Financially Ever After: The Couples' Guide to Managing Money

Description

Your Guide to Managing the Real Dollars-and the Real Emotions-of Your Relationship Too often with money, couples face two choices: fight and risk making the situation worse, or keep quiet and risk making the situation worse. Financially Ever After offers a third option: family financial fluency-the insight, knowledge, and vocabulary every couple needs to communicate effectively about money. Jeff D. Opdyke, previously The Wall Street Journal's syndicated "Love & Money" columnist, covers any and all financial issues that couples face, including budgeting, deciding on whether to have joint or individual accounts, dividing up family financial chores, confronting debt, making major purchases, as well as handling mortgages, employment, children, and even engagement rings. He offers dozens of real-life scenarios between couples, with scripts and suggestions for how to broach delicate money-related subjects with your significant other, whether he or she has a shaky credit history or is feeling left out of family financial decision-making. The book also provides helpful tools to organize your financial life, such as a budgeting chart, a "scorecard" to track spending, and an "affordability calculator" to help you figure out how much buying a house will cost you. A must-read for any couple starting out, Financially Ever After lays the groundwork for building a healthy and thriving financial life together.

Jeff D. Opdyke is a financial columnist and the author of six books, including, most recently FINANCIALLY EVER AFTER and PIGGYBANKING. During Opdyke's seventeen years at the Wall Street Journal, he wrote about personal finance, family finance, and the investment markets, and, for six of those years, he wrote the popular and nationally syndicated "Love & Money" column. Though Jeff is no longer a full-time employee of The Wall Street Journal, he recently returned to writing his "Love & Money" column on a biweekly basis. He lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with his wife, Amy, and their two children.