Job first, then the Wedding

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This post is verbatim from an Ask Amy column, written by Amy Dickinson, one of the smartest, most practical and ethical syndicated columnists. Thank you Amy!!

Dear Amy, Our son got engaged. He is 26 and after spending eight years in college, he did not get a degree. He and his fiancee live with her parents. Our son wants to be an actor. After many conversations, he has let us know that he is ‘on track’ with his profession and will not pursue full-time work. This couple does nothing but watch TV, post on Facebook and participate in local acting gigs.

My wife had a conversation with the mother of the bride-to-be about wedding plans. It did not go well. The couple wants to have an elaborate and expensive wedding. My wife told the mother we would not contribute money to indulge the couple in this type of venue or discuss wedding plans until they became more motivated and employed. This infuriated the mother of the bride-to-be. She called my wife manipulative and said she was using this tactic as leverage not to pay for half the wedding. My wife was trying to make a point that the focus needs to be on the motivation and employment of these adults. Are we wrong in our thinking?

A concerned dad

Dear Dad,

You should not be discussing this wedding with the fiancee’s parents, but with the couple. Whenever someone asks you to pay for something, this puts you in a position to make a choice about the proposed investment. If the fiancee’s mother says you are trying to manipulate through money, you can truthfully respond,”Damn straight, we are.”

Couples should finance their own weddings. If they want money from you, then they are going to have to be brave enough to lay out their case, and not send mommy to do their asking. Basically, you and your wife are doing what the fiancee’s parents won’t do – setting firm boundaries and making sound financial choices.

Your stance should be,”We are not against this marriage, but if the couple wants this fancy wedding, they should get jobs, save up, and contribute toward it. If they do, then we will reconsider our position.”

Amen and thank you again, Amy!

“Don’t You Trust Me?”

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How many women hear this question from their fiancée before the wedding?  It happens more often than you think.

Who wants to spoil the euphoria of wedding plans and the excitement of honeymoon planning by discussing money? Many women won’t take a chance of bringing up a subject which, in the past, has made her future husband impatient, sometimes even angry?

“Why are you always thinking about money?” he had said. “Didn’t we agree we’d talk about that after the honeymoon?” This is not a good sign for how he will handle discussions of money after you’re married.

If you wait until after the honeymoon, it’s too late. Once you say “I Do”, you become one half of a legal and financial contractual unit called a marriage. You don’t like to think of your marriage that way, but in the eyes of the law, that’s what it is. Every financial decision your husband makes, with your knowledge, or without it, will affect you in the future.

How unfortunate that couples will seek premarital counseling for sex, religion, parenting or conflict  resolution, but few sign on for financial coaching and money issues.  Few women plan on being widowed or divorced. Too many cede control of finances to their husband, leaving them unprepared to cope on their own in case their marriage ends.

Don’t let this happen to you. Get involved in the finances before you marry. Don’t wait till after the honeymoon. It’s not about trusting your future husband. It’s about understanding your joint finances, asking questions because you deserve answers and participating as an equal partner.

What Suze Orman Doesn’t Know

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I admire Suze Orman. She’s one of the best writers about financial information. Her writing is clear and conversational; the information accurate and easy to understand. I recommend her books to the women who take my seminars. I’ve included her books as part of the suggested reading list in my book “Don’t Worry about a Thing, Dear “- Why Women Need Financial Intimacy.

However, Suze, by her own description, is a lesbian and has never been in a relationship with a man.  She’s never been held hostage by the cultural forces that millions of women experience in relationship to their husband. She’s never been legally bound to a man who raises his voice in anger, or stonewalls his wife, or refuses to share financial information with her or blocks her access to marital financial records. Suze is never in financial danger because someone else is making financial decisions without her knowledge.

Suze never raised children; her nurturing instincts as a mom weren’t tested by children whom luck or life dealt a raw deal and now they expect mom to bail them out. She is a free agent, unencumbered by the cultural and emotional baggage that millions of women experience as wives and mothers.

It’s easy for Suze to provide financial information and millions rely on her advice. What’s harder is for married women to act on her advice, especially in the nine community property states, where a woman’s financial well-being is legally and financially entwined with her husband. Few things will stop a woman from asking for financial information from a husband who refuses to share financial information and snarls, ‘Why do you want to know? Are you planning to divorce me?’

That’s when you need advice from women who have been there. Find out more at http://www.financialintimacy.com

Marrying for Money

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Is there anything wrong with marrying for money? Few women I know will admit to it, but after meeting their mate, I can’t help wondering if they think anyone is fooled. For example, does anyone think that Anna Nicole Smith, a model for Guess and Playboy magazine married 89-year-old oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II for love?

At least the practice isn’t the dirty little secret it used to be. If you google ‘marrying for money’, dozens of pages of articles and websites encourage you to do just that. Daphne Merkin, writer and journalist, is honest about  her refusal to marry for money. She writes “If the man is rich enough, one overlooks everything. He can be bald, hairy, have a stomach that hangs like an apron and be really under-endowed.”

