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How to navigate financial conversations with your partner as newlyweds

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After the wedding and honeymoon bliss wears off, it’s time to get back to reality.

Money is a topic that requires discussion between you and your partner, hopefully before nuptials take place. Finances can be a huge point of contention between couples, so it’s important to establish a plan early on about how you both, as a married couple, are going to deal with money. 

Money is also often an awkward topic between partners, but it’s vital to be honest with each other through financial conversations. After all, 44% of couples argue at least occasionally about money, according to Bankrate.

Below are tips to follow as newlyweds to help you navigate through the sticky situation of finances. 

Couple personal finance

Discussing finances is a difficult, but important conversation to have with your spouse. (  / iStock)

WHEN SHOULD I START SAVING FOR MY WEDDING?

  1. Put the discussion of money out there
  2. Determine your long-term and short-term financial goals
  3. Figure out how you are going to save as a couple
  4. Create a budget
  5. Adjust finances when necessary

1. Put the discussion of money out there 

When you sit down with your partner to talk about finances, put it all out there. Be 100% honest with each other, so there aren’t any surprises down the line. 

One important topic is debt. This includes everything from personal loans, credit card debt and student loans. Figure out how much you both have and come up with a plan on how you will pay it off. 

Also, talk about your spending and saving habits. What do you spend a lot of money on? Do you consider yourself a spender or a saver? How much money have you already saved? Do you have a retirement plan in place?

2. Determine your long-term and short-term financial goals 

Establish the goals that you have together, short- and long-term. 

If you have outstanding debt, one goal is probably going to be to get that paid off as soon as possible. Maybe you want to save for a down payment for a house. Do you have an emergency fund set up yet? If not, maybe one of your first goals is to get that funded. 

You can also talk about short-term money goals. This includes things like saving for a vacation or maybe a new vehicle. 

WHAT IS FINANCIAL INFIDELITY IN A MARRIAGE?

woman shopping

When talking about finances with your spouse, be open and transparent about things like debt and your own personal spending habits. (  / iStock)

3. Figure out how you are going to save as a couple

There are three different ways you can handle finances together. The first is doing everything jointly. The second is keeping your finances completely separate and the third is a combination of both.

Today, 43% of U.S. couples who are married, in a civil partnership or live together have only joint accounts, according to Bankrate. 

Thirty-four percent of couples have a mix of joint and separate accounts, according to the source, and 23% have completely separate accounts. 

PUTTING YOUR MONEY WHERE YOUR MARRIAGE IS: THE BEST FINANCIAL PRACTICES TO ENRICH YOUR RELATIONSHIP

The stats do show that keeping money separate as a couple is an idea posed by younger generations, with 69% of millennials keeping separate accounts, according to Bankrate.

How you and your spouse plan to handle your finances is a personal decision. Some, like Dave Ramsey, for example, believe that when a couple is married, their money should get married too, and all income should go into the same pot.

Others would rather keep things separate, although this does pose difficulty when bills and children come into play. 

Certain couples find value in a combination of both ideas.

For most couples, individuals won’t have the same debts and income, which can quickly create financial imbalance and hostility towards one another. 

That is why it’s so important to talk through all of these options with your partner, and determine what is best for you during the stage of your life that you’re in. Remember, you aren’t stuck to one way of doing things forever. If the method you choose isn’t working, you can always change things. 

That said, lumping everything together still remains the most popular option. 

SAVE MORE MONEY: 10 CLEVER WAYS TO CUT SPENDING ON UNNECESSARY ITEMS 

4. Create a budget 

Creating a budget is a great way to keep you on track with your goals and see spending habits clearly.

Whether you’ve made a budget before or not, creating one with your partner for the first time is a new experience. Even if you’ve made one as a single individual for years, it’s going to look different now that you’re married. 

When creating a budget, key things to consider are your combined income, expenses and saving plans.

laptop-computer-table

Revisit your budget monthly to make sure you are on track with your goals and to make any necessary adjustments. (  / iStock)

Once you know your combined income, list out all of your expenses, including bills as well as debts that you need to pay.

