Channeling Suze Orman for a happy marriage

10023, suze would have told me to avoid my husband like the plague. unemployed, in debt, irs after him, no ability to make a single major economic decision. but i knew it and went ahead anyway. i guess i saw the potential.

I like Suze, smart lady, great jackets.

I've already spelled out this requirement to our eldest, who is nine.

The six-year-old gets the lecture next fall. I figure we're safe for now, because she still thinks boys are "yucky", no matter how credit-worthy or neat they are.

AR: you are a braver person than I. My point was - full disclosure. If you know and are okay with it, that's one thing. But all these things are usually discovered too late. Plus, there's something to be said for malleability in the hands of a great woman.

Hey, AR! must of posted at the same time. I don't know if Suze would have nixed your DH because he had potential & was on the right path.

My partner was also woefully uninformed about finances, and had some tax authorities after him. When I moved in with him, I filed 6 years of tax returns for him. But he was very malleable. I think that's why he proposed :)

10023, yes, i did know. it was very apparent. and he has been wonderfully cooperative.

i agree totally, make sure you've checked every closet for skeletons.

Hey, W81, credit-worthy, neat boys can still be yucky!

In my books, IQ (book smarts & emotional stability) and a sense of humor trump just about anything else. Oh, and body odor has to be appealing. No deodorant will cure that.

dwell, he wasn't quite on the right path when i met him. which is why he was 32 when he graduated from law school. but he was just a bit of a late bloomer, and i was the fertilizer.

Who was it who once asked the rhetorical question "Is anybody happy?" ... ?

Touche. Maybe I should have said "contented married life" or some such thing.

alanhart: I think that's from "Lovers and Other Strangers".

aboutready: Fertilizer? As in: you kept giving him sh*t until he grew up?

exactly

Suze is a lesbian. I wouldn't rely on her for advice about men.

Are you saying that just because you're a gay and you don't like cats and hummus?

hire a housekeeper. Do not comingle funds unless you are of similar approach. Take the bumps along the road in grain.

Sorry, but I really like saying "a gay". And I never miss an opportunity to promote the 'cats and hummus' thing.

Orman? for a happy marriage? Carpet munchers, plumbers and, straight shooters could do a lot worse for advice than the swagering 'fancy jacket wearing' Orman. Her advice is sound and universal. Want a crack at a happy marriage? Be careful with all your money that rivals frugal, be kind to each other and, don't underestimate the power of oral sex. (It can only be used as a weapon if it is withheld)

Steve: gay, straight, whatevah, she's right.

I always ask my gay friend for fashion advice, and he's not prone to wearing skirts (that I know of, at least).

I'm with dwell.

I don't care for Snoozie's advice. It's too one-dimensional. I must say my lesbian friends usually give better advice for dating men than my het friends. 10023, SIX tax returns?! It must have been love. West81st, I hope you start requiring credit checks on their boyfriends before you let them go to prom.

Suze can be very helpful and I like how she addresses the psychological and emotional aspects of handling one's money/finances - I just hope that people use her advice as a primer - each person has unique/specific circumstances that must be discovered and analyzed before any financial (or psychological, for that matter) professional can make a suitable recommendation.

Suzie Orman's over-hyping of FICO ticks me off. She sold kits and made a bundle on an irrelevant score that contributed to the subprime crises. I'm not so impressed. Dave Ramsey impressed me far more.

She seems to know her market. Or so I gather from that NYT article last week and seeing her show a few times.

The New York Times? All the news that's fit to misprint?

I adore this impression:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/19681/saturday-night-live-suze-orman

She is annoying. Honestly I have no idea what she brings to the table.

I like Liz Pulliam Weston; she is my favorite personal finance writer. She even gets a shout out from Burton Malkiel in the most recent edition of Random Walk. I also like MP Dunleavey, although she sometimes gets raked over the coals for her decisions. She writes about making real-time decisions, though, which I find much more helpful than one-size-fits-all advice. So many PF writers are so sanctimonious, I don't like reading them.

My ex was a rich clueless idiot and I am still enjoying the $$$ I milked.

That's all.

10023, i think you're selling yourself a bit short here. six tax returns?

and the sex columnist at TONY has entirely espoused (nice word usage, i'm sure you'll agree) the notion that the financial savvy of the mate matters. the last couple of weeks he's had rather heated words on the matter. he and falco should compare criteria lists, i think. happy holiday weekend to all. i'm off to the great green north.

Next month Off Broadway:

I Love You, Your Perfect, Now Show Me Your Credit Report?

Very romantic.

Yep - 6! But 4 of those tax returns were filed under a different tax regime. I'm not sure what the U.S. tax laws are regarding grad school stipends & tuition waivers.

Under that tax regime, if you made above 10k (more or less, I forget what the limit was in the early 90s), you have to file. Grad student income derived from research-assistant-ships were taxable. My dear partner was making 14k-ish as a grad student, and he had to pay 3-ish k in tuition to the university. He took out no loans, had no parental help and asked to have no tax withheld because he could not afford it. His view was that he would probably not owe (without having done the calculations).

He doesn't have an excuse for the unfiled taxes for the other 2 tax returns. He did have tax withheld and ended up not owing, so legally he didn't have to file on time (luck).

on happiness.

http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?p=403&date=1

Social scientists used to have a straightforward, if tongue-in-cheek, answer to the question of how to become happy: Surround yourself with people who are uglier, poorer and shorter than you are - and who are unhappily married and have annoying kids. You will compare yourself with these people, and the contrast will cheer you up.

Nicholas Christakis, 47, a physician and sociologist at Harvard University, challenges this idea. Using data from a study that tracked about 5,000 people over 20 years, he suggests that happiness, like the flu, can spread from person to person. When people who are close to us, both in terms of social ties (friends or relatives) and physical proximity, become happier, we do too. For example, when a person who lives within a mile of a good friend becomes happier, the probability that this person’s good friend will also become happier increases 15%. More surprising is that the effect can transcend direct links and reach a third degree of separation: when a friend of a friend becomes happier, we become happier, even when we don’t know that third person directly.

This means that surrounding ourselves with happier people will make us happier, make the people close to us happier - and make the people close to them happier. But social networks don’t transmit only the good things in life.

Christakis found that smoking and obesity can be socially infectious too. If his thesis proves out, then the saying that you can judge a person by his or her friends might carry more weight than we thought.

In the little research I've done about psychology (that's one, count 'em, one published piece in Psych Today) there are two things you can do that will probably up your level of happiness significantly: one is to get into a marriage that works for you, and the other is to be religious.

It's isn't that money (or even compatible styles for relating to money) can't buy happiness, but it's much further down the scale.

ali r.
{downtown broker}

I have been using Desktop Budget from http://Spryka.com to manage my personal finances for a few months now. Its the easiest to use free, offline personal finance software I have seen so far.