I have met many women who won’t admit that they married for money, but freely confess that they stay married because of the money. A woman in one of my seminars said “Am I happily married? That’s beside the point. I know what I’ve got – and at least he has money.”

Many of the other women agreed with her. One woman said  “Don’t you feel like you sold your soul just for the money?” Hey, souls are sold for lots of other things as well.

Is there a difference between going into marriage for the money and staying married for the money? Is it wrong to believe that money makes someone more interesting? If marriage buys you a lifestyle you want, are you selling your soul by opting for security and stability over romantic love and passion?

The statistics on love and passion aren’t that impressive. Presumably passion evaporates within the first two years of marriage. There’s no guarantee that love will last, but having money is a good diversion. How would you advise your daughter?

Check out the other blogs about love, marriage and money at http://www.financialintimacy.com

When is Old too Old to Drive?

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A driver in his mid-nineties was trying to parallel park on a busy street in Palo Alto during the height of the lunchtime hour this week. The driver hit the accelerator instead of the brake and slammed into a pedestrian and four people seated at tables outside of a restaurant. Two of them needed surgery, the others had cuts and bruises. The driver could just as easily have killed them all. The police are calling this a tragic accident and, pending further investigation, don’t plan to file criminal charges.

The DMV requires that the driver take an ’emergency retest’ to see if his license should be taken away. Really? If he passes his retest, will they let him out on the road again? He wasn’t drinking. He could have been doing drugs, perfectly legal drugs that impair his ability to respond quickly, to coordinate his eye, hand and foot movements, to judge distances and inhibit his responses.

Actually, what he was doing is criminal. He shouldn’t have been driving in the first place.  The people he injured may suffer permanent health problems or be disfigured. Our collective insurance rates will rise because his insurance company will have to reimburse the people he injured. If he had killed the five people he injured, their families would have suffered serious consequences.

The Department of Motor Vehicles should draw a line in the sand. No matter how well a 90- year-old sees or how many questions he answers correctly, he’s too old to drive. No matter how sharp his memory or what a good dancer he still is, behind the wheel of a car, he is a potential menace. If he hands in his keys voluntarily, let’s give him a medal. If not, let’s deny him a license.

Ninety is not the new 70. The body and brain that worked well two decades ago isn’t doing so well.   Don’t endanger the rest of us in the name of beating the aging game. If you’re in your 90s, hand in your keys. If your parents are in their 90s, for your sake and theirs, take the keys.It’s time to draw a line in the sand.

 

 

Financial Vulnerability in Marriage

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It’s counterintuitive to think about divorce when you marry. Few women do. Without thinking of the consequences of letting our husband manage our money, we set ourselves up for financial vulnerability. We trust him to be making financial choices that will benefit us both.

Sometimes he does.  Sometimes he doesn’t.  Most of the time, he’s not thinking of his future without us.

Money is never about money. It’s about what we fear and what we want, what we learned from our family, and how comfortable we feel discussing a touchy subject with our mate. It’s about power and leverage – who has it, how is it used, who is affected by it. It’s about the working dynamics of a relationship. A marriage can’t function without  the ability to talk about money.

Unfortunately, if we’re not participating in the marital finances, we don’t find out how vulnerable we are until a crisis of widowhood or divorce changes our life.  Not being able to talk about money comfortably, either before or during marriage, makes women financially vulnerable and resentful.

Here are six questions to answer for yourself before you’re slammed with a crisis:

Am I participating in financial decisions with my husband?

Do I understand our marital finances?

What do I need financially to feel secure?

How would I manage if I were widowed or divorced?

Do I sign documents without understanding them?

Do I know the location of all our financial records?

There are many more questions and answers in my book. The information can help make you financially intimate and feeling safe.

http://www.amazon.com/Worry-about-Thing-Financial-Intimacy/dp/0977836827/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1406390916&sr=8-2&keywords=don%27t+worry+about+a+thing+dear

Living in Denial

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Last week,  an ordinary day turned into an extraordinary one when a commercial airliner, carrying 298 people on holiday, business and family reunions, was hit by a missile and crashed in a field of sunflowers, killing everyone on board.

Extraordinary events happen daily to millions of us doing familiar things in environments where our illusion of safety temporarily masks our anxiety about unpredictability. A family picnics under a tree; the tree falls. A man drinks coffee at Starbucks; a car plows through the window and kills him. A family sleeps on the 18th floor in their high rise condo; a crane towering above them for another high rise topples on them.

Random events abound, senseless, following no pattern and completely unpredictable. They exist as possibility until they happen. That’s the point; they’re random.

Here in California, we live in earthquake country. Will there be a BIG one someday? Sure. Maybe even in my lifetime. When it comes, it won’t be a random event. It will be part of the tapestry of geology. We can’t predict when, but we won’t be surprised.

Astronomers tell us we live in an orderly universe. Mathematicians predict sequences and probabilities. We can chart the possibility of our plane going down, but being shot out of the sky? Not even on the charts.

Perhaps all we can know for sure, and maybe not even that, is that when we breathe in, we can breathe out. So enjoying every moment may be the only protection we have against a random universe. Living in denial helps too.