Then, don’t forget to also include how much you want to save from month to month. A popular budgeting method for couples and individuals is the 50/30/20 rule, where 50% of money goes toward needs, 30% toward wants and 20% to savings. 

5. Adjust finances when necessary

An initial money conversation is great, but it should not be the only one you have. Check in with each other on a monthly or bimonthly basis to ensure changes are made and points are heard. 

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Make any adjustments you need to make in order to maintain a healthy relationship with your significant other and your finances. 

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Treasury Secretary Bessent says market woes are more about tech stock sell-off than Trump’s tariffs

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaks to reporters outside the West Wing after doing a television interview on the North Lawn of the White House on March 13, 2025 in Washington, DC. 

Andrew Harnik | Getty Images

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday the sell-off in the stock market is due more to a sharp pullback in the biggest technology stocks instead of the protectionist policies coming from the Trump administration.

“I’m trying to be Secretary of Treasury, not a market commentator. What I would point out is that especially the Nasdaq peaked on DeepSeek day so that’s a Mag 7 problem, not a MAGA problem,” Bessent said on Bloomberg TV Wednesday evening.

Bessent was referring to Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, whose new language models sparked a rout in U.S. technology stocks in late January. The emergence of DeepSeek’s highly competitive and potentially much cheaper models stoked doubts about the billions that the big U.S. tech companies are spending on AI.

The so-called Magnificent 7 stocks — Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia — started selling off drastically, pulling the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite into correction territory. The tech-heavy benchmark is down about 13% from its record high reached on December 16.

However, the secretary downplayed the impact from President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs, which caught many investors off guard and fueled fears of a re-acceleration in inflation, slower economic growth and even a recession. Many investors have blamed the tariff rollout for driving the S&P 500 briefly into correction territory from its record reached in late February. Wall Street defines a correction as a drop of 10% from a recent high.

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S&P 500, YTD

Trump signed an aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy at the White House Wednesday evening, slapping duties of at least 10% and even higher for some countries. The actions sparked a huge sell-off in the stock market overnight, with the S&P 500 futures declining nearly 4% and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average shedding 1,100 points. The losses will likely but the S&P 500 back into correction territory in Thursday’s session.

“It’s going to be fine if we put the best economic conditions in place,” Bessent said in a separate interview on Fox Wednesday evening. “If you go back and look, the stock market actually peaked on the [DeepSeek] Chinese AI announcement. So a lot of what we have seen has been just an idiosyncratic tech sell-off.”

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Conservative cable channel Newsmax shares plunge more than 70% after a dizzying 2-day surge

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A Newsmax booth broadcasts as attendees try out the guns on display at the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual convention in Houston, Texas, U.S. May 29, 2022. 

Callaghan O’hare | Reuters

Shares of conservative news channel Newsmax plunged more than 70% on Wednesday as its meteoric rise as a new public company proved to be short-lived.

The stock tumbled a whopping 72% in afternoon trading, following a 2,230% surge in Newsmax’s first two days of trading after debuting on the New York Stock Exchange. At one point, the rally gave the company a market capitalization of nearly $30 billion — surpassing the market cap of legacy media companies like Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox Corp.

Newsmax was listed on the NYSE via a so-called Regulation A offering, instead of a traditional IPO. Such an offering allows small companies to raise capital without undergoing the full SEC registration process. The primary focus is to sell to retail investors, in this case It was sold to approximately 30,000 retail investors. 

The public offering indeed garnered the attention from retail traders, some of whom touted the stock as the “New GME” in online chatrooms. GME refers to the meme stock GameStop, which made Wall Street history in 2021 by its speculative trading boom.

Newsmax has a small “float,” or shares available for trading. Less than 6% of Newsmax shares, or 7.5 million shares out of a total of 128 million fully diluted shares, are available for public trading.

The conservative TV news outlet has seen its ratings rise with the election of President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans — although it still falls behind the dominant Fox News. Overall, Newsmax ranks in the top 20 among cable network average viewership in both prime time and daytime, Nielsen said.

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Stocks making the biggest moves midday: TSLA, DJT, AMZN, RIVN

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