Louis Barajas (YouTube) advises couples to plan for marriage—not just the wedding— emphasizing financial and values-alignment conversations. He introduces a tool called the "Values Conversation," announces an upcoming webinar, and recommends discussing partner FICO scores, debt, spending habits, children, and religious upbringing prior to marriage.
Foreign.
We're currently working with a, a client who we're doing some, I guess, financial planning for her wedding that she's going to have not this June, but the following June 2025, about a year and a half from now. And you know, one of my staff members is talking to me about that. They're doing the budget for the wedding. It's going to be an expensive wedding. I mean that, you know, they've spent a lot of time already in the last couple months creating the budget, looking at the numbers, taking a look at their savings, where they're putting the money for the, for the, where they're saving the money for their wedding. And you know, one of the things that I think about every single time when I, when I doing a, sitting down with clients that are planning a wedding that's two to three years out is I asked them, how much time have you spent thinking about or talking about your future marriage? Right. And so most of the time, clients will spend more time on preparing for a wedding than sitting down and preparing for a marriage. And that's really different. So I have a wonderful tool that I use that I will make accessible online. And then soon we're going to have, I'll have a little webinar on it. It's my, it's called the Values Conversation. And it's wonderful tool to have you and your partner go through it and see how your values align. And, and so it's, and you could be very different people even having the same values. And I'm going to walk you through that really important webinar. We're going to be doing it in the next two, three weeks. And so I asked you just go to the website that Louis Barajas.com you will put a post of date out there when we'll start it and then we can do sign sign up. I might even do a live webinar versus a tape webinar. Okay. So think about your values. Sit down and look at. You should know your partner's FICO score. How much debt do they have? What are their spending habits? Do you want to have children or not? If you do have children, are you from the same religion? Will you be raising them up with the same values or different religions? I mean, these are all important things that should be discussed prior to getting married. And again, so I spend a lot of time with clients on planning the wedding, but rarely have a lot of time to sit down and talk to them and think that, you know, that's more of the therapy, more financial therapist kind of talk, and we don't really do that. But ask yourself, how much time are you actually spending on the marriage party?