 

Brides Rethinking Extravagant Weddings

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Many brides- to-be are beginning to function in the real world, trading extravagant credit card weddings for an event they can actually afford. These savvy brides are beginning to run their numbers , rearrange priorities and ask questions that really matter.

For example, wouldn’t $30,000 pay off the graduate school loans? Do I really need 200 wedding guests? If a wedding lunch costs half of a wedding dinner, do we really need moonlight? The iPod is paid for;  do we really need the DJ’s banter in between dance numbers? Perhaps most important, should my parents really be cutting into their retirement savings to pay for my wedding?

Finally, a glimmer of reason is emerging. Couples are moving up wedding dates for year-end tax breaks and substantial savings on health insurance premiums. Some are combining plans to marry with a year-end vacation.

And then there’s the ultimate voice of reason – the bride who realizes that the cost of her wedding day could be the down payment on a house. She is smart enough to say “The wedding is one day. The house is going to last a lot longer than that”.

Unfortunately, with two million weddings annually in the U.S. the $160 billion wedding industry isn’t tightening its belt just yet. Let’s give it a few more years of savvy brides.

Is Marriage About Sex and Stuff?

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Oh, it’s so unromantic.
A study at the University of Michigan School of Public Health found that 27 percent of men and 14 percent of women undergraduates were willing to trade favors or gifts for sex. And although they weren’t hard up for resources, the students surveyed “recognized the value of this socioeconomic currency system.”

The study, led by Dr. Daniel Kruger and published in the prestigious journal Evolutionary Psychology concluded that  “perhaps the ‘romance’ in romantic relationships facilitates stability by avoiding the recognition of exchanges”.

Could it really be all about sex and favors and stuff? Have we sugarcoated the barter system to fool ourselves about why we choose a particular mate? Does this subconscious equivalency meter rule our choice for marriage partner? Is romantic love no more than an alibi for instinctual behavior lodged deep in our reptilian brain?

Apparently, a partner who provides more resources — wealth, shelter, home repairs — is seen as more attractive and stands to reap more sexual rewards. Could the handyman with the fully loaded tool belt be the human equivalent of the male bower bird ?

“Call it crass, sexist or gender stereotyping all you want, but there are thousands of years of biological programming at work here”, says Dr. Chris Fariello, director of the Institute for Sex Therapy at the Council for Relationships. He and other scientists believe that regardless of our motivation, we’re hardwired to use our bodies as a bargaining chip.

Plain and simple, a partner who provides more resources — wealth, shelter, home repairs — is seen as more attractive and stands to reap more sexual rewards.
“I don’t get anybody in my office who says, ‘My husband sits on the couch all day and eats bonbons, and I want to have sex with him all the time.”

What could Home Depot do with that!
http://tinyurl.com/p9mqsyj

 

Bag Lady Fears Endure

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Bag lady – a term used to describe a homeless woman who walks around the streets of a city carrying her possessions in a bag. This is still a real and persistent fear of even the most successful women.

I wrote about this eight years ago when I read that the rich, the talented and successful admitted to having bag lady fears. “Bag lady syndrome is a fear many women share that their financial security could disappear in a heartbeat, leaving them homeless, penniless and destitute,”  MSN money columnist Jay McDonald wrote in January 2006. “Lily Tomlin, Gloria Steinem, Shirley MacLaine and Katie Couric all admit to having a bag lady in their anxiety closet.” http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1688656/posts

What’s surprising is that years later, a survey conducted by Allianz Insurance company, showed that bag lady fears still torment the wealthy woman and cut across all corners of life and levels of education and income. Half the women who responded to the survey say they ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’ fear losing all their money and becoming homeless.

A third of the highest-income earners ($200,000+) say they worry about becoming a bag lady. Even 46% of Women of InfluenceSM, who generally are less worried about their retirement savings, can’t shake this fear.

While bag lady fear may be irrational for Katie Couric, Gloria Steinem and Lily Tomlin,  it may not be for most women. It’s not just about money. It’s about the fear of not being in control of one’s life, of feeling weak and unsure about our ability to survive on our own. Psychologically, it goes even deeper – it’s the anxiety of being utterly alone.

According to the survey, after the fear of losing a husband, the thought of running out of money in retirement is what 57% of women say keeps them up at night. Many of us who are or have been married don’t have a history of managing our own money. We’re not used to thinking about the bigger picture. We think our husband is better at making the ‘really big’ money decisions. We balance the household budget and decide what to buy; he handles the investments for our future. Our financial decisions result in money spent and gone, not invested for growth.

Divorce or widowhood is the wake up call that we really are on our own. Our future is up to us and what if we blow it?

Men, whether successful or not, don’t seem to worry about becoming destitute in their old age, invisible, unloved, roaming the streets, scrounging in garbage cans for food.They don’t spend their adult years fearing it. There is no ‘bag gent’ syndrome.
https://www.allianzlife.com/retirement/retirement-insights/women-money-and-power/bag-lady