. Compound interest. All that good stuff.
We talked about taking their pennies, dimes, and birthday checks from family and friends and depositing them down at the local savings institution. It’s always neat to see the coin machine sort all those round pieces of metal in a fraction of the time it used to take me to put them into paper rolls. (There used to be some long rainy days growing up.)
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I was having lunch the other day with a retired colleague and friend. We catch up periodically, filling each other in on our children’s activities and our lives. This time, he really wanted to spend some talking about the retirement experience.
He’s not your ordinary retiree. In his last several years with Vanguard, he studied for and passed all the Certified Financial Planner™ exams, because he thought it would be helpful personally and as an alternate career option.
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We recently asked college students for their thoughts about retirement—when they want to retire, when they’ll start saving, and what they hope to do once they’re retired. Here’s what they told us.
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