I have found it helps me feel more secure when we at least have the annual discussion to revisit what direction we’re heading, what major expenses we anticipate and can plan for, and how our assets compare to where we were the year before.

If anyone else has this kind of a situation, please know that one of you needs to take an interest in your finances. If neither of you will, your ship will be rudderless and you will end up grounded on the shoals of debt and poverty.

I would really like my husband to be more interested in our finances, and he is not an impediment to good financial management, but if you can’t interest your partner in it, you really need to do it yourself. Even if you don’t find it to be a natural skill, you can learn.

If you (jointly) are potentially fertile and aren’t ready to discuss every aspect of whether or how you’d raise a potential child, you aren’t ready to be physically intimate with someone.

If you (jointly) can’t discuss every aspect of earning, saving, spending, and investing money, you aren’t ready to be financially intimate with someone.

If we’d been that smart when we were a lot younger, we’d be a lot better off financially than we are now.

I’m 35 now, and in a long term but not yet living together (or ready to) relationship of 1 year and 6 months. I’m sure at some point when/if moving in together we’ll need to do the big discussion on finances. In the meanwhile I’ve done my part to set him up with a proper pension contribution and index fund investing etc.

Something I see more of is couples coming together without kids later in life when already very independent financially; and sometimes with couples who have huge disparity in income and net worth. When in the past it was common to get together as Trent and Sarah did when you’re quite young and start from very little (or going back further, to when men were breadwinners and women didn’t work or earned very little).

Now you can have two people meeting in their late 30s and starting a family together then, already with very different financial situations. Merging those two together can be difficult.

We sit down together at least once a year & go over the budget, investments, plans for the next few years etc. Most of our income is from farming one crop, so our money picture for the year falls into place as we find out what that income will be. And at any time during the year either of us will raise a question or suggest we need to do a quick re-visit if things change or aren’t working the way we’d expected. Going from being single to being part of a couple requires re-thinking spending and budgeting habits & developing ways to keep track of what each other is doing, positive & negative.