Ramit Sethi walks through combining finances with a partner and starting money conversations early. He recommends beginning discussions a year before marriage, using guided journal questions to align on what a shared rich life looks like, so you're not just merging accounts but merging spending priorities.
What advice do you have about combining finances with a partner? We're getting married in two weeks. Well, two weeks, not that long. I mean, my advice is to have started, like, a year ago. But if you can't do that, let's talk about what you can do now. Getting married is an amazing opportunity, symbolically and in all other ways, to turn the page and begin the new chapter of your life. And I love doing this with money because it gives you an excuse to sit down and talk about things that you normally would not talk about. Like, it's perfectly normal to just go, hey, babe, you know, now that we got married, I'd love to sit down and talk about how we should set up our accounts. Whereas if you had done that before, or if you do that three years from now, it's going to be kind of weird. A good thing to do would be to start using some of the questions in my journal where I sit down and I encourage you to say, you know, what is our rich life? What do we want to spend our money on? Where do we want to spend our time? Like, if you could live anywhere, where would it be?